Applied Sports Science newsletter – February 3, 2016

… What was abundantly clear is that American soccer has a special player on its hands in Pulisic. Bild, the famous German tabloid, already has a name for him: “Das Ami-Juwel” (“the American Jewel”).

Jewels are to be protected, and that’s what everyone needs to do with Pulisic.

The Pennsylvania native is the eighth youngest player to debut in the Bundesliga, but the top 10 list of youngest Bundesliga debutants is hardly memorable. Only a few have gone on and become stars. Nuri Sahin, the youngest at age 16 and now a decade later Pulisic’s mentor at Dortmund, Julian Draxler and Christian Woerns, come to mind.

… The NBA is considered to be a player’s league — something reinforced by the first few months of this Warriors’ season, when Golden State rattled off one of the best starts in NBA history with Kerr watching from afar while recovering from back surgery. Luke Walton, with one year of NBA assistant coaching experience under his belt, took over and took the Warriors right back to the top of the standings. The fact Golden State’s opponent in last season’s NBA Finals, the Cleveland Cavaliers, just fired head coach David Blatt despite a 30-11 record in 2015-16 furthered that notion, as well.

But the perception that coaches do nothing but roll the ball out onto the court ignores the examples of strong leadership and the dividends its paid.

FA Cup fourth-round weekend means that Premier League managers will be under pressure again to pick youngsters. But from the top clubs few will, and for good reason. The young players we are producing are, for the most part, simply not good enough. And it is the fault of the clubs and their cultures.

Football is all about taking responsibility. It is about learning how to make decisions for yourself. The old apprentice system, which my generation of players came through in the 1990s, taught us this. We knew we had to work hard and learn from the senior players if we wanted to succeed in the game.

I fear that the modern generation are being let down by the system.

… Kerr went on to note that they are “constantly trying to find ways to keep it light, keep it fun, keep them entertained, and every once in a while we’ll have an outing on the road where we’ll go see a movie. The more that you can generate a good vibe, however that is, the more likely you are to develop chemistry.” [video, 3:05]

Atoms, neutrons, quarks, anti-matter, and microbes are new and scary to Doug Pederson, but he’s willing to learn. Chip Kelly may be gone, but the Eagles’ sports science infrastructure will stay in place, according to Pederson, who spoke at the Senior Bowl.

The team retained Shaun Huls as their “sports science coordinator,” and it appears as though Pederson is being tutored by Huls regularly.

The United States Army Medical Research Acquisition Activity (USAMRAA) issued a Sources Sought for commercially available body sensor devices and software development to distinguish between multiple physical activities.

In the technology tussle for consumer wrists, it seems as though the smart money is on the smartwatch.

A new report from Gartner predicts that the wearables market will grow 18.4 percent in 2016, with sales of 274.6 million units and $28.7 billion by the end of the year. Most of that cash, analysts said, will be driven by an uptick in the sales of smartwatches, which alone are expected to pull in $11.5 billion in revenue.

These days, professional sports teams are continuously seeking ways to gather data on their players’ biomechanics and movement with an eye to increasing performance and avoiding injury. Now, Kitman Labs, a sports technology company based in Menlo Park, Calif., that calls itself “the World’s First Athlete Optimization System,” has devised a way for teams in the NFL, MLB and NBA to transform multiple-source data into digestible, practical information.

Jeff Bower, general manager of the Detroit Pistons, explains the advantages of a system like Kitman Labs the best. “We think [Kitman Labs] provides a terrific vehicle for us to turn an incredible amount of data into useful, manageable information that can help our players,” he tells SI.com. “Everything we are doing in this area is designed to give us feedback that can help us monitor the welfare of our players.”

Microsoft is busy prepping HoloLens, its augmented reality headset, for developer and commercial clients, but that doesn’t stop it from dreaming of a distant future, where regular people wear the headset and enjoy NFL football in a whole new way.

In a video released on Tuesday as part of the run-up to Super Bowl 50, which is being held in San Francisco, Microsoft and partner the NFL depict a game-watching experience that’s equal parts sports action viewing and video game.

With the support of some of the most recognised international experts in sports medicine, FIFA is launching a new initiative to help disseminate the latest knowledge in sports science and improve the care of players around the globe. The FIFA Diploma in Football Medicine is a free online course, accessible to all and also designed to help clinicians learn how to diagnose and manage common football-related injuries and illnesses.

