Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 25, 2015

Usually the last thing any heptathlete feels like doing at the end of an 800m, when their lungs and limbs are waving a white flag, is muster a smile. But even though her body was slumped on the track and a wave of photographers were invading her personal space, Jessica Ennis-Hill was happy to make an exception.

During this year there have been many sporting performances that have made the jaw drop and the heart sing. Nothing, though, has come close to rocket-launching the soul quite as much as watching Ennis-Hill claim the heptathlon world title only 13 months after giving birth to her son Reggie. It deserves to go down as one of the great comebacks in sport.

Callum Wilson’s first goal in the Football League seemed far too easy considering all that the young forward, twenty at the time, had put into it. In March 2013, Coventry City faced Colchester in a midweek League One fixture. Down 2-1, Wilson came on late in the second half and promptly took on his marker, Nigeria-born, one-time England C team international Magnus Okuonghae, down the right wing. With one step-over and scissor with his right foot and another scissor with his left, Wilson put Okuonghae off-balance to make room for a low finish into the bottom left corner to level the scoreline.

By an age when most future England stars begin establishing themselves at the top, Wilson had only made five previous appearances in the Football League at the time of that goal. His two loan spells at non-league outfits Kettering Town and Tamworth, after graduating from Coventry’s youth system, had been marred by injuries. In two-and-a-half years after signing his first professional contract with Coventry, Wilson had only managed to score two goals in twenty-three games, twenty-two of which at Kettering and Tamworth.

Ashleigh Johnson stands out in the pool because of her athletic talent, but also her background.

Johnson is the only black player on the U.S. Women’s National Water Polo team. She’s also the only player not from California.

If you’re like most leaders, you’re probably reluctant to give an individual feedback in a team meeting. You’ve probably learned to praise in public and criticize in private. You may be concerned that if you give feedback in a group setting, you’ll put that person on the spot, get him or her defensive, make everyone else in the room uncomfortable, and strain the team’s working relationships. That’s why leaders tend to focus on the risks of giving feedback in a team, but miss the risks of inappropriately giving feedback one-on-one.

Giving feedback in the right setting is important. It affects your team’s performance, working relationships and well-being. Here are some guidelines and explanations for when to give feedback in a team setting, and when to offer it one-one one.

Chester E. Finn Jr. has three very bright granddaughters. He thinks they “have considerable academic potential and are not always being challenged by their schools.” Finn is not just a proud grandpa; he’s a long-established expert on education policy with the Fordham Institute and Hoover Institution.

So it’s not surprising that his grandkids got him wondering about — and researching — a big question: How well is the U.S. educating its top performers?

His answer: not very. “High achievers are being neglected in all sort of ways by schools that had no incentive to push them farther up.”

When 80,000 fans pack MetLife Stadium each time the Giants and the Jets play this season, they are unlikely to notice the 22 new radio receivers placed discreetly around the building. Nor will they see the radio frequency chips embedded in every player’s shoulder pads.

But with this gear, fans watching on television and following on the Internet will be able to see how fast and far players are running, how far offensive players are from their defenders and other statistics and data-driven graphics.

Baylor’s athletic performance team recently acquired a new muscle diagnostic technology “TMG” to benefit student-athletes. Sic ’em Sports Productions has the story on Inside #?CampBU.

There is a lot of buzz these days over precision medicine and if you’re stuck in the midst of EHR implementations and/or ICD-9/10 transitions, it might sound a bit farfetched to see how precision medicine will ever scale to the clinic. Integrating genomic data into the EHR is going to be a major challenge on its own and then there is the data from wearables, sensors, and other connected home monitoring devices. And once you have that data, how do you derive meaningful insights that can and will be used in the context of the care delivery process?

The latest issue of Cell Systems has an interesting piece outlining many of these challenges while offering a vision of how open APIs could catalyze a more innovative healthcare sector, at least in terms of what data analytics could do with greater data liquidity.

