This offseason has been another landmark time in the sports concussion discussion, mostly because the bad news continues to pile up:
- Football Retirements in National Footbal Post
- Substandard Hockey Helmets on ESPN, Outside the Lines
- Baseball Hitters’ Performance Declines in The New York Times
- Women’s Soccer Concussions in The Daily Tar Heel
- Rugby Concussion Protocols reported by Reuters
Media has underreported the major developments that have occurred:
- New Brain-protecting Materials from MIT
- Improved Sensors and Telemetry like X2 Biosystems
- Better Understanding of Brain Healing at Henry Ford Health System in Detroit
- Experimental Brain Models, like Europe’s Human Brain Project that has seen research stakeholders demand competent administration and oversight
This is leading edge science and all of it factors into understanding, preventing and treating concussions. In fact advances in one domain, like new materials, increase the opportunity to make advances in the other areas, like sensors, because researchers will be able to improve their experiments and the insights those experiments can yield. All of this progress takes place together, a difficult narrative but one that is much closer to ground truth than what sports journalists are reporting, like in this article on US Army materials research by The MMQB.
The Best Things I Read Last Week
- How Lionel Messi and Wayne Rooney think on the field ESPN FC … Cogent analysis by Simon Kuper about how the best players prepare mentally to do things that are spectacular and seem spontaneous.
- Recovery time plays key role for NCAA’s March Madness athletes Fox News … A good look at how winning the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament is an effort that involves more than playing and winning the games teams are scheduled to play.
- INSIDE GERMANY’S ULTRA-COMPETITIVE SOCCER COACHING ACADEMY Vice Sports … No surprise, Germany has an education institute where soccer coaches learn the game, learn to coach, and learn to innovate.
- From the lab to real-world application: Scientific insights are vital to innovation Nutra Ingredients … Consumer-centric innovation must be coupled with real-world scientific insights that explain how to best deliver nutrition to those that need it, says Lucozade’s senior sports scientist.
- Anterior Cruciate Ligament Reconstruction—Not Exactly a One-Way Ticket Back to the Preinjury Level, A Review of Contextual Factors Affecting Return to Sport After Surgery Sports Health … Approximately 1/3 of ACL reconstructions fail to return to pre-injury performance levels, but things seem to be getting better as treatments, rehab practices and the mental challenges of returning involve fewer and fewer guesses.
- Rebuilding a Champion: An exclusive look at Azarenka’s fitness regime Tennis … Azarenka went to P3 to regain her athleticism, a good move vigen the enormous data and knowledge into lateral movement that has been accumulating there.