Applied Sports Science newsletter – July 10, 2015

… “I’m sick of being injured and not being able to play at full strength 100 percent,” McGary said. “So this summer was really key for me. I stayed in Oklahoma City and just been working my tail off to get into shape.”

After playing in only eight games in his final year at Michigan because of a back injury, McGary sustained a broken bone in his left foot in the Thunder’s first preseason game last season. He missed the final six exhibition contests and the first 17 regular season games while recovering. McGary returned to the lineup, played one game and then missed the next 23 contests due to shin splints. He appeared in only 32 games as a rookie.

Now weighing in at about 255 pounds, McGary says he’s fully healthy for the first time in years.

The Philadelphia 76ers today announced that the team has successfully recruited Todd Wright as Assistant Coach, Head of Strength and Conditioning. Wright brings with him 21 years of experience and is widely recognized within the field for his ability to develop players using innovative basketball-specific strength and conditioning techniques.

“We feel fortunate to now call Todd Wright a Sixer,” said President of Basketball Operations and General Manager Sam Hinkie. “His reputation as a trainer of basketball players is second to none. His values and his ability to form genuine, lasting relationships with athletes to help them achieve their goals are both heavily aligned with our organization and with our player development in Philadelphia. When it became clear that the University of Texas was to make a change in their men’s basketball program, I booked a flight to Austin within 10 minutes.”

Did you get enough sleep last night? Are you feeling fully awake, like your brightest, smartest, and most capable self? This, unfortunately, is a pipe dream for the majority of Americans. “Most of us are operating at suboptimal levels basically always,” the Harvard neurologist and sleep medicine physician Josna Adusumilli told me. Fifty to seventy million Americans, Adusumilli says, have chronic sleep disorders.

In a series of conversations with sleep scientists this May, facilitated by a Harvard Medical School Media Fellowship, I learned that the consequences of lack of sleep are severe. While we all suffer from sleep inertia (a general grogginess and lack of mental clarity), the stickiness of that inertia depends largely on the quantity and quality of the sleep that precedes it. If you’re fully rested, sleep inertia dissipates relatively quickly. But, when you’re not, it can last far into the day, with unpleasant and even risky results.

Many of us have been experiencing the repercussions of inadequate sleep since childhood. Judith Owens, the director of the Center for Pediatric Sleep Disorders at Boston Children’s Hospital, has been studying the effects of school start times on the well-being of school-age kids—and her conclusions are not encouraging.

Monitoring soccer players is important for evaluating individual and collective team behavior during training sessions and games, in addition to informing recovery strategies and load management. Modern micro-technology allows assessment of physical, technical and tactical performance parameters in “real-world” conditions. However, physical testing performed either in laboratories or on the pitch is required for individual training prescription, and to develop performance benchmarks for playing standards and playing positions. Anaerobic actions precede the majority of goals, and a large number of linear or repeated sprint tests with or without direction changes have been used in order to assess soccer players’ ability to create or close a gap. The Yo-Yo tests evaluate the players’ ability to repeatedly perform intense exercise. These tests have substantial correlations with high-intensity running distance covered in matches and are considered more valid than measures of maximal aerobic power. Commonly used change-of-direction tests do not mimic on-field movements, and the usefulness of repeated-sprint tests can be questioned, owing to the near-perfect relationship between best and average sprint times. In this presentation we outline minimum standards, percentiles, methodological concerns and future recommendations which hopefully can serve as bottom line information for soccer practitioners.

Players with two US National Football League teams will be wearing movement sensor technology by Australian medical device company dorsaVi in their upcoming season.

NFL teams New Orleans Saints and Cleveland Browns have been using the movement sensors during training in their off-season and have now decided to use the technology during the 2015/16 season.

dorsaVi’s ViPerform technology comprises a wireless, wearable movement sensor system that can measure and record movement and muscle activity.

… The news of Pierre-Paul’s digital truncation would have come out before long– it’s difficult for linemen to hide severe hand injuries– even if Schefter’s source didn’t leak it, but in an era of ostensible medical privacy, Schefter’s tweet still was a bit stunning to see. Though laws such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act do not apply to journalists, Schefter’s actions still cross a line of decency and ethics.

One of the central concepts here is authorization, and as we move away from a time in which the bulk of athlete health information exists in conventional medical records and into a reality in which people, including those involved with sports teams, are embracing wearable athletic technology with the capability of pervasively gathering vast amounts of biometric data, authorization may become a moot issue for the monitored athletes. Seeing Pierre-Paul’s records pop up on Twitter struck some as “creepy” and “invasive,” but we may not be far from a situation in which athletes are indirectly pressured or directly asked to authorize broad disclosure of their health information.

Federal and state authorities who enforce the protection of private medical information are watching the case of Jason Pierre-Paul, the National Football League star whose medical records were publicized Wednesday.

“We are aware of the incident,” said a spokeswoman for the Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights. She said the office could open a case based on media reports, and has done so in the past. She declined to comment further, saying the office does not release information on “current or potential investigations.”

