Applied Sports Science newsletter – March 22, 2016

The first baseman’s toss was high, but Jeff Samardzija was there, racing from the mound and gliding through the air by the bag at Scottsdale Stadium on Monday. He plucked the ball from the sky and landed with his foot in the right place.

The move is familiar to Samardzija. A decade ago, he was a star wide receiver at Notre Dame, where he set the school record for receptions. Samardzija’s athleticism — and the relatively fresh condition of his arm for 31 years old — attracted the San Francisco Giants in free agency this off-season.

They called it the “sick ball.” It was Gonzaga coaches’ method for quarantining sophomore forward Domantas Sabonis, who arrived in Denver for the NCAA tournament’s opening weekend battling the flu: setting aside a separate ball for Sabonis’s shootarounds, marking it with his jersey number, and instructing head student manager Tim Stoddard to wipe it down with Purell and keep it stored in a towel when it wasn’t in use. As a future doctor who’s heading to the University of Florida’s medical school in the fall, Stoddard was skeptical of the sick ball’s impact, especially since Sabonis still participated in five-on-five drills. “I don’t think the CDC endorses this as a virus control mechanism,” Stoddard said. “But it’s good to at least make people think we’re doing something to help.”

Even if it was just a placebo, none of Sabonis’s teammates fell ill in Denver, his condition gradually improved, and the flu turned out to be the only containable aspect of the youngest son of Hall of Fame center (and Lithuanian legend) Arvydas Sabonis.

The body’s branching network of peripheral nerves connects neurons in the brain and spinal cord to organs, skin, and muscles, regulating a host of biological functions from digestion to sensation to locomotion. But the peripheral nervous system can do even more than that, which is why DARPA already has research programs underway to harness it for a number of functions—as a substitute for drugs to treat diseases and accelerate healing, for example, as well as to control advanced prosthetic limbs and restore tactile sensation to their users.

Now, pushing those limits further, DARPA aims to enlist the body’s peripheral nerves to achieve something that has long been considered the brain’s domain alone: facilitating learning. The effort will turn on its head the usual notion that the brain tells the peripheral nervous system what to do.

The new program, Targeted Neuroplasticity Training (TNT), seeks to advance the pace and effectiveness of a specific kind of learning—cognitive skills training—through the precise activation of peripheral nerves that can in turn promote and strengthen neuronal connections in the brain.

The monitoring of fatigue and recovery is an important aspect in the regular fine-tuning of training recommendations in competitive sports. To this end, various surrogate markers have been proposed including a wide range of blood-borne parameters as well as psychological and autonomic measures.

Blood-borne parameters are particularly attractive surrogate markers of fatigue and recovery because of their obvious objectivity, their high accuracy and precision of measurements, the minimal interference with the training process, and, in most cases, a clear physiological concept concerning their connection with exercise and fatigue.

Surprisingly, so far no parameter could be established which has adequate sensitivity and reproducibility for the monitoring of fatigue and recovery during athletic training cycles.

… Is the data we collect with these devices actually useful?

For this to be true, the wearable has to be telling you something you don’t already know. Your device’s digital output, with its decimal points and automatically uploaded charts, certainly seems more accurate and richly detailed than the everyday sensory data you collect automatically from your body. But whether it really is remains an open question.

The nation’s leading health researchers are getting a new tech tool that could transform the way we get information about the human body — from skin to skeleton.

After several years in development, the MC10 BioStampRC went on sale this week. It’s a waterproof, band-aid-like sticker loaded with some of the most sophisticated tracking sensors ever created. It provides real-time access to a person’s vital signs and activity, in an entirely unobtrusive way.

For now, it’s only available to the research community — the “RC” stands for “research connect” — but it’s a giant leap forward in the wonderful world of wearables. “The ability to capture, with research level precision, tailored data outside of a clinic…that’s the Holy Grail,” says Dr. Alvaro Pascual-Leone, Associate Dean of Harvard Medical School.

Scientists have unveiled a see-through wrist cuff that measures the level of glucose in the bloodstream of diabetic patients and administers a drug to lower that level if needed. It’s not yet a full-blown treatment—for one thing, the experimental version can’t provide enough of the drug to do the trick—but it should be of great use in monitoring patients.

It’s also an actual application for a newfangled material in sore need of one: graphene, a superthin form of carbon with interesting electronic properties. By itself, graphene can’t sense glucose, but if you dope 2-D carbon properly, it can become quite a useful elecrochemistry set. The inventors—working in South Korea, Massachusetts and Texas—doped the graphene with minute quantities of gold to get the effect they wanted. They describe their work in this week’s issue of the journal Nature.

