Everyone in sports wants an advantage, a leg up against the competition. Sports science should be an “advantage” but the circumstances that surround sports science are not as simple as the idea of competitive advantage. Marginal gains, the philosophy that many small advantages can accrue in a manner that leads to victories, is on the verge of being debunked. If there’s little meaning in the smallest advantage, where can sports organizations go for confidence in their decision-making?
Blazin’ Saddles: Bradley Wiggins slams ‘rubbish’ marginal gains (Eurosport)
Popovich: Silver’s involvement in rest issue could hurt relationships (ESPN, San Antonio Spurs Blog)
Cheating in junior tennis: First-hand account, solution (SI.com, Zoe Howard)
‘To be the best, we need knowledge’ – Barcelona set to unveil cutting-edge ‘Milan Lab’ (Goal.com)
Why are English teams performing so badly in the Champions League? (The Red Bulletin, Raphael Honigstein)
Education and skill-building should be something that sports organizations look to as a source for sustainable, long term advantage.
Melbourne Victory partners with Victoria University (Melbourne Victory)
Ryan Fraser: Sports psychologist helped me banish negativity (The Scotsman, Alan Pattullo)
How can companies learn from competitors’ R&D failures? (MIT Sloan School of Management, Zach Church)
Motor Learning: What Coaches Should Know About the Science (SimpliFaster Blog, Carl Valle)
Mexico steady improvement continues on the road to Russia 2018 (ESPN FC, Tom Marshall)
Why You Should Make Time for Self-Reflection (Even If You Hate Doing It) (Harvard Business Review, Jennifer Porter)
Health and nutrition are a less predictable basis for competitive advantage. It can also get morally dubious when winning comes with spikes in the risk to athletes health.
An injury prevention pyramid for elite sports teams. (British Journal of Sports Medicine)
Significant injuries derail playoff hopes around NHL (FOX Sports, AP)
Playing in Pain in the N.F.L. (The New Yorker, Louisa Thomas)
How The Peanut Butter And Jelly Sandwich Became The NBA’s Go-To Comfort Food (NPR, The Salt, Scott Simon)
Drafting Pitchers Who Have Undergone Tommy John Surgery (Fangraphs Baseball, Bill Petti)
This drink hopes to propel elite marathoners to the sub-two hour mark (ESPN, SweetSpot blog, Mark Simon)
Stem cell procedure could be next wave in sports medicine (The Boston Globe, Alex Speier)
How can team physicians improve their job performance? 5 details from AAOS (Becker’s Orthopedic Review)
Periodised nutrition for athletes (Asker Jeukendrup, mysportscience blog)
Minimizing Injury and Maximizing Return to Play: Lessons from Engineered Ligaments (Sports Medicine journal)
Canadian youth hockey injuries cut in half after national policy change (Reuters Health, Carolyn Crist)
Periodized Nutrition for Athletes (Sports Medicine journal)
Doping in sport: Drug use ‘fast becoming a crisis’ (BBC Sport)
Caffeine: How it Works For and Against Your Performance (TrainingPeaks, Carrie McCusker)
Athletes who operate at high strength and stamina have resistance to injury but trends are favoring decreasing athlete workloads to avoid overuse. Best practices for navigating the situation are far from obvious.
The ‘Critical Power’ Concept: Applications to Sports Performance with a Focus on Intermittent High-Intensity Exercise (Sports Medicine journal)
Cardinals give tour of performance department (MLB.com, Jenifer Langosch)
Combating wear and tear – University of Utah bioengineers detect early signs of damage in connective tissues such as ligaments, tendons and cartilage (University of Utah, UNews)
Smarter Endurance Training with Heart Rate Variability Guidance (Firstbeat)
UConn’s Recipe for Success Is to Run, Run and Run Some More (The New York Times, Jere Longman)
Functional Movement Systems How Michigan’s Basketball Team Incorporates the FMS (FunctionalMovement.com, Jon Sanderson)
Improving Change of Direction: Here’s What The Latest Research is Telling Us (Train Heroic, Chris Beardsley)
The downside of year-round hockey: Ottawa Senators strength coach warns of declining athleticism among youth (National Post, Wayne Scanlan)
How the OHL is poised to change the way combines are run (Sportsnet.ca, David Singh)
Minutes Pile Up, and Michigan Faces a Longer Road Than Most (The New York Times, Marc Tracy)
Michigan Basketball: Preparing for Success – No Matter What (FastModel Sports)
Tennessee Vols open spring practice bigger, stronger, ‘more explosive’ (GoVols247)
Behavior based measures like incentives and habits come from social science. Bad examples are overly complicated and ineffective. Good examples seem to depend on skillful communication and collaboration.
Incentives Don’t Help People Change, but Peer Pressure Does (Harvard Business Review, Susanna Gallani)
Is it time for clubs to end goal bonuses and put players on flexible pay? (The Guardian, Sean Ingle)
The opportunistic debut (21st Club Limited, Omar Chaudhuri)
The Rebirth of Baseball’s Great Communicator (The Ringer, Katie Baker)
Jerry Stackhouse’s D-League Experiment (The Ringer, Sam Fortier)
With access to advanced metrics, hitters are digging in to go deep (USA Today Sports, Steve Gardner)
Shared Mental Models – The vital but invisible ingredient for team success (Lane4performance)
When NFL Contracts Want a Pound of Flesh (The MMQB, Andrew Brandt)
Inside the ‘Tinderization’ of today’s NBA (ESPN TrueHoop, Tom Haberstroh)
Does Cognitive Enhancement Work in Chess? (The Atlantic, James Hamblin)
The NBA’s secret addiction (ESPN TrueHoop, Baxter Holmes)
Evidence-based analysis should provide some kind of unbiased gauge for the value of a sports decision. Methods get commoditized though and the advantage changes from skillful analysis to the pursuit/avoidance of undervalued/overvalued tactics and strategies.
Out to Fix the Twins, a New Executive Wants More From the Mound (The New York Times, Tyler Kepner)
How the Red Sox revived their analytics department (Providence Journal, Tim Britton)
Buster Posey’s superior advanced catching metrics make him elite (ESPN, SweetSpot blog, Mark Simon)
Evaluating erroneous offside calls in soccer (PLOS One; Stephanie Huttermann)
Automatically measuring decision-making on the pitch (Medium, David Sumpter)
RB Leipzig coach Ralph Hasenhüttl’s winning formula (The Red Bulletin, Stefan Wagner)
More things that I read and liked last week:
Tommy Haas Confronts Tennis’s Future (March 25, The New Yorker, Louisa Thomas)
Chris Paul’s Fast Hands and Gruesome Fingers (March 22, The New York Times, Scott Cacciola)
The $10 million quest to build a home health device inspired by ‘Star Trek’ (March 21, The Washington Post, Karen Heller)
Will Roger Federer Ever Be Done? (March 20, GQ, Rosecrans Baldwin)
Kara Goucher: “I Still Want to Be Competitive” (March 20, Runner’s World, Brian Metzler)