Applied Sports Science newsletter – April 5, 2016

Ahead of their Super Sunday clash against Southampton, we profile five of Leicester’s unsung heroes this season…

Steve Walsh – Head of recruitment and assistant manager

In February Leicester’s head of technical scouting, Ben Wrigglesworth, joined Arsenal as a first-team video scout, but the appointment led to many to suggest the Gunners had got the wrong man.

Whether you’re liking, sharing, or retweeting, the exchange of information is simply a click away. By sharing knowledge we progress our own understanding of the world around us. It’s how we grow and develop ideas. For some though, making cognitive progress requires a little more than a social media interaction. For coaches in the Australian Football League (AFL), developing their game has required some out of the box thinking.

Jay Wright remembers this guy helping out temporarily with Villanova’s basketball players while Wright looked for a new strength and conditioning coach in 2012 and telling this guy, “Look, I’m not hiring you for this job.”

At the time, John Shackleton was in charge of strength and conditioning for some of Villanova’s Olympic sports.

“I’m not hiring an Olympic sports guy,” Wright told him, and that’s no great offense to Olympic sports, which often set trends in strength and conditioning. “I want a basketball guy,” Wright said.

Over the past 15 years it’s been an interesting experience working with and learning from many great coaches. Working with a coach like Jim Harbaugh, already a great NFL quarterback, Warren Gatland, Brendan Rogers or Shaun Edwards. Spending time discussing how to prepare to take on a new job with Eddie Jones, debating with the legendary swimming coach Bill Sweetanham or coffee with Joe Schmidt, Clive Woodward, Sam Allardyce, Nathan Buckley or Axel Foley all can always be enlightening experiences. Then there is working with real leaders in a more serious sphere of work, military, or special operations where leadership takes on a different and very real meaning. Leaders such US Marine Col Jim Minick, US Army Ranger Charles Jenks and others in the elite Navy Seal and Delta Force communities are exceptional teachers. The most common question I am asked is who was the best coach I’ve worked with. The truth is I’m not sure. I learned something different from them all.

How do creative people come up with great ideas? Organizational psychologist Adam Grant studies “originals”: thinkers who dream up new ideas and take action to put them into the world. In this talk, learn three unexpected habits of originals — including embracing failure. “The greatest originals are the ones who fail the most, because they’re the ones who try the most,” Grant says. “You need a lot of bad ideas in order to get a few good ones.” [video, 15:25]

We often think of consciousness as binary: you’re either fully aware of something, or you’re not.

Yet according to a team of cognitive neuroscientists at the University of California, Santa Barbara, conscious awareness is gradual. A simple stimulus — say, a red cube — is processed by the brain in multiple separate subconscious streams, each encoding one aspect of the cube.

The result? Even when some features — a sharp edge — remain subconscious, others — the color red — can drift into conscious awareness.

The MC10 BioStamp RC has been called a “giant leap forward in the wonderful world of wearables” by USA Today , and for good reason. Weighing just under six grams, the flexible, soft and waterproof band-aid like device is unobtrusive to the wearer while providing unprecedented visibility into physiological data in real time. The BioStamp transmits the data to the company’s cloud-based software, where researchers and, ultimately, medical personnel will be able to analyze health and wellness conditions in the context of a user’s daily activities. MC10 previously struck a partnership deal with L’Oreal to integrate the technology into a patch that monitors exposure to UV rays: Users can upload a picture of the patch to a mobile app to calculate the precise level of UV exposure. That is just one example of the vast potential of MC10’s technology, and it all begins with a data-centric point of view.

As the Pirates prospect Matt Benedict tossed a baseball on Roberto Clemente Field at Pittsburgh’s minor league complex late one Sunday afternoon, five blue sensors attached to his body recorded 39 sets of measurements, including shoulder rotation, hip speed and stride.

Minutes later, Benedict, a 27-year-old right-hander, examined a hand-held computer, checking how he rated against test groups.