The authors begin with the challenges that EHRs create for developing any form of real-time, real world digital health, much less a practical approach to precision medicine. The article then lays out an argument for an “App-Based Economy” that would be less tethered to individual EHRs, and offer a vision more concentrated on open APIs connected to data warehouses and EHRs. The key difference is that this app-enabled ecosystem would enable substitutability of apps, which then allows for greater customizability rather than a one-size-fits-all approach as we see today.

As clear as the benefits of exercise are, explaining its effects at the molecular level has been scientifically strenuous. That’s especially true for irisin—a hormone that appears in some animal studies to increase energy expenditure after physical activity and promote healthy metabolism. Experiments to measure irisin in exercising people have set off a bitter scientific dispute, leading some to believe humans don’t produce it at all. Now, the lab that discovered the hormone is coming to its defense, aiming to win over critics by showing its presence in human blood with a more sophisticated, commonly used analytical technique.

Irisin—named for the Greek messenger goddess Iris—first revealed itself in the lab of Bruce Spiegelman, a cellular biologist at Harvard Medical School. His lab was trying to identify key proteins produced by muscles during a workout. “We’re all told to exercise,” he says. “In the end, presumably the [effects] will all come down to a series of molecules.”

Exercise provides many health benefits, including improved metabolism, cardiovascular health, and cognition. We have shown previously that FNDC5, a type I transmembrane protein, and its circulating form, irisin, convey some of these benefits in mice. However, recent reports questioned the existence of circulating human irisin both because human FNDC5 has a non-canonical ATA translation start and because of claims that many human irisin antibodies used in commercial ELISA kits lack required specificity. In this paper we have identified and quantitated human irisin in plasma using mass spectrometry with control peptides enriched with heavy stable isotopes as internal standards. This precise state-of-the-art method shows that human irisin is mainly translated from its non-canonical start codon and circulates at ?3.6 ng/ml in sedentary individuals; this level is increased to ?4.3 ng/ml in individuals undergoing aerobic interval training. These data unequivocally demonstrate that human irisin exists, circulates, and is regulated by exercise.

Ron Francis, Executive Vice President and General Manager of the National Hockey League’s Carolina Hurricanes, today announced that the team has named Eric Tulsky to the position of Hockey Analyst. As Hockey Analyst, Tulsky will provide and analyze data to assist the hockey operations departmen and coaching staff. Tulsky worked for the team during the 2014-15 season on a part-time basis.

Karim Kassam studied electrical and computer engineering during his undergraduate years at Queens University in Kingston, Ontario. He earned his master’s degree in advanced computing, specializing in logic and artificial intelligence, at Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine in London, and he earned his Ph.D in social psychology from Harvard.

So why is Kassam now sitting in on scouting meetings and offering advice to Steelers general manager Kevin Colbert?

In the ever-changing world of the National Football League, where advanced statistics are becoming more popular, Kassam is bringing the Steelers up to speed as the team’s new analytics and football research coordinator.

Communicating the insights of analytics in an actionable manner is a topic that never seems to go out of style. Especially as big data comes to the NBA, how does one parse that data in a way that is understandable and actionable for a great basketball thinker who has never had cause to develop any sort of knowledge basis in data science? Rajiv Maheswaran, CEO of pioneering analytics house Second Spectrum, perhaps unwittingly gave the best practical bit of advice I can remember hearing when he told me what Second Spectrum does is “mostly identifying basketball words in the data.”

In locker rooms across the country, amid the pads, sticks, balls and helmets, sports teams are increasingly relying on a new piece of equipment. It’s typically about the size of a thin flip phone and is worn in the middle of an athlete’s back, usually under a compression shirt. When the biometric sensor starts whirring to life, every athletic movement, every heartbeat and every muscle twitch is converted into numbers, arming teams with more information than ever about an athlete’s performance, potential and health.

The end result is the latest offshoot of the burgeoning analytics world, where teams are leaning on technology and data to not just prevent and rehabilitate injuries but to predict them.

When “Moneyball” hit the scene a dozen years ago and analytics in sports went mainstream, both fans and teams thought of the newfangled statistics in terms of in-game strategy and roster building. Innovative and complex measurements were used to evaluate players in new and revealing ways. But the more recent analytics revolution has focused on health, injuries and keeping players on the field.