Applied Sports Science newsletter – July 9, 2015

… None of us — fans, journalists, even scouts and coaches — can look into the future.

Some players are extraordinary as teenagers because they are so physically advanced. That is an advantage early in their careers but holds them back in the long-term because it means they do not need to sharpen the rest of their game. Once that physical edge is blunted, so is their talent.

After a season marred by high-profile injuries to star players, the NBA has formed a committee to promote research into player health. … The initiative is in partnership with General Electric Healthcare. It will be spearheaded by a 20-person strategic advisory board comprising team physicians and clinical researchers from various fields, including orthopedics, sports medicine, radiology and epidemiology.

It’s strange, when you think about it, that we spend close to a third of our lives asleep. Why do we do it? While we’re sleeping, we’re vulnerable—and, at least on the outside, supremely unproductive. In a 1719 sermon, “Vigilius, or, The Awakener,” Cotton Mather called an excess of sleep “sinful” and lamented that we often sleep when we should be working. Benjamin Franklin echoed the sentiment in “Poor Richard’s Almanack,” when he quipped that “there’ll be sleeping enough in the grave.” For a long time, sleep’s apparent uselessness amused even the scientists who studied it. The Harvard sleep researcher Robert Stickgold has recalled his former collaborator J. Allan Hobson joking that the only known function of sleep was to cure sleepiness. In a 2006 review of the explanations researchers had proposed for sleep, Marcos Frank, a neuroscientist then working at the University of Pennsylvania (he is now at WSU Spokane) concluded that the evidence for sleep’s putative effects on cognition was “weak or equivocal.”

But in the past decade, and even the past year, the mystery has seemed to be abating. In a series of conversations with sleep scientists this May, I was offered a glimpse of converging lines of inquiry that are shedding light on why such a significant part of our lives is spent lying inert, with our eyes closed, not doing anything that seems particularly meaningful or relevant to, well, anything.

I’m coming back from two injuries and a serious bout of overtraining last season. How do I know when I’ve crossed the line from pushing hard to overdoing it? —Jeffrey

First, you need to learn the difference between pushing hard and pushing too much, and then you should track your performance to ensure you’re not overdoing it again.

Iris asks: How do you define a rest day versus an active recovery day? How does the latter differ from a cross-training day?

Your body needs rest to recover and get stronger from hard workouts. Rest and active recovery (including gentle cross-training) are both tools we can use to achieve our fitness goals.

A rest day doesn’t involve exercise at all. Think of these days like a good night of sleep. Plan to completely relax: sleep in, enjoy family time, or do light errands or housework. Avoid strenuous tasks like raking the yard, painting the house, or helping a friend move.

While there’s an argument for us to follow an established game plan, whether it’s in business, sports or any other walk of life, there are also those that choose the road less traveled. When it comes sports in North America, the set formula of accepted success for the majority has been playing in high school and joining academies all for the goal of earning collegiate scholarships… and for a smaller percentage turning professional.

This is no different in soccer, where the rise in soccer’s popularity and growth of domestic leagues has seen a shift from the days when players had few options but to strike out on their own. In some ways this has been for the better, with players now able to earn a living and play the sport they love virtually in their own backyard around family, friends and community. However, it has also come at a loss of that unique young talent with the compelling tale of the North American fighting, scratching and clawing his way abroad.

… Marathon running is known to have a high requirement of volume in training and the event itself, which can be quite a physical total on the body, how do you approach giving athletes advice about recovery strategies after training and competition?

No doubt about it: racing a marathon, and the months of training that go into it, poses a huge physical, and emotional, toll on an athlete. Recovery pre and post-race are of the utmost importance.

Regardless of your specific approach to training or your overall workload, it’s important to look at recovery on both the micro and macro levels. With my own athletes, we discuss what recovery looks like after a race or key workout, throughout the course of a given training week and also during an entire training cycle or season.

We build in recovery days, strategies and even blocks so that the athlete can physically and emotionally recharge from the demands of training and racing. I don’t believe athletes over-train so much as they under-recover.

There has been nothing but crickets from the Utah Jazz thus far through free agency. Utah could have pressed the fast-forward button on its current rebuild after a surprising 38-win season under rookie head coach Quinn Snyder. The Jazz had the opportunity to clear near-max salary cap space to chase one the NBA’s premier free agents this summer. Instead, Utah has opted to stay patient. Patience has been a virtue for the franchise of late.

