Applied Sports Science newsletter – May 22, 2015

“Most [players], they kind of tell you who they are,” says Scott Servais, the Angels’ assistant GM of scouting and player development. “[Nelson Cruz] is the ultimate exception to the rule.” In Servais’s current role, Cruz is a threat: the big bat in Seattle blocking the Angels’ path to the playoffs, and the best hitter in the American League to this point, with a ridiculous .351/.406/.715 line and an MLB-leading 16 home runs. But in Servais’s former role as the Rangers’ senior director of player development, Cruz was a pet project — one that, at the time, seemed unlikely to pan out.

Like a lot of baseball rules, the one Servais is citing is unwritten, but no less real than the ones that cause brawls and bruised batters. He’s seen the studies, and the consensus is clear: Old minor league players aren’t prospects. The average major leaguer debuts at age 24, and a 28-year-old rookie is nearly three times as likely as a 21-year-old rookie to wash out after one year. It follows that one can learn a lot about a player from his birthdate without knowing anything about his ballpark, background, or build. For high school draftees, a year can mean the difference between being a bust and making the big leagues. And even in the upper levels, a few years can separate an exciting stat line from an identical one that’s easily dismissed. By necessity, every player development director is part instructor, part actuary, pulling for each player but also keeping an eye on the clock. As Ron Hopkins, a current scout for the Pirates and the Rangers’ former scouting director, puts it, “Most guys, by 29, they’re either established or coaches.”

In case you didn’t notice, the Columbus Crew SC has gotten remarkably better in the last two seasons under the direction of Sporting Director and Head Coach Gregg Berhalter. The team got an additional boost when Berhalter added Steve Tashjian as his high-performance director last midseason.

“[Steve’s] job is to maximize players’ performance on a daily basis,” Berhalter said, adding that the small percentage of game-time performance fans see on the field is built from the large percentage of physical and nutritional training off the field. Tashjian uses a system of screening, monitoring and data collection to fine-tune their programs.

… My first experience of the Premier League was working at a club that had spent millions on a cryogenic treatment room.

I asked the doctor why had the investment on rehabilitation been so great? He said: “You invest in a piece of equipment that cost you 70 grand a week. How much would you pay to ensure that machine keeps working at optimum levels?”

I am writing this because Hull City midfielder Jake Livermore has been accused of cocaine abuse.

The simple argument may be how much has this cost the player? The more complex argument is what’s not happening as a result of this action.

Bart Sullivan is currently the Head Boys Varsity Lacrosse Coach and Program Director for Southlake Carroll High School in Southlake, Texas. Recently he posted a blog that reminded me of the value of communication between coaches of different sports. There is always something to learn, always ideas to share. Bart has used some ideas from my last blog “How do we help the young player organise information and action?” and USA baskeball coach Brian McCormick to design his own training sessions for lacrosse. Let us reflect on this. Three different sports, three different sized balls. One sport played using the feet, another using the hands and the third with sticks.

Today’s wearables don’t pass a physical exam, according to the chief executive of a startup that’s designing a medical-grade device. Julien Penders will share his opinions and experiences in a talk at the Embedded Systems Conference in Silicon Valley.

The Apple Watch, for example, is a cool device but it doesn’t deliver the kind of data doctors and medical researchers need, said Penders, a former researcher at the Imec institute outside Brussels.

“It’s pretty limited,” said Penders who now heads Bloom Technologies (San Francisco). “It’s a bit disappointing from a health perspective because the quality of the sensor is no better than what you find in other systems today and the reliability of the data is at a very low level,” he said.

Researchers at Strathclyde University have created a tiny wearable sensor to test athletes’ sweat.

It delivers real-time information to a smartphone to help sportsmen and women achieve optimum performance.

The tiny sensor analyses the electrolytes in sweat and transmits the data to a smartphone.

It feels as if every year a new fitness product becomes America’s newest craze. Currently, the Fitbit wearable, which allows users to track number of steps walked, sleep quality, and other health data, has become a popular commodity among tech-savvy health enthusiasts. However, this device has caught the eye of athletic trainers—some of whom think it can be used to help solve the current epidemic of serious concussions in sports. Dr. Jordan Hamson-Utley, the Program Director for the Master of Health Science in Athletic Training at the University of St. Augustine, has been looking at new ways to care for concussions particularly at the high school level. She believes that Fitbit could revolutionize the way that athletic trainers monitor and treat concussed athletes.

Many athletic trainers and nurses know just how difficult and costly it can be to treat concussions. “I was busting my back trying to get blood from athletes before and after concussions,” Hamson-Utley describes. This method is very costly, with blood tests costing $50 per test. Many high schools simply cannot afford to use so many resources on accumulating the data to accurately treat this disease. Dr. Hamson-Utley struggled with this problem, until “[she] got a Fitbit [her]self, and thought—wait a minute—this is the key!”

OBJECTIVE:
To determine the compliance of schools and school nurses in the United States with national recommendations for cognitive rest in students who sustain a concussion.
… MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES:
Self-reported responses were collected regarding demographics and compliance of schools and school nurses with recommendations for the management of the postconcussion student, including the presence of specific guidelines for individualized care and the responsibility of the nurse for the prevention, detection, and management of concussions.
RESULTS:
Analysis was performed on 1033 completed questionnaires (36% usable response rate). Fifty-three percent of schools have guidelines to assist students when returning to school after a concussion. These guidelines include extension of assignment deadlines (87%), rest periods during the school day (84%), postponement or staggering of tests (75%), reduced workload (73%), and accommodation for light or noise sensitivity (64%). Sixty-six percent of nurses in our sample have had special training in the recognition and management of concussions. Nurses reported involvement in the following roles: identifying suspected concussions (80%), providing emotional support for recovering students dealing with concussion-related depression (59%), and guiding the student’s postconcussion graduated academic and activity re-entry process (58%).
CONCLUSIONS:
We detected a wide variability in compliance of schools and school nurses with national recommendations for cognitive rest.
CLINICAL RELEVANCE:
Ensuring that schools have policies established for a student’s return to learning, having specific guidelines to provide an individualized approach to return to learning based on postconcussion signs/symptoms, training school nurses in the recognition and management of concussions, and involving school nurses in the re-entry process are identified areas for improvement. Schools in the United States should be aware of these recommendations to guide a student’s postconcussion graduated academic re-entry process.

