Applied Sports Science newsletter – July 21, 2015

… Overall, 45 MLS-based players were called to play in the Gold Cup for the first round. For the knockout phase that started this past weekend, the number fell dramatically to 30 and only because Canada (with 10 MLS-based players on the roster) was eliminated in the first round. Real Salt Lake, Toronto FC, and FC Dallas were all missing five players each as a result of the biennial tournament.

Take struggling RSL. The team has flirted with the Western Conference cellar all season and then lost four players to international duty starting on Week 18 during Independence Day weekend. The losses include USMNT midfielder Kyle Beckerman and goalkeeper Nick Rimando, arguably the team’s two best players. Similarly, the Gold Cup has also impacted the Houston Dynamo -another struggling team in the Western Conference – after the club lost three players.

… Utah has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to improve the Zions Bank Basketball Center facility and to bolster the player development staff to make it worth the players’ while, too.

While participation in Utah is encouraged, it’s not required — but just about every player on the team has taken advantage of it.

“They’ve improved a lot of stuff. They’re making it real home like,” Favors said. “Guys want to come out to Utah, (train) in the practice facility and work with the coaches and enjoy what Salt Lake’s got.”

Running is a tug-of-war between warrior and scientist. … Wise runners drink from both wells. But embracing the irrationality of passion and the deductive reasoning of the mind demands more than brandishing a copy of Daniels’ Running Formula to brush up on your VDOT while simultaneously quoting Pre: “I run to see who has the most guts.” It requires a guide to this realm of interconnected opposites, and none navigates the yin and yang better than the Tao Te Ching.

Thought leaders across the globe answer one question: what is the biggest missing piece in how we educate scientists? Responses ranged from the practical to the philosophical.

What do you do when the game you have prepared for your whole life has changed? This is the question I posed in The Changemaker Effect. Our centuries old one-leader-at-a-time past has given way to a new everyone-a-leader present. Leadership in this context requires everyone to see the big picture and advance solutions that contribute to positive change.

This new game demands very different skills and a new kind of teamwork. Here are 10 things you need to know.

In 2013/14 Arsenal lost 2472 days to injury – then they brought in American strength and conditioning specialist Shad Forsythe.

… Ken Berger of CBS Sports revealed earlier last month that recently dismissed Chicago Bulls head coach Tom Thibodeau may have in fact protested against technology that would have the ability to track and monitor a player’s physical fitness and, therefore, assist coaching staff with how to better treat their players on the court.

“He was basically challenging it, like, ‘Michael Jordan didn’t need that,’” [Brian Kopp, president of the sports tech company Catapult] said to Fox Sports.

In the modern era, with the relentless 82 game schedule followed by playoffs – where the standard is again pushed higher – there is definitely an opportunity for technology to have an impact with injury prevention.

… It wasn’t a normal week in Beaverton, Oregon. The Nike Headquarters campus was packed with out-of-towners for The Opening. In its fifth year, Nike hosted a four-day event of competitions for the top 166 high school football players across America, including Nike Elite 7on7, Nike Elite Linemen, and the Nike Football Rating National Championship. The prize? Bragging rights.

Hudl’s football squad had the opportunity to spend the week testing our newest product?—?Hudl Sideline. Our main testing event was the Nike Elite 7on7. There were six teams competing for the title?—?Alpha Pro, Fly Rush, Hyper Cool, Lunarbeast, Mach Speed, and Superbad?—?each led by several football greats. The experience was surreal. It was hard to believe we were surrounded by so much talent. Even more exciting, our team saw first-hand how valuable the sideline replay product that we built can be.

UA has been at the forefront of building a platform for tracking fitness goals and activity, but the future of this company’s Connected Fitness platform aims to “transform human health.”

Google’s Eddystone protocol aims to make beacons more flexible and open, and to compete with Apple’s iBeacon in what is still a nascent market.

Google introduced an open specification for Bluetooth low energy (BLE) beacons on Tuesday in the hope that it can encourage developers, marketers, and hardware makers to adopt its technology alongside, or in lieu of, the iBeacon system offered by Apple.

Beacons are simple hardware devices that transmit an identification code to devices configured to be attentive to the BLE signal, which typically travels up to 100 meters. Mobile apps receiving that code can then respond with a notification or other action that’s contextually relevant to the location of the device and its owner.

In professional soccer, the benefits of lower limb strength training have been advocated. However, from an aspect of performance development, specifically with respect to expression of fatigue and injury prevention, the advantages of increased lower body strength have received limited attention at the elite level of the game. The primary aim of this cross-sectional investigation was to examine the association between lower body strength and the expression of markers of fatigue as evaluated through muscle damage assessment following match play in professional soccer players. Ten male professional soccer players participated in this investigation (mean ± SD age 26.2 ± 4.3 years, height 181.6 ± 4.8 cm and body mass 78.7 ± 6.1 kg); creatine kinase (CK) was collected 2-days post-match for a 5-month period and at three different time points (Phase 1, Phase 2 and Phase 3); muscular strength (e.g. 4 repetition half-squat) was measured 3-day post-match. No significant change in CK and muscular force across three time points was found (F = 0.60, P = 0.56, ?2 = 0.06 and F = 2.65, P = 0.10, ?2 = 0.23, respectively). Muscular force was negatively correlated (moderate to very large) with CK. It can be concluded that players who produce greater lower body force as a result of being stronger in the lower limbs show reduced levels of CK 48 h post-match.

Background Little is known about the rate and pattern of injuries in international volleyball competition.

Objective To describe the risk and pattern of injuries among world-class players based on data from the The International Volleyball Federation (FIVB) Injury Surveillance System (ISS) (junior and senior, male and female).

Methods The FIVB ISS is based on prospective registration of injuries by team medical staff during all major FIVB tournaments (World Championships, World Cup, World Grand Prix, World League, Olympic Games). This paper is based on 4-year data (September 2010 to November 2014) obtained through the FIVB ISS during 32 major FIVB events (23 senior and 9 junior).

Results The incidence of time-loss injuries during match play was 3.8/1000 player hours (95% CI 3.0 to 4.5); this was greater for senior players than for junior players (relative risk: 2.04, 1.29 to 3.21), while there was no difference between males and females (1.04, 0.70 to 1.55). Across all age and sex groups, the ankle was the most commonly injured body part (25.9%), followed by the knee (15.2%), fingers/thumb (10.7%) and lower back (8.9%). Injury incidence was greater for centre players and lower for liberos than for other player functions; injury patterns also differed between player functions.

Conclusions Volleyball is a very safe sport, even at the highest levels of play. Preventive measures should focus on acute ankle and finger sprains, and overuse injuries in the knee, lower back and shoulder.

One of the simplest and most common power ranking models is known as the Bradley-Terry-Luce model, which is equivalent to other famous models such the logistic model and the Elo rating system. I’ll be referring to “teams” here, but of course the same ideas apply to any two-participant game.

Let me clarify what I mean when I use the term “power ranking”. A power ranking supplies not only a ranking of teams, but also provides numbers that may be used to estimate the probabilities of various outcomes were two particular teams to play a match.

The 2015 New England Symposium on Statistics in Sports will be a meeting of statisticians and quantitative analysts connected with sports teams, sports media, and universities to discuss common problems of interest in statistical modeling and analysis of sports data. The symposium format will be a mixture of invited talks, a poster session, and a panel discussion.

NESSIS registration is now open. Earl bird registration ends August 1.

Talk and poster abstracts are now available online.