Sometimes you hear about strength coaches or sports clinicians getting creative and plying their trade in places far away from the field, the gym, the weight room or the training room, repurposing locations like hotel ballrooms or airport lounges to meet their needs. The ability to McGyver a workout or a therapy session or even a healthy meal is a worthwhile talent (and a good story). Team executives show a different talent when they fundraise, design, build and staff amenity-filled training centers, like with the current arms race to build indoor football facilities at U.S. universities.
Innovation occurs at both extremes. Creative solutions come when goals stay high even though the financial and material resources to meet those goals are lacking. The former Soviet Union had better rocket technology than the U.S. for much of the Cold War and it came from the country’s desperation, ingenuity and (of course) talent. The more common practice is to spend heavily and create an ideal setting for talent to flourish, and by hiring exceptional people who have worked hard to create the track record that shows they deserve the opportunity. The differences are like what you see in a scrappy startup company versus what goes on at a corporate lab or product development team.
One situation is not necessarily better than the other. Good results will emerge in both cases. What matters is that both situations remain viable. Three UK soccer teams recently finished construction on new training centers. Manchester City will spend £200 million, Southampton spent £30 million and Wolves spent £7 million. Man City will not become 6X better than Southampton or 40X better than Wolves because of the team’s larger investment. Teams will find that investing in their futures do help them to improve, but the gains don’t increase in proportion to the amount of money invested. Some teams will find that they can do better with less, Soviet-style, if those teams have the talent and they are hungry to innovate.
The Best Things I Read Last Week:
- Sensor Fusion Goes Open-Source EE Times … A consortium of sensor chip makers plan to Open Source algorithms that enable tracking, hoping that fusion applications will enable sensing redundancies that improve accuracy and lead to new applications.
- Meet the Calgary Flames’ secret off-ice weapon The Hockey News, Post-to-Post blog … Strength and conditioning coach Ryan van Asten won the Stanley Cup with the Los Angeles Kings last season, and then he left and joined the Calgary Flames over the summer.
- Getting Better at Getting Better The New Yorker … The systematic approaches used by sports scientists to improve players and their performance are gaining traction in other circles.
- Jonathan Rothberg’s New Startup Raises $100 Million for Chip-based Ultrasound MIT Technology Review … Ultrasound on a chip will make imaging much less expensive and, maybe more important for sports, more user-friendly in terms of mobility and flexibility.
- Muscle energetics during explosive activities and potential effects of nutrition and training Sports Medicine … Energy requirements for high intensity exercise need to be met through nutrition. A clear picture of those pathways will help to optimize the relationship between nutrition and athletic performance.