Applied Sports Science newsletter – April 1, 2016

… Nobody expected Powell, as a second-round pick, to get as much of a chance with the Raptors as he has received this season. Due to DeMarre Carroll’s knee injury, James Johnson’s unreliability and Terrence Ross’s recent thumb ailment, Powell has now played more minutes with the Raptors (447) than with Raptors 905 (317). He has averaged 15.3 points and shooting 47 per cent on 19 three-point attempts over the last three games, a nice bonus for a player whose main utility is on the defensive end.

For fellow rookie Delon Wright, however, the same NBA opportunity hasn’t arrived yet. The 20th pick in the NBA Draft, Wright has played 122 mostly low-leverage minutes with Raptors, and 536 with Raptors 905. The two point guards ahead of him on the roster, Cory Joseph and Kyle Lowry, have missed one and two games, respectively. So, Wright is left to watch two experienced players ahead of him, get most of his minutes in the D-League and live vicariously through Powell.

“I see him working hard. It’s paying off for him,” Wright said on Tuesday. “It motivates me to continue to work hard.”

… Sean Kilpatrick Jr., who signed a three-year contract with the Nets March 19, grew up only about 37 miles away in White Plains. But his two-year trek to Brooklyn and an NBA career consisted of thousands of detour-laden miles.

After gaining second-team All-American honors at the University of Cincinnati in 2014, the former White Plains High standout went undrafted. That was crushing and still irritates his White Plains High coach, Spencer Mayfield, who said, “He’s just an explosive scorer. I thought he should have been drafted in the second round. I know what an NBA player looks like.”

Mayfield knew but the league’s 30 teams apparently did not, at least not two years ago.

… Part of this sudden uptick in attacking ability has to do with Liverpool getting healthy. Coutinho was out for a month and then returned to action one game before the run started. He played eight out of nine matches. Youngster Divock Origi was out for two months and returned at the same time as Coutinho. He’s appeared in all nine Liverpool games since.

And then there’s Daniel Sturridge. The England international also returned to health in time for this run, and remarkably has appeared in seven of Liverpool’s last nine games. Over that time span he’s been responsible for a whopping 0.64 expected goals per 90 minutes. To put that in perspective, of players in the Premier League who have played more than 1,000 minutes this year, only Sergio Aguero has a higher expected goal tally per 90 minutes with 0.73, and he’s doing it over 4.5 shots per game. Sturridge is taking only 3.64.

The hand-written roster — misspelled “rosta” — tells the runners when it’s their turn for communal chores. Stephen Kiprotich‘s name is on it. So is Eliud Kipchoge‘s.

At the Olympic Games, World Championships and the biggest marathons, both men are stars. But in the high-altitude training camp in western Kenya where they live like monks, they muck out shared toilets and do the washing up just like everyone else.

Kiprotich and Kipchoge are convinced their no-frills lifestyle is vital for their success.

More than a dozen times over the past four years, Pirates closer Mark Melancon has meticulously scoured a color-coded dashboard, noting cortisol and nutrient intake levels with results on more than 30 biomarkers found in his blood.

For the past eight months, Twins right-hander Trevor May has done the same, as the Washington native keeps a close eye on his Vitamin D level to promote better sleep efficiency.

Data, in the form of advanced metrics and statistics, has become king in baseball, and Melancon and May are among a growing group of players that are taking that information to the next level. In their case, they use a web-based health platform called InsideTracker. The Boston-based company — developed by nutritionists, scientists and aging specialists from Harvard University, MIT and Tufts University — has taken the popularity of nutrition-tracking services a step further: measuring hormones levels, glucose, cholesterol, vitamins and other key biomarkers that don’t show up on a standard physical or blood test.

As a kinesiology student Alex Malone has a keen awareness of the link between recovery and performance, but didn’t always think it applied to him. One day last winter the star running back at U of T headed into an intense weight training session on five hours sleep, but still figured he could dead-lift 600 pounds.

He made the lift, but as he put the barbell down blood tricked from his nose. Then it flowed. And then he admitted to himself he wasn’t sleeping enough to support his heavy lifting.

“Sometimes I’ve had enough rest days that I should be performing well, but I’m physically and mentally exhausted,” says Malone, who sleeps seven hours a day in season but less than six over the winter.

Adam Beard moved halfway across the globe and promptly tuned out the noise. Newly hired as the Browns director of high performance, Beard was tasked last season with observing and analyzing a sport rooted in tradition to find “low-hanging fruit,” areas that could use a fresh perspective from someone with as diverse of a background as Beard’s.

The Australian-born Beard, who picked up a wealth of experience overseas working with many Olympic, world champion and professional sporting organizations, focused exclusively on what he saw between the lines and behind the scenes in the weight room while tuning out everything else that makes the NFL a billion-dollar machine.

“It’s a really unique game, it’s followed all over the world. Processes have always stayed true,” Beard said. “I think with science coming in, you’ve got to find a way of helping that culture and helping the sport without changing the sport.

… 1. What is the evolution of technology in your day-to-day work from the beginning of your career until now?