… Wearables are lightweight, sensor-based devices which are worn close to and/or on the surface of the skin, where they detect, analyze, and transmit information concerning several internal and/or external variables to an external device and provide in some cases immediate biofeedback to the athlete. However, the variety of such wearables already available is overwhelming and it is not clear which one(s) may be best for monitoring training and health.

Accordingly, our present aims are threefold: (a) to briefly summarize (non-invasive) parameters that are of potential value in assessing an athlete’s training and health; (b) to provide a brief overview of the individual wearables presently available and the parameters they monitor; and (c) to highlight current gaps in our knowledge in order to help direct both future scientific studies and the development of commercial wearables.

It’s often said that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. But we all react to adversity in different ways. While some seem able to pull through hardship, for others it can be more of a struggle.

Scientists have different interpretations of why this happens. According to some, our DNA can determine our resilience, but others believe there is a lot more to it than pure biology.

Perhaps no one will remember the setting, a hearing room for the House Energy and Commerce Committee, or the person who asked the question, a member of the House of Representatives from Illinois. But seven words spoken in the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington on Monday could profoundly affect the country’s most popular sport.

After years of the N.F.L.‘s disputing evidence that connected football to chronic traumatic encephalopathy, the degenerative brain disease found in nearly 100 former players, a top official for the league for the first time acknowledged the link. To many, it was an echo of big tobacco’s confession in 1997 that smoking causes cancer and heart disease.

There is a sense among those who pay attention to youth and high school athletics that more and more young athletes today are focusing on excelling at a single sport instead of playing a variety.

Perhaps surprisingly, though, little research has been conducted on the prevalence of sports specialization in high school athletes — and what that might mean for these competitors’ health.

“Sport specialization is a hot topic in sports medicine, yet there is a severe lack of empirical data that exists about the topic,” says UW–Madison’s David Bell, an assistant professor with the Department of Kinesiology’s Athletic Training Program and the director of the Wisconsin Injury in Sport Laboratory (WISL).

Sitting over coffee, Slaven Bilic forwards his theory. “This season is kind of logical,” the manager of West Ham United says of an incredible, topsy-turvy campaign in the Premier League. “I will try to explain.” And explain he does.

The essence of Bilic’s argument is that every club in the league now has the financial capacity to compete and buy what he calls “good enough players”.

“And those clubs that already have [good players], the gap was like this,” Bilic says, spreading his hands wide apart. “Because in Chelsea you had Costa, Fabregas, that one, that one, Hazard. But Crystal Palace didn’t have Cabaye. Now with this [television] money … And next year is going to be even more the possibility that these clubs can buy these players to close the gap. And these clubs [the traditional big ones] can’t buy more of these. You can’t buy Messis, there are not plenty of them. They already have 15 good ones; they can’t buy 30. There is no space.

I blame it all on Dean Smith. This new-wave obsession with statistics in college basketball carries a link to the late legendary coach. He was a mathematics major at Kansas, you know. Yet Smith also was the master of suppressing the analytical part of the game, thus indirectly leading to a deeper examination of the game’s numbers.

In some ways, Smith would love the idea that his favored points-per-possession statistic is now easily available to players, coaches and fans for every college team in the country. On the other hand, he might not appreciate that anyone can find out through kenpom.com that North Carolina ranks 231st in the country in 2-point field goal distribution among its players.

This all started with Smith.

Eric Tulsky, Andrew Thomas, Tyler Dellow, Brian Macdonald, and Tim Barnes are not as well known as their on-ice colleagues, who include, respectively by organization, Justin Faulk (Carolina), Zach Parise (Minnesota), Connor McDavid (Edmonton), Aleksander Barkov (Florida), and Alex Ovechkin (Washington).

That both parties draw paychecks by the same employer, some with more zeros than others, indicates how seriously NHL teams are taking analytics, the category inhabited by the former. It has become common for clubs to hire at least one person to oversee numbers, with reinforcements from fellow employees or consultants.

The trick now is for teams to apply the expertise their nontraditional employees (statisticians, lawyers, professors) in hockey operations have brought to the sport. As much as hockey has acknowledged the importance of analytics, disagreements exist as to how to maximize the richness tucked inside the numbers.

On March 11-12 I attended the annual Sloan MIT Sports Analytics Conference in Boston, which felt like a nice, if slightly exhausting, point of re-entry into the soccer analytics world after a prolonged absence.

As ever, it was a sometimes surreal event where you can share a beer with someone who helped broker the sale of a Premier League club, hours before you sit ten feet away to listen to Stan Kroenke and Sam Kennedy talk about the use of data analytics at Arsenal and Liverpool. There was some interesting soccer-related stuff throughout, and one or two highly compelling paper presentations in other sports, too.