Three comments about last week’s Sloan Sports Analytics conference:
- Lots athletic performance technology on display by vendors. In fact, there were probably more performance technology vendors than athletic performance coaches at the Sloan conference. When I asked Gary McCoy from Catapult why, he said that it was just one more dimension to the multi-faceted collaboration that comes when teams adopt these technology tools. McCoy goes to the meetings for coaches, trainers and sports medicine clinicians too, and it is important to get face time with all of these groups and his message changes for each audience. Successful adoption on teams comes down to how teams do with getting the different groups on the same page, and often it is the front office and head coach who motivate staff to get out of silos and start collaborating.
- The injury and performance analytics discussion is now a major part of the analytics discussion in each and every major sport. The data and analysis for game results and for athlete health/performance are not yet widely integrated, but at least they are now in the same ballpark. There was a weak effort to have a separate injury and performance analysis discussion across all sports, but it lacked the sport- and athlete-specific context to for the discussion to go beyond rehashing old talking points.
- Organizations–teams, as well as leagues and media companies, progressing down to individual analysts–are all over the map in terms of their utilization of athlete performance technology. I got no sense that the rising tide of sports science was going to raise all the boats. Every organization has its own level of skill, talent, interest and curiosity. The day is coming though when athlete performance and player health is an organizational intelligence test though, and when it occurs, wins and losses will make it easy to spot who passes and who fails.
The Best Things I Read Last Week
- Asymmetry after Hamstring Injury in English Premier League: Issue Resolved, Or Perhaps Not? PubMed, International Journal of Sports Medicine … Hamstring injuries are notoriously difficult to gauge recovery and are prone to re-injury. A group at Liverpool John Moores University went looking for pre-season baselines that put hamstring function against potential risk factors, looking for measures that could be used as predictive diagnostics. This experiment was not successful but it is on the right track.
- Injured? Fear Is Your Biggest Enemy. Outside Online, The Fit List blog … Along with the role that the brain plays in fatigue, the role the brain plays in recovery is at the very heart of understanding athletic performance.
- The future of health care is a dongle attached to your smartphone The Washington Post … With so much attention on wearable technology and the way those sense and tracking interfaces get their data, the opportunity to take advantage of the computing power on smartphone platforms is another essential modality, especially for physiology data.
- NBA Insider: Is It Numbers or Talent? Sorting Fact, Fiction in NBA Stats Wave Bleacher Report, NBA … Basketball journalist Howard Beck takes the temperature of the current NBA analytics discussion. It is a good indication of the increasing impact of data and analysis (but doesn’t say anything about player health or athletic performance data).
- NCAA Soccer Summit Storify, Inside the NCAA … Momentum has been impressive at US Soccer and the NCAA to incorporate more scientific- and research-based evidence into their athlete development programs. No surprise that their interests have converged and there is significant collaboration moving ahead.