Sports Science: Week in Review, May 29-June 4

Leaders of sports organizations like to display their confidence in the analysis that pervades sports. Their assurance in having mastered, or at least comprehended, the risks that intersect their business and their competitive environment makes for quality narratives.

  • Predators have trusted analytics throughout run to Cup Final (NHL.com, Arpon Basu)
  • Colorado’s Pablo Mastroeni: “Stats will lose to the human spirit every day” (MLSsoccer.com)
  • The NBA’s Adam Silver: How Analytics Is Transforming Basketball (Knowledge@Wharton)
  • Cristiano Ronaldo and Real Madrid’s stars expertly managed by Zinedine Zidane (ESPN FC, Sid Lowe)
  • Alabama football: Nick Saban’s model coming under NCAA attack (SI.com, Andy Staples)
  • Whether or not leadership’s confidence in analysis is justified is another matter. Most of the “science” in sports science isn’t grounded in engineering, leaving it subject to conjecture and begging further investigation. The sports science that does have actionable follow-through seems to rest on axioms that border on common sense. The conclusions of these “solid” (or “solved”) arguments and studies have, for the most part, a “well, duh” m.o.

  • The Growth Equation: Stress + Rest = Growth (Brad Stulberg and Steve Magness, Peak Performance blog)
  • A motor-unit based model of muscle fatigue (PLOS Computational Biology)
  • Effect of a gluteal activation warm-up on explosive exercise performance (BMJ Open Sport & Exercise Medicine)
  • Study links late-night tweeting with subpar performances by NBA players (UPI, Brooks Hays)
  • Hitting back against concussions (Purdue Exponent, Brad Pushkar)
  • Exercise and sleep: Good news for the weary (CNN.com, Sandee LaMotte)
  • Here’s the Latest Research on Running Form (Runner’s World, Sweat Science blog, Alex Hutchinson)
  • Athletes’ Microbiomes Differ from Nonathletes (The Scientist Magazine®, Jeff Akst)
  • Lindsay Allen: Micronutrients Researcher (The Scientist Magazine®, Anna Azvolinsky)
  • Working memory: How you keep things ‘in mind’ over the short term (The Conversation, Alex Burmester)
  • In many cases the issue is a person, something specific to his or her unique circumstance. Athletes’ lives are shaped by decades of choices that shape their health and development but their success and their careers boil down to moments of heightened high-stakes decision-making.

  • Francesco Totti’s Ageing Curve (Mark Taylor, The Power of Goals blog)
  • Can Terrance Ferguson Jump from High School To Australia to the NBA? (VICE Sports, Sam Vecenie)
  • Mallory Pugh and Christian Pulisic help U.S. soccer get glimpses of its future (The Washington Post, Steven Goff)
  • Brandon Marshall embraces Giants’ grasp of progressive technology (ESPN NFL, Jordan Raanan)
  • Baseball’s Most Underappreciated Star Joey Votto Continues to Evolve (VICE Sports, Blake Murphy)
  • Zach Lowe on Cleveland Cavaliers’ Tristan Thompson becoming an elite role player (ESPN NBA, Zach Lowe)
  • Risks still abundant as Chris Bosh hopes to get back on court in NBA (NBA.com, David Aldridge)
  • The risks, the evidence, the decisions and the outcomes swirl in a sea of question and debates — that’s just sports science in its current context. In time there should be some sort of ground truth that emerges from the data and the engineering communities working in sports science.

  • The ‘why’ of strength and conditioning (AUT Millennium News, Jamie Douglas)
  • Just don’t do it: Compression tights fail to curb runners’ muscle fatigue (STAT, Megan Thielking)
  • Painkillers in sport: A ‘career necessity’ or a ‘serious health risk’? (BBC Sport)
  • Texas on track to become first state to explicitly back stem cell therapies (STAT, Andrew Joseph)
  • English football’s dark side in which the young are collateral damage in the search for the next big thing (The Independent (UK), Ian Herbert)
  • Baseball Therapy: Circumstances, Implementation, and the Slow Change of Baseball (Baseball Prospectus, Russell A. Carleton)
  • Injury rates in young female athletes may be underestimated (Reuters)
  • The orthotics debate — How running shoe inserts are dividing the experts (espnW, Amanda Loudin)
  • Digital Healthcare At the Inflection Point, Via Mary Meeker (Health Populi blog, Jane Sarasohn-Kahn)
  • Why Shouldn’t Aging Athletes Be Allowed to Take Testosterone? (Outside Online, Andrew Tilin)
  • Generation Why: A Look Into The Off-Field Development Of A Bundesliga Player (SportTechie, Jonathan Harding)
  • A Kinetic Model Describing Injury-Burden in Team Sports | SpringerLink (Sports Medicine journal)
  • More things that I read and liked last week:

  • What to Do When You Inherit a Team That Isn’t Working Hard Enough (June 02, Harvard Business Review, Joseph Grenny)
  • These days in baseball, every batter is trying to find an angle (June 01, The Washington Post, Dave Sheinin and Armand Emamdjomeh)
  • ‘We’ve found religion down here’: Sports startup firm considers Frisco a home run (June 04, Dallas News, Valerie Wigglesworth)
  • Champions League Final Predictions: Who will win? We asked machine-learning experts (June 03, Wired UK, João Medeiros)
  • The Key to Being Killer in the Clutch Like Kyrie and King James (May 30, Bleacher Report, Brandon Sneed)
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