Biometric baseball has arrived.

While saying he feels physically fine heading into the season, second baseman Joe Panik on Saturday literally knocked on wood and credited the Giants’ physical therapist, who has a more involved role in 2016.

In the past, the Giants sent injured players to Arizona to work with physical therapist Tony Reale. Panik was Reale’s prized pupil last fall because of his back injury, which cost him most of the final two months and put into question whether he could bounce back.

Now players will have the luxury of having Reale available every day. With his new role, Reale will be with the Giants all season, including on the road.

On his first day in office, in January 2015, Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred announced his interest in “inject[ing] additional offense into the game.” Over the previous several seasons, scoring in baseball had dropped to levels not seen since the mid-1970s, as an expanded strike zone, an increase in average pitch velocity, the rise of defensive shifts, and detailed data on batter tendencies had combined to keep runs scarce. Manfred mentioned banning the shift as a possible solution to the scoring decline, and he considered shrinking the strike zone and adding the designated hitter to the National League. But he decided to see whether the trend persisted before taking action.

After the 2015 season, Manfred congratulated himself on his earlier restraint. “What I said at the beginning of the year was that, before we made a judgment and started to talk about changes, that we needed at least another year of data,” Manfred said. “Every once in awhile, even I get to be right.”

He was right: Just as it began to seem certain that only a deus ex Manfred could rescue the sport from soccer-esque scores, baseball’s offense came back from the brink. The only problem is that no one knows why.

… What’s most interesting about the Cubs on the eve of Opening Day, though, is the way their makeup reflects the game’s evolution. Their hard luck has its origins in the early 1900s, but their ideology belongs squarely to the present day. They are baseball’s presumptive best team, and they look entirely different from the way a team with that title would have looked just a handful of years ago. If they become the story of the season, they will not only end more than a century of Chicago angst but also further solidify the sport’s new doctrine, one that values flexibility over outdated brawn.

… Unlike players, coaches have and need time to learn and develop, with the first job often providing more lessons than any other. And yet most don’t get the chance to put those lessons into practice; statistics from English football via the League Managers Association reveal that over half of first-time managers do not get a second job. How many potentially world-class managers have been lost through football’s ‘safety first’ approach?

In order to make smart decisions at work, we need data. Where that data comes from and how we analyze it depends on a lot of factors — for example, what we’re trying to do with the results, how accurate we need the findings to be, and how much of a budget we have. There is a spectrum of experiments that managers can do from quick, informal ones, to pilot studies, to field experiments, and to lab research. One of the more structured experiments is the randomized controlled experiment­.

To better understand what a randomized controlled experiment is and how businesses use them, I talked with Tom Redman, author of Data Driven: Profiting from Your Most Important Business Asset.

… “The culture that Steve has created is one of a lot of joy,” Myers said. “They enjoy coming to work every day. Professional sports is not always like that. You create an environment where you are excited to go to practice or you look over at Stephen Curry getting up extra shots. How does that not somehow resonate with the rest of the team? For us to see the continuance of what happened last year, I guess that I’m surprised; I thought fatigue might set in.

“Our players, they love to play and they hate to lose. Maybe that combination works.”

This week (and seemingly every week), the issue of the importance and value of communication in football analytics came up again, notably in a recent article written by Gabriele Marcotti in the Times. In it, he talks about the work pursued by Chris Anderson, co-author of the popular football stats book The Numbers Game and vice-chairman of Coventry City.

Marcotti writes that analytics won’t achieve a real breakthrough in the football universe until managers and coaches get a better education in mathematics and logic. It’s paywalled, but here’s the relevant passage:

The problem is not a lack of intelligence among managers. It’s a lack of education. Draw coaches out of the ranks of ex-professionals and you will mostly be dealing with men who have had virtually no meaningful academic schooling past the age of 16. Which makes understanding the maths and logic behind some advanced analytics extremely difficult.