Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 18, 2015

Chip Kelly has taken some hits, in the media and from former players, this off-season. Now it’s the Eagles coach’s turn to communicate his thoughts. Plus, how badminton helped Sam Bradford, an ironman in Cleveland, the 2014 playoff team that’s better than everyone thinks and much more.

… Tennessee’s players are using sleep trackers and working with sleep coaches during training camp. Understanding their sleep is the newest tool in maximizing recovery to ensure the players take the biggest steps forward when they are awake.

“It’s all about investing in our players and investing in them reaching their full potential,” head coach Butch Jones said. “That’s all part of our sports science in having sleep coaches and sleep monitors and making sure they get the nine hours that they need. It’s about educating them on how you go to bed at night and how you fall asleep.”

From my interviews with those who have successfully undertaken a running form overhaul, it’s clear that several factors are crucial:

Patience

Consistently plugging away at the drills and integrating the drills into one’s running program

Consistently working on the mobility component.

In the United States, soccer is the second-most popular youth sport behind basketball. Between 3 and 5 million American boys and girls play the game — and many dream of becoming the next Cristiano Ronaldo or Abby Wambach.

A new initiative at UC Santa Barbara is designed to capitalize on the passion young soccer players bring to the sport and aims to show them that success in sports can lead to success in the classroom. The one-day program is an innovative outreach partnership among UCSB’s Materials Research Lab (MRL), the Santa Barbara Soccer Club, the Lompoc Chelsea Football Club and the UCSB men’s soccer team.

Israeli medical device company Integrity Applications has begun the process with the FDA to bring its noninvasive glucose monitoring device, GlucoTrack, to the United States.

GlucoTrack allows users to monitor their blood glucose level without drawing blood. The user wears a clip on his or her ear, and GlucoTrack uses a combination of sensors to determine blood glucose level, then sends the data to handheld device about the size of a smartphone. The ear clip still has to be calibrated every six months, and the calibration presumably requires drawing blood.

… Medical staff working for professional sporting teams have an inherent conflict of interest. On the one hand they have a duty to their patient who happens to be a professional sportsperson, however they are employed by a professional sporting club whose sole aim is sporting success. Occasionally, as in the incident described, there is a conflict of interest, real or perceived, between the two.

In situations such as this, it is clear that the doctor’s first priority is always the health of their patient. However the club can seemingly “punish” the doctor and even terminate their contract at any time.

PMSE 362: Materials for epidermal and water-soluble forms of flexible electronics

PMSE 363: Thin and flexible organic electronic devices for wearable or implantable electronics

PMSE 364: 3D printing of flexible electronics and sensors

PMSE 365: Field-effect transistors based on room-temperature processed conjugated polymer/doped carbon nanotube composites for flexible electronics

PMSE 366: Polymers for all-printable field-effect chemical sensors and biosensors

PMSE 367: Parasitic capacitance effect on dynamic performance of printed sub-2 volt electrolyte-gated poly(3-hexylthiophene) transistors

PMSE 368: Flexible macroporous polymer cages as spacer/spring elements for REWOD energy harvesting devices

The majority of HRV studies to date have used endurance athletes, partly because treadmills and spin bikes are readily available in every sports science lab, and partly because runners are cyclists are perfectly willing to bury themselves on a regular basis as it’s what they consider to be ‘fun’.

So it makes a welcome change to see researchers Andrew Flatt and Dr Mike Esco at the University of Alabama have devised some elegant studies to assess how individual members of a collegiate soccer squad were adapting to a uniform training regime, and to use HRV data captured during the first 3 weeks of an off season program to see if they could predict how the individual player’s fitness would evolve.

It did not seem especially noteworthy when Angelique Kerber summoned her coach, Torben Beltz, after the first set of her opening match at the Bank of the West Classic here last week. Under WTA rules since 2008, players can call for 90-second on-court coaching visits once per set.

But there was a twist. Beltz was able to fortify his burst of advice with nearly real-time data delivered from a WTA-issued iPad he had been monitoring in his seat.

Beltz told Kerber that her opponent, Daria Gavrilova, was serving to her backhand nearly every time.

… “It’s like capitalism,” said Billy Beane. “You have a void that needs to be filled, and a whole generation of kids that see it.” Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A’s, has seen the leagues’ approach to pitching do a full 180.

“Back in the 1990s, there was a panic in the industry about lack of pitching,” Beane told CNBC. “Now you have a big wave of pitching that is physically so much different.”

There is a single phrase that sums up Diego Simeone; one that condenses the philosophy and attitude that he brings to his teams and what he expects from his players. “Effort is non-negotiable”.

While his career path and his teams reflect this maxim, there is also one single defining moment in his coaching career to date – and that is December 2011, when he took over at Atletico Madrid.

Up until then, his track record had been a sharp and unrelenting learning curve, experimenting with style and formations at a dizzying number of clubs. Since then, it has been one of stability and unprecedented success.

As it begins its first season in the English Premier League, AFC Bournemouth—an obscure club with a minor-league baseball-size stadium—is facing long odds. Its roster has no star power. It has lost both of its games so far. Its stay in English soccer’s top league is likely to last just one year.

Things couldn’t be better.

Have you seen plots of data that are ridiculously explanatory and you can’t understand why? Do you want to plot data and have no idea what sort of plot to use? Do you want to distinguish between plots that are informative and plots that are simply flashy?

ggplot2 is a plotting system for R. It’s a easy way to make decent plots rather quickly, and it’s so helpful that it might be the only thing you use R for. I once gave a lesson at Galvanize’s Data Science Immersive that introduced ggplot2 without expecting any prior knowledge to R.

Perhaps you don’t care about ggplot2 in particular; this lesson, or whatever you want to call it, should also serve as a decent introduction to plotting in general.

… In this post, we’ll use R to create and test a few different projection systems, focusing on a bare-bones Marcel and a multiple linear regression model for predicting home runs. I’ve said a couple times before that we’re just scratching the surface of what you can do — but this is especially true in this case, since people write graduate theses on the sort of stuff we’re exploring here. At the end, though, I’ll point you to some places where you can learn more about both baseball projections and R programming.