Applied Sports Science newsletter – April 27, 2015

… Nobody dreams of being a role player, but those are the guys who manage to have decade-long careers.

The thing I can’t preach enough is patience. I’ll tell you right now that you’re not going to get as much playing time as you think you should. If you’re drafted high and you don’t get that playing time, you tend to get mad at the world. You may work hard for a period of time, but it won’t last. You’ll lose that focus and ultimately that mindset that made you successful enough to make it to the NBA.

You might think you’re too good to be sitting on anybody’s bench, but try to get that ego in check

… “I think the best way to phrase it is I like our progress but I like to win,” Stevens said. “So I’m disappointed right now. But it’s not at anybody or at myself — it’s just, you’re disappointed to lose. We have to get better. We have to get better in every which way, and that’s the challenge ahead. Because winning’s a lot more fun.”

Stevens admitted recently that maybe the hardest part of coaching is that you’re always focused on what’s next. And just minutes after his team had been dispatched from the postseason with a 101-93 loss, Stevens was already thinking ahead to the summer and building on all the progress made to this point.

It’s been nearly three months since Chip Kelly announced he was promoting Ed Marynowitz to vice president of player personnel.

On Thursday morning at the NovaCare Complex, the 31 year old met the media for the first time to discuss his new role, the Eagles’ scouting approach and next week’s draft. Marynowitz obviously was in no mood to offer up detailed evaluations on the prospects, but he did speak at length about what the organization is looking for under Kelly.

Specifically, Marynowitz laid out the three-part evaluation plan the Eagles use under Kelly.

In April 2012, Furman University, in Greenville, South Carolina, announced the hiring of Robert Gary to lead the school’s cross country and track and field teams. The fine print in the press release stated that Gary would also oversee a “formalized post-collegiate training group,” now known as Furman Elite.

… In the middle distance world, this concept of losing speed is widespread. Go to any coaching conference, hang around enough coaches, or just talk to your athletes and you’ll hear this concept over and over. It’s used as an argument against doing any kind of aerobic work, regardless of sport or event. It’s thought that only those “slow” distance kids should do long work because speed doesn’t matter much in their world. So they can afford to be slow.

But here’s the thing, if you are losing speed that much during training, it’s not the long aerobic work that is doing it, it’s that your training sucks.

… after a more than a decade of dominance, Australia hasn’t had a man or woman on an ITU World Championship podium since 2010. While the magnitude of the country’s previous success would be arguably hard to sustain, there’s one clear reason Australia has dropped off the radar: the country changed its approach to coaching.

In its heyday, Triathlon Australia understood that optimal athletic development requires “the right coach, at the right time, in the right place,” says Jonathan Hall, performance director for USA Triathlon, and an Aussie. In other words, possessing important measurable physiological qualities—strength, endurance, speed—isn’t a guarantee of success at the elite level. Without the right coaching and environment to flourish, endurance athletes may not realize their full potential.

Everyone seems to agree that collaboration across functions is critical for major projects and initiatives. The reality, however, is that meshing the skills and resources of different departments, each focused on its own distinct targets, to achieve a larger organizational goal is much easier said than done. In fact, it takes much more than people being willing to get together, share information, and cooperate. It more importantly involves making tough decisions and trade-offs about what and what not to do, in order to adjust workloads across areas with different priorities and bosses. And despite all the well-meaning cooperative behaviors, this is often where interdepartmental collaboration breaks down.

From wearable activity trackers to fantasy e-sports, technology is transforming the way athletes train for the game and fans engage with their teams.

With all of this momentum VCs are swinging for the fences. Investors have spent over $1 billion in venture deals for sports-related startups over the past year — and everyone wants in on the action.

What started out as a way to help the Nebraska football team better film their practices has turned into a worldwide business venture for a trio of UNL grads. For David Graff and his Cornhusker cohorts, the goal was to find a way to mix their love of sports and technology. What resulted was a business venture called Hudl — today, the fastest-growing company in the state of Nebraska, with more than 200 employees.

… One of the more common criticisms of Mr. Cuban’s position was the idea that a test wrongly interpreted can lead to unnecessary worry and overreaction.The possibility of receiving a false positive or a poor analysis is possible, but only when the experts are not involved. Blaming the test results, or its interpretation is not the real issue here. Not getting any data or establishing a realistic baseline, until it’s too late, is the real problem. When the goal of testing is overall health and wellness, monitoring and management is far more effective than screening one time.

Rocky Tekulve, an athletic trainer with Wellington Orthopaedic and Sports Medicine, demonstrates how mobile device apps can help spot and correct mistakes in the mechanics of young athletes that could otherwise lead to injuries.

Background Current knowledge on anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury mechanisms in male football players is limited.

Aim To describe ACL injury mechanisms in male professional football players using systematic video analysis.

Methods We assessed videos from 39 complete ACL tears recorded via prospective professional football injury surveillance between 2001 and 2011. Five analysts independently reviewed all videos to estimate the time of initial foot contact with the ground and the time of ACL tear. We then analysed all videos according to a structured format describing the injury circumstances and lower limb joint biomechanics.

Results Twenty-five injuries were non-contact, eight indirect contact and six direct contact injuries. We identified three main categories of non-contact and indirect contact injury situations: (1) pressing (n=11), (2) re-gaining balance after kicking (n=5) and (3) landing after heading (n=5). The fourth main injury situation was direct contact with the injured leg or knee (n=6). Knee valgus was frequently seen in the main categories of non-contact and indirect contact playing situations (n=11), but a dynamic valgus collapse was infrequent (n=3). This was in contrast to the tackling-induced direct contact situations where a knee valgus collapse occurred in all cases (n=3).

Conclusions Eighty-five per cent of the ACL injuries in male professional football players resulted from non-contact or indirect contact mechanisms. The most common playing situation leading to injury was pressing followed by kicking and heading. Knee valgus was frequently seen regardless of the playing situation, but a dynamic valgus collapse was rare.