Each module is written by international experts in their respective fields, sharing written content, podcasts and video examinations as well as providing links to journal articles and other resources. High-profile players also share their experiences of injury and what they learned through their recovery.

Background: In the United States alone, millions of athletes participate in sports with potential for head injury each year. Although poorly understood, possible long-term neurological consequences of repetitive sports-related concussions have received increased recognition and attention in recent years. A better understanding of the risk factors for concussion remains a public health priority. Despite the attention focused on mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI) in football, gaps remain in the understanding of the optimal methodology to determine concussion incidence and position-specific risk factors.

Purpose: To calculate the rates of concussion in professional football players using established and novel metrics on a group and position-specific basis.

Study Design: Case-control study; Level of evidence, 3.

Methods: Athletes from the 2012-2013 and 2013-2014 National Football League (NFL) seasons were included in this analysis of publicly available data. Concussion incidence rates were analyzed using established (athlete exposure [AE], game position [GP]) and novel (position play [PP]) metrics cumulatively, by game unit and position type (offensive skill players and linemen, defensive skill players and linemen), and by position.

Results: In 480 games, there were 292 concussions, resulting in 0.61 concussions per game (95% CI, 0.54-0.68), 6.61 concussions per 1000 AEs (95% CI, 5.85-7.37), 1.38 concussions per 100 GPs (95% CI, 1.22-1.54), and 0.17 concussions per 1000 PPs (95% CI, 0.15-0.19). Depending on the method of calculation, the relative order of at-risk positions changed. In addition, using the PP metric, offensive skill players had a significantly greater rate of concussion than offensive linemen, defensive skill players, and defensive linemen (P < .05).

Conclusion: For this study period, concussion incidence by position and unit varied depending on which metric was used. Compared with AE and GP, the PP metric found that the relative risk of concussion for offensive skill players was significantly greater than other position types. The strengths and limitations of various concussion incidence metrics need further evaluation.

Re-training the brain with painless exercises may be the key to stopping recurring tendon pain, according to Melbourne researchers.

AFL, basketball and netball players are the major sufferers, with tendon pain in the knee debilitating and long-lasting. The injury can sideline a player or cause them to give up the sport entirely.

“More than 50 per cent of people who stop sport because of tendon pain still suffer from that pain 15 years later,” says Dr Ebonie Rio of the Monash University Tendon Research group.

… where do interested clubs even begin to start using analytics? How should they begin to go about collecting and managing performance data? To whom do they turn for help in analysing it? How do clubs tell the difference between statistical snake oil and statistical science?

For a club without a single analyst let alone an entire department, there is, thankfully, a very simple and effective answer to all of these questions: start small.

A while ago a group of researchers (Enrico Bertini among them) published a paper titled “The Persuasive Power of Data Visualization”. I’ve been interested in how to make information graphics convincing since I read this New York Times story, but I somehow assumed that research about the topic was limited and sparse. I was wrong.

Yesterday I met with one of our PhD candidates at the School of Communication of the University of Miami. Her name is Fan Yang. She’s interested in the communication of risk, and in how charts, maps, and infographics can lead to behavioral change.

Fan shared more than twenty papers she is planning to quote in her dissertation.

Humans frequently cooperate without carefully weighing the costs and benefits. As a result, people may wind up cooperating when it is not worthwhile to do so. Why risk making costly mistakes? Here, we experimentally demonstrate that reputation concerns provide an answer: there are social costs to being seen as someone who calculates the costs before deciding to help. As a result, people cooperate in an uncalculating way in order to signal their trustworthiness to observers. We present two economic game experiments in which uncalculating versus calculating decision-making is operationalized by (i) a subject’s choice of whether to reveal the precise costs of cooperating (Experiment 1) and (ii) the time a subject spends considering these costs (Experiment 2). In both experiments, we find that subjects are more likely to engage in uncalculating cooperation when their decision-making process is observable to others. Furthermore, we find that people who engage in uncalculating cooperation are perceived as, and actually are, more trustworthy than people who cooperate in a calculating way. Together, our results suggest that uncalculating cooperation is used as an honest signal of trustworthiness, and can help to explain a range of puzzling behaviors such as extreme altruism, the use of deontological ethics, and romantic love.