When I first started in this field there were really only a few tools that could be used to analyze the many variables that comprise performance. This kept things relatively easy to manage, but there were certainly holes in the overall measurement of the athlete. Many times I had questions about performance but did not have the necessary tools to analyze or pull data. In some cases, the tools existed but the analysis was extremely time consuming and therefore prohibitive because of the NBA schedule. We may be playing back to back games or at times four games in five days, which means there is not always enough time to analyze and interpret certain metrics to take action steps.

… These last two weeks of the season are still important for the Jets, particularly off the ice.

The Jets are closely monitoring their rest and recovery structure for players, while testing an intriguing medical theory that they hope could provide a competitive advantage next year.

“We’re trying a bunch of different things when it comes to recovery, things that we wouldn’t necessarily try if you’re in a playoff hunt,” Jets coach Paul Maurice said Monday.

… Alli’s initial impact was impressive, but his spatial awareness has improved further and his relationship with Kane has developed nicely, while Dembele has become more decisive with his final pass — previously his major weakness. Dier covers for his teammates excellently, and often acts as the second part of Tottenham’s press, although his distribution is less impressive than his midfield colleagues’.

The most important factor in all this, however, is Tottenham’s fitness. Their incredible stamina doesn’t simply mean they can continue working to regain possession, it means they can retain the composure required to play intelligent passes, too. Exhaustion often leads to rushed distribution, or taking too many touches, something rarely witnessed from Spurs this season.

Pochettino’s fitness regime is crucial, and, while opponents can work out what Spurs are doing on the pitch, it’s more difficult to investigate what happens in training. One thing’s for sure, though: Spurs are incredibly fit.

The college sports arms race takes on different forms as the years progress, and we are in the era of indoor practice facilities, nutrition centers and student housing.

If a school is still in the process of trying to upgrade its weight-training facility and football offices, it is behind the times. That’s so late 2000’s, early 2010’s.

Arizona of all schools wants an indoor practice facility for its football program. Miami yearns for one badly because it is the last ACC team without one or plans for one after Boston College announced recently that an indoor facility will be part of its $200 million in athletics facilities upgrades.

… Some researchers worry that the rising drumbeat of C.T.E. diagnoses is far outpacing scientific progress in pinpointing the symptoms, risks and prevalence of the disease. The American Academy of Clinical Neuropsychology, an organization of brain injury specialists, is preparing a public statement to point out that much of the science of C.T.E. is still unsettled and to contend that the evidence to date should not be interpreted to mean that parents must keep their children off sports teams, officials of the group say.

“I’ve had parents come into my practice, their child had a single concussion and they think he or she has permanent brain damage,” said Karen Postal, the organization’s president and an instructor at Harvard. “There’s no basis for that.”

When NFL senior vice president Jeff Miller appeared before a Congressional committee and finally, after years of Big Tobacco-esque non-denial denials, acknowledged a causal link between playing football and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, it was heralded as a huge step. The floodgates of stupidity opened up in short order.

While NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell described Miller’s statement as ”consistent with our position over the years,” (note: it is not at all consistent with the NFL’s position over the years), a slew of league owners seem unsure what officially mandated talking points they should stick to in this brave, new world.

According to USA Today, if you “ask someone from the NFL, be it from the league office or an owner, about the connection between CTE and football and you will get a different answer almost every time.”

That may be true, but for the owners who have gone on the record, there are a few overlapping themes. Last week, Dallas Cowboys owner Jerry Jones said the notion of a link between football and degenerative brain disease is, well, not real.

… Fayhee’s story is hardly unique across college athletics. In fact, it is now told over and over again at the University of Michigan as part of its Athletes Connected program — a groundbreaking research, treatment and educational project dedicated to promoting mental health in student-athletes. The program, originally funded by a 2014 NCAA Innovations in Research and Practice Grant and now 100 percent philanthropy-based, has become a model for other schools.

Mental illness has permeated college campuses in the same way it has permeated the country. Millions suffer, from all walks of life. According to a study led by Drexel University and published in the February edition of the British Journal of Sports Medicine, nearly a quarter of student-athletes studied (enrolled in liberal-arts colleges on the East Coast) suffered from depressive symptoms. Female athletes were nearly twice as likely as male athletes to display symptoms. On top of that, Athletes Connected research found only about one-third of college students suffering from mental illness seeks help. When it comes to student-athletes who are suffering, though, that number drops to one in 10.

The student-invented game Scoring Frenzy may be a relatively simple wager for a fantasy sports lover, but it took some massive supercomputing power before it was ready for the patent application process. Developer John Lukasik and his partner, both students in last fall’s Gaming Innovation class, were able to run game simulations on one of the world’s most powerful supercomputers: UNLV’s Cherry Creek II.

“The game is based on real-life sports,” explained Lukasik, a UNLV Harrah Hotel College graduate student. “We needed to test the underlying algorithms of the game against full seasons of professional football. To do this, basically, we had to simulate 50 million NFL seasons to understand what the odds were.”

Calculations that would have taken weeks, possibly months, to perform on a more traditional computing system took just under three days with Cherry Creek II. Co-located at UNLV’s Science and Engineering Building and off campus at Switch’s Las Vegas SUPERNAP data center, Cherry Creek II is equipped with such massive computing power that it can run countless simulations simultaneously.