The Future of American Sports Science

Sports science now differentiates the best teams in American soccer, football and basketbal, college and professional. And its importance will only increase.

In soccer the US Men’s National team was internationally praised as the fittest team in the World Cup. The Seattle Sounders actively monitor player fatigue and injury risk and have the best record in MLS. NCAA soccer appears ready to lengthen the season to give players adequate recovery between games and to improve the development of the best young American players. The NFL Philadelphia Eagles are seeing their scientific methods copied and the two teams who played the best at the end of last season, the Seahawks and 49ers, both hired sports scientists to oversee athlete performance. This coming college football season is crucial for all-in science upstarts like Kentucky, Baylor and Missouri that will attempt to compete with science-aware powers like Florida State and Alabama. NBA teams have unfilled job openings for Performance Directors, knowing that in order to dethrone the champion San Antonio Spurs, they will have to avoid being run off the court by the league’s deepest roster of team-developed and practically ageless talent. The NCAA men’s basketball final saw two teams with elite strength coaches, UConn’s Chris West and Florida’s Preston Greene, square off, with the Huskies showing again how they gain strength as the season goes on and could physically dominate opponents in April.

All of this sports science falls mostly below the media radar, a sidelight to the on-field highlights. Attention fails to reach the suites of off-field backrooms: the weight room, the training room, the data analysts bullpen and the meeting rooms where players, coaches and staff collaborate. Since sports science operates in the shadows it comes off as a black art or worse, a black box, where all sorts of hard to understand inputs lead to wins, or when the voodoo fails, losses. In order to shine some light it will help everyone to know, what is sports science?

Sports science is nothing less that the full integration of sports medicine, sports training, nutrition management, human performance psychology, sensor technology, game and practice data analytics, coaching player development and game strategy, all under the decision-making umbrella of sports front office management.

As a professional practice domain in the US, sports science barely exists. Management manages. Coaches coach. Clinicians treat. Analysts crunch numbers. Trainers train. And players play. Integration and collaboration, where it occurs, is a private exercise undertaken by forward-looking teams, at private training labs for elite athletes and at a handful of corporate research centers. So while the impact of sports science grows there is little sense that an American culture of sports science has taken hold.

To the extent it does exist in the US, sports science mostly belongs to Nike, Gatorade, EXOS. Putting sports science in a corporate silo might not be all bad. Companies develop products and services that move the state of the art forward, but they cannot be integrated enough or specific enough to meet all the needs of a team, let alone a sport. Alternatively, universities are fast improving at bridging sports science disciplines to the advantage of sport teams. American research universities have steadily evolved over the past 25 years to combine scientific and technical disciplines to good use, and they are becoming the home for the American version of whatever sports science becomes. UConn, Stanford, Kansas, Kentucky have, among other schools, turned teams into living laboratories, often with on-field success.

Transferring technology remains a challenge though, mostly because professional teams are rarely willing collaborators with universities (exceptions: lots of teams work with academic sports medicine faculty and the Orlando Magic appear to work closely with the University of Central Florida Human Performance Lab, see paper). Realize though that there has not been time for the profession to create the sort of revolving door between universities, teams and corporations to really circulate knowledge deeply.

Sports science first materialized in Europe, with professional football and rugby clubs that sometimes collaborated with universities and sometimes did not, and in Australia, with government-backed Australia Institute for Sports advancing research and at the same time improving human performance. These are big-time sports and the examples are evidence that sports science buy-in is inevitable. The gains are too substantial and, maybe more crucial, the organizational change that occurs is such an overhaul that the teams that pursue investments in sports science are launching headfirst off a cliff.

It remains difficult for U.S. sports organizations to start down the path, but it also seems likely that the teams that fail to take the leap will lose and their leap into sports science is ultimately inevitable. Let’s say that sports science is here in America and it is set to be a big big thing, but the path to impact is hard to predict. This is where the US Soccer Federation and the national soccer teams have a crucial role to play, especially with the new Kansas City training site and the announced presence that sports science will have.

Soccer in general, and the US Mens National Team in particular, have an opportunity to be the high profile team that fully and publicly engages the full spectrum of world class sports science, using it to compete at the highest level. USSF could adopt a stance that developing American sports science is every bit as important and as valuable as developing American soccer talent. It is the same team equals lab concept as research universities practice, but at national scale and, if executed well, puts the United States among the very best in the world on day one, on par with World Cup champion Germany, a team that put sports science and technology to excellent use.

The key thing I am paying attention is to how much sway the corporations have in US Soccer sports science research and development, versus how much of a presence university research gets. German soccer relied heavily for World Cup science support on tech partners SAP, Adidas and EXOS, but also turned to inexpensive university resources for high-volume technical opposition scouting. In both cases the expertise to know what to use new technology for lied in the sports organization, and German soccer knew enough to assess the risk and rewards and to make quality bets with the money it had for technology.

Can the US sports develop a deep scientific and technical competency? Probably, but only if the decision-makers are smart about engaging the best-in-the-world talent at US universities while still creating opportunities for corporate participation that don’t allow for any single company operating at the expense of integrated, collaborative high-performance sports science results. There is no ceiling for how far well-resourced US researchers could advance sports science, but the ceiling lowers if priorities and decisions get outsourced to corporate partners, and it lowers further if we choose to rely on far away partners. If the US cannot surpass player tracking technologies from Australia, Germany or Israel, or data interfaces from Germany or Serbia, then this is a nation that cannot adequate mobilize its resources in order to reach our full potential and compete at highest possible level. Sports science is set to evolve rapidly in the US, a run that will probably take place for at least a few years to come. The stakes are high, in terms of championships, salaries and entertainment. Pay attention.

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