In this video, Bryan Hill of Rehab United in San Diego gives an extensive look at the lower leg, the calf in particular, pointing out problem areas and stretching ideas meant to mimic what’s needed in a typical running stride. [video, 5:25]

Choking, or failing in a pressure-filled situation, is common enough. But the underlying psychology is surprisingly mysterious for such a familiar phenomenon. So scientists at Johns Hopkins University and the California Institute of Technology decided to investigate what happens in the brain of a person who chokes. They recruited 26 men and women to practice playing a mentally taxing video game — which involved moving dots on a screen quickly — while lying down in an M.R.I. machine.

The researchers gave each participant $100 in real money, which they might add to or lose during play; before each game, the researchers would name a figure from $0 to $100 as the possible “stakes.” But to increase the pressure to perform as well as possible on every game, they told participants that just one randomly chosen game from the hundreds played during the session would determine how much money was won or lost. The M.R.I. recorded brain activity, especially in the ventral striatum, a portion of the brain known to be involved in physical performance. Afterward, to determine their “loss aversion,” the intensity with which they react to the prospect of gains and losses, the subjects gambled on virtual coin tosses.

The results were unexpected. When presented with potential gains, highly loss-averse participants showed intensifying activity in their ventral striatums, and their game play improved. But when they had an opportunity to win $100, their performance declined precipitously. They choked. Their counterparts with low loss aversion — who ought to have been unfazed by the prospect of losing their money — did better in all of their games, except when they were faced with losing $100. Then they choked, consistently.

As most of you know, I post my real-time video injury analysis on twitter immediately after a suspected injury. For the 2014 NFL season, I tallied a 92.6% success record in being correct.

Using the television to make injury diagnosis is far from foolproof, but I want to explain how it is no accident either. Besides my study of injury as an orthopedic surgeon, I spent 17 years analyzing NFL injury video. Every Monday morning after a game, I would visit the team video room with the head athletic trainer to review injury tape. This is after having tended to a player on the field, treated him in the training room, obtained x-rays/MRI and re-examined the following morning. With the specific diagnosis known, we could reverse engineer the mechanism of injury.

I feel tremendously lucky to have this unique perspective and that is what gives me an advantage over others trying to do the same thing. Even with this experience, it is only video analysis without hands on exam. I have doumented 11 “misses” in my 148 “calls” last season.

Soccer is skeptical of many things. Foreign owners, goalline technology, players that refuse to celebrate against a former team, snoods and perhaps most notably artificial turf fields. But Major League Soccer is generally more suspicious on the latter than most. Ask most concerned who or what is North American soccer’s biggest enemy and it would surely be a toss-up between Sepp Blatter and plastic pitches.

While there are numerous nations around the world that debate the top-level suitability of artificial pitches in soccer, MLS perhaps fosters the fiercest such discussion. Plastic fields are derided as a blight on the North American game – and often as a hindrance to the quality of soccer played in its top-flight. Some of the league’s best players – most famously Thierry Henry – rarely played on it, for fear of picking up an injury. In summary, the artificial turf used at five MLS venues is bad for the quality of the game and the health of its players, or so the rhetoric goes.

But that’s not necessarily the case. In fact, there is increasingly an argument to be made that artificial surfaces actually improve the standard of soccer played on it, with the legitimacy of claims over injury issues caused by such pitches also doubted by medical professionals. North American soccer might have it wrong, and there is precedence for MLS to follow on opinion this too.

… The question was how to map amateur baseball players to fit in these two worlds and then figure out what the rubber-meets-road application would be.

This idea kicked around in my head for about five years, with versions of incomplete theories and hunches, but my initial idea is that the first round — or maybe even just the top half of the first round — is Extremistan and the rest of the draft is Mediocristan. The idea would be to look for players underrated by the traditional process to reap value with the top picks, then choose players that fit the rubric for big-league success in the lower rounds, when the stakes are lower and the talent more ordinary.

The draft combine is fascinating to me, and not for the reasons you might think. Sure, it is exciting to see athletes tested to get a better idea of their dimensions and raw athletic ability. As an amateur analyst it is exciting to reap the benefits of the data the combine generates. But I think the real fun isn’t the combine itself. It’s in the art and science of each agent or player’s decision to attend the combine.

Most years, several of the players expected to be highly drafted do not attend, despite perfect health. For potential #1 picks, this is an easy decision. Going to the combine is pure risk. The expectations are already very high. There is no pick higher than #1 and the salary for the first overall pick is predetermined. They may get injured if they participate in the combine scrimmages, especially against competition that might benefit from such an “accident”. Even without an injury, poor play or other performance could cause their stock to move, and the only direction is down.

For most players without the luxury of such a position, the decision is not as easy. Agents and players have to balance a player’s expectations, listed measurements, perceived strengths and weaknesses, actual strengths and weaknesses, current health, and market value to come to a conclusion as to whether a player should go or not.