Utah’s front office is bullish, to say the least, on their young core of Gordon Hayward, Rudy Gobert and Derrick Favors. David Fredman, who is entering his 42nd season in the NBA, said as much. The Jazz director of pro player personnel moved with the Jazz from New Orleans to Utah in 1974, and spent 15 years as an assistant to Jerry Sloan.

“I’ve seen about all the regimes [in franchise history] and I will say that I’ve seen nothing as exciting as what we’re doing now,” says Fredman. “It’s certainly the most excitement we’ve had since the run to the Finals in ’97 and ‘98.”

… Eight of the top 11 picks in the 2014 draft suffered serious injuries this past season, four of whom missed 35 or more games. Many of the injuries came early in the season.

“I was definitely weirded out by that,” said Boston Celtics guard Marcus Smart, who missed 12 games because of injury after being selected sixth overall. “It was less than a month in, then somebody else went down, then the next guy, then the next guy. It was like, ‘What’s going on?'”

Health professionals in and around the league say it isn’t happenstance.

Basketball is a fast-moving game of improvisation, contact and, ahem, spatio-temporal pattern recognition. Rajiv Maheswaran and his colleagues are analyzing the movements behind the key plays of the game, to help coaches and players combine intuition with new data. Bonus: What they’re learning could help us understand how humans move everywhere. [video, 12:08]

Watching Wimbledon this year, I was struck by how tall many of the players are. In previous years, this thought had been nothing more than fleeting, but this time, for whatever reason, my interest was piqued just enough to set me off on a small journey of discovery that led to an interesting insight. Are Wimbledon tennis players above average height? Significantly. So, why? And does this also apply within the cohort: are taller players seeded higher?

I laboriously curated two datasets of the names, seeds, and heights of all of the 128 male and 128 female singles players at Wimbledon this year. The Wimbledon website lists the all players’ alongside their seeds and has individual profiles for each player that include, among other things, their heights. Google also provides most players’ heights when searching, for example, “how tall is Novak Djokovic.” Only one player, Lin Zhu, caused trouble as her height seems to appear nowhere on the Web, so I resorted to estimating from a couple of photographs of her shaking hands over the net with Francesca Schiavone, who’s height I know. I estimate that she is 5cm taller, at 171cm. Another point of note is that different sources occasionally display heights that differ by a centimetre or so (perhaps a conversion error); fortunately, it turns out that this is less than the magnitude of my findings, so shouldn’t be an issue.

The University of Nebraska Athletic Department has recently added Tucker Zeleny as the Director of Sports Analytics and Data Analysis. Zeleny joins Athletics after building an impressive resume in various areas at UNL.

Zeleny will head a newly formed department that will be in charge of working with Nebraska’s 24 varsity sports to collect, analyze and summarize data related to team and individual performance. Zeleny and his staff will also work with support staff areas within the department to collect, analyze and summarize data related to department operations.

Now that the Women’s World Cup is over, one might ask: Are countries with more gender equality more successful on the women’s soccer field?

It sure does look like it, if you take a quick glance at country rankings and tournament history. While the men’s game has historically been dominated by the likes of Brazil, Argentina, Italy, Spain and Germany, the women’s game has been dominated by countries like the U.S., Norway, Sweden and – well, Germany. If you look more closely at the data, however, the reality is more nuanced. More important, it seems, are the right kind of norms and the right kind of resources allocated to the game.

… There’s a saying in the sciences, “Statistics means never having to say you are certain.” In any massive data analysis, for instance, there will be random correlations that look “significant” but actually are noise, not signal.

And then there’s the question of what metrics a personality test uses to gauge “success.” Big data needs a hard outcome metric for performance, but the most readily available metrics may not actually be the most important variables in organizational flourishing.

A manager – like the demotivating petty tyrant mentioned above –can force his people to work hard to meet quarterly targets, for example, while destroying the emotional climate that sustains the life-blood of any organization. We have long known that managers who focus too much on performance at the expense of people can be ruinous to the organization over the long term. Using an outcome metric like an executive’s earnings performance, while ignoring his role as a boss and his impact on the morale, loyalty, focus, and stress levels of his direct reports, may result in a false indication of who’s really the best boss.