Anti-doping agencies in Britain and the US have begun investigations into the American coach Alberto Salazar, who is accused of giving performance enhancing drugs to his athletes.

He has denied the allegations in a 12,000-word open letter, but the scandal has put the spotlight back on doping in sport.

Four experts give their perspective on how easy it is to cheat to the BBC World Service Inquiry programme.

… While sports science and research tends to focus upon the biological and psychological training necessary to become an elite performer, success in sport is much more complex than this. Underpinning any athlete’s “bio-psycho” make-up is the socio-cultural environment in which they are brought up.

This is now acknowledged in sports performance development, thanks partly to a review undertaken through SportCoachUK, which looked at the importance of geography and location in sporting participation, alongside other factors such as children’s socio-economic status and their educational background. The culture in which young athletes are brought up can have a significant impact upon the opportunities available to them to engage and participate in sport.

According to the latest data from the National Sporting Goods Association (NSGA) despite a two percent increase in in the number of 7-17-year-olds from 2010 to 2014, youth participation in sports, fitness, and recreation activities has declined for almost every physical activity during these four years.

Chart 1 below reflects the rather dramatic changes in the number of team sports participants among youth ages seven to seventeen. Declines were least severe for baseball and tackle football, and most severe for basketball and soccer, contrary to conventional wisdom that contact sports are losing participants at a higher rate than non-contact sports because of injury concerns. The facts below suggest a universal decline in team sports participants regardless of whether the sport is contact or non-contact.

… We find a subtle but substantial bias in a standard measure of the conditional dependence of present outcomes on streaks of past outcomes in sequential data. The mechanism is driven by a form of selection bias, which leads to an underestimate of the true conditional probability of a given outcome when conditioning on prior outcomes of the same kind. The biased measure has been used prominently in the literature that investigates incorrect beliefs in sequential decision making — most notably the Gambler’s Fallacy and the Hot Hand Fallacy. Upon correcting for the bias, the conclusions of some prominent studies in the literature are reversed. The bias also provides a structural explanation of why the belief in the law of small numbers persists, as repeated experience with finite sequences can only reinforce these beliefs, on average.

… On June 25, the Dominion Theatre in London hosted an event to discuss analytics in football and to ask what the future might hold. Analysts, journalists, data collectors and even amateur bloggers were able to hear the views and opinions of some of the key players in the field.

An expert panel comprised of Dan Barnett, Director of Analytics at Analysis Marketing Ltd, Brian Prestidge, Alteryx and Tableau consultant at The Information Lab, Sam Lloyd, Founder of Replay Analysis Ltd and John Burn-Murdoch, a data journalist for the Financial Times took to the floor with Duncan Alexander of Opta hosting a Q&A session towards the end.

That scepticism over the effectiveness of analytics in football still lingers is without question. Forest Green, praised for becoming the first non-league side to implement Prozone performance analysis into the day to day running of their club, didn’t take long to change their mind. Just seven months later, Forest Green manager Ady Pennock binned the system claiming that he could see the bigger picture with his own eyes. “I am a great believer in what I see and my eyes don’t lie,” he said. “I don’t need a bit of paper. The most important stat is the scoreline and I don’t want Prozone for the sake of having it.”

In recent years, there has been a great deal of debate about the ethical questions associated with “nudges,” understood as approaches that steer people in certain directions while fully maintaining freedom of choice. Evidence about people’s views cannot resolve the ethical questions, but in democratic societies (and probably nondemocratic ones as well), those views will inevitably affect what governments are willing to do. Existing evidence, including a nationally representative survey conducted for this essay, supports five general conclusions. First, there is widespread support for nudges, at least of the kind that democratic societies have adopted or seriously considered in the recent past. Importantly, that support can be found across partisan lines. Second, the support evaporates when people suspects the motivations of those who are engage in nudging, and when they fear that because of inertia and inattention, citizens might end up with outcomes that are inconsistent with their interests or their values. Third, there appears to be greater support for nudges that appeal to conscious, deliberative thinking than for nudges that affect subconscious or unconscious processing, though there can be widespread approval of the latter as well (especially if they are meant to combat self-control problems). Fourth, people’s assessment of nudges in general will be greatly affected by the political valence of the particular nudges that they have in mind (or that are brought to their minds). Fifth, transparency about nudging will not, in general, reduce the effectiveness of nudges, because most nudges are already transparent, and because people will not, in general, rebel against nudges. But this last conclusion must be taken with caution in light of preliminary but suggestive evidence of potential “reactance” against certain nudges.

The ancient Roman philosopher Publius once opined, “A good reputation is more valuable than money.”

Well, new research appearing in this month’s issue of Management Science suggests these words may be as true today as they were two thousand years ago.

Researchers David Waguespack and Robert Salomon examined whether “reputationally-privileged” athletes (that is, athletes who had been successful in previous competitions, or those from countries with a track record of athletic excellence) were more likely to succeed at the Olympic Games than lesser-known athletes.