Applied Sports Science newsletter – April 7, 2016

Get up IT. We need you.

Thomas got up. He made his free throw and a few minutes later he drained a huge 3-pointer that put the game out of reach. Thomas tacked on a couple more free throws for good measure to finish with 25 points and a satisfying victory. It was more than that for Thomas; it was validation that he was finally in a place where he could be himself.

“If Jae hadn’t said that I wouldn’t have got up,” Thomas says now, almost a year to the day later. “That’s how bad I was hurting. It was like, ‘They really want me to finish this game.’ It’s something I can’t explain. It’s something I’ve always wanted.”

Scouting for players that are potential 2016 NFL draft picks still has a month to go. Agents have a valuable role to play in ensuring that their clients are showcased to maximize their draft potential. There are no rules governing what events a player should participate in. This is where agent advice comes in. It starts with having a thorough understanding of what strengths a player has that will attract teams and what possible impediments need overcoming. You are not a fan, and uncomfortable realities need to be shared with your client.

An agent needs to be thoroughly conversant with team scouting reports to understand how to navigate the scouting process. Which events can best showcase your client and how should he approach them? The second season of scouting began with all-star games played in by seniors. Those players had a week of evaluation and a game to play. Next came the NFL Scouting Combine, with its comprehensive physical, skills tests, team interviews and performance by position. An agent needs to monitor the team feedback from these testing events. Did a player interview well? Did he run and do the other drills impressively? Are there injury concerns? Character concerns? If so, pro scouting day, on-campus visits and visits to franchises can be used to answer these questions.

If the University of Iowa football team is not in-season, its director of strength and conditioning for football, Chris Doyle, MSCC, is training speed. [video, 3:53]

In less than a month, teams build the futures of their franchises in the NFL Draft. With months of preparation, including meetings and workouts with prospects at all positions, teams have to decide between an immediate starter and someone worth investing in.

One of the more difficult positions to evaluate preparedness is at quarterback. There’s a growing dialogue between coaches and GMs who think it’s best to draft a trainable quarterback, someone to learn under the current starter for a few seasons, and those who think starting as a rookie is the best type of training.

… The Fischer Institute of Physical Therapy & Performance is one of those few programs deemed by a multitude of athletes as being a premier source for both physical therapy and performance development.

The institute offers rehabilitation and training services to professional baseball and football players alike, and boasts sponsorships from performance entities such as Muscle Milk and Cybex. Former Major League Baseball pitcher Randy Johnson, New York Jets cornerback Darrelle Revis and Arizona Cardinals defensive back Tyrann Mathieu, among others, have graced the facility with appearances amidst injury rehab or offseason training.

The Fischer Institute is a state-of-the-art physical therapy and performance center located in south Phoenix. It was founded in 1997 by Brett and Stephanie Fischer.

Every day elite athletes and coaches earn a living by pushing the boundaries of human potential. The dividing line between what was once considered impossible and what is now a prerequisite for success is constantly shifting. Michael Johnson, one of the best athletes that has ever lived, has created a high performance centre that is the world’s leading speed factory. It is here that athletes from all over the world improve their speed and where the limitations of athletic capabilities are being explored.

Researchers at ETH Zurich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich) and the University of Bologna have developed PULPino, an open-source processor optimized for low power consumption and application in wearables and the Internet of Things (IoT).

Although competitive athletes have been using NormaTec systems for years, the price point (nearly $2,000) and bulkiness of past iterations was a bit of a deterrent for the average age-grouper. The new Normatec Pulse Leg Recovery System is a few hundred dollars cheaper and weighs only 12 pounds in its case.

Zebra Technologies has been marking and tracking assets in the commercial world for years with their family of RFID products. What they couldn’t have foreseen at the beginning was their products winding up on Sundays with the National Football League. We sat down with Jill Stelfox, Zebra’s VP & GM of Location Services to find out how the NFL found IoT and what it means for the connected world.

So Jill, tell us about the work you are doing with the NFL?

What we do at Zebra is we do the player tracking for the NFL. So what that means is we put two tags in the shoulder pads of the football players, and then we place 22 receivers around the bowl of the stadium, collect the latitude and longitude, speed, distance, all those things, and that is sent to a server on site, and then in under half a second to broadcasters and two seconds to the rest of the world.

Something seemed off about Cleveland Cavaliers point guard Matthew Dellavedova during last Thursday night’s game against the Brooklyn Nets.

He was held scoreless in 17 minutes of action, taking six shots and missing every single one of them, in perhaps the coldest shooting performance of his career. But if you’d looked closer, you would have found that something was indeed off — or, to be more accurate, something was missing. In each of the prior 15 games, a wearable gadget had been strapped to the wrist of Dellavedova’s guiding hand. On that night, for the first time in over a month, Delly’s left wrist was bare.

The device that had been occupying Dellavedova’s wrist is called a Whoop, and it’s built to track fancy stuff such as heart rate, body temperature and body movement during both awake and sleeping hours. Think Fitbit, but for the million-dollar athlete.

Jan Ekstrand thinks every hamstring injury is preventable. “All of them?” I asked him during a Skype conversation last week. “Yeah, I think so,” he replied.

Ekstrand, director of the Football Research Group, coauthored a recent report in the British Journal of Sports Medicine that found “hamstring injury has been the single most common injury type in professional [soccer] for many years.” The BJSM study, which tracked soccer players from 36 clubs in 12 European countries between 2001 and 2014, also found that hamstring injuries have risen among pro soccer players. During the 13-year study period, average rates of hamstring injuries climbed 2.3 percent from year to year, and the most pronounced bump happened during practice — hamstring injuries acquired during training rose by 4 percent per year.

That’s odd because other types of injury, like ankle sprains and medial collateral ligament strains, have decreased. It’s the hamstring that we can’t seem to get right. But why?

Something is very wrong with the Joint Drug Agreement in Major League Baseball.

Last week, ESPN’s Buster Olney reported on a conversation that he had with Dodgers first baseman Adrian Gonzalez on the subject of therapeutic use exemptions (TUEs), which is basically a doctor’s note saying that a player has permission to take a substance that would otherwise be banned under the JDA. Olney stated that it wasn’t the first conversation he’d had on the subject. Actually, it was the latest of several, but Gonzalez was the first to go on the record with his concerns. According to Olney, it’s the talk of camp that a lot of guys have TUEs, though some of them may not actually need them.

What are soccer analytics and how are teams in MLS using them?

Over the next month, MLSsoccer.com will help answer those questions and show you how MLS teams are using data to find players, construct balanced rosters, prevent injury and even win games. Starting Wednesday, we’ll take you behind the curtain once a week for five weeks to show how North American clubs are pushing the envelope in the world of soccer analytics.

… With companies offering more and more data analysis, there should be more science behind this fundamental aspect of managing a football club. Naturally the price of a player is ultimately down to what clubs are willing to pay. As Phil Smith, a football agent who has represented Gianfranco Zola, Andrey Arshavin and Harry Kane, points out: “It is a question of supply and demand, with the agents having little overall influence. The greater the competition, the higher the price.” Agents will encourage as much interest as possible in the hope of driving up their players’ worth, and consequently their fee, but there is only so much they can do.

Omar Chaudhuri, head of football intelligence at the 21st Club consultancy, who have worked with clubs in the Premier League and throughout the world, says buying players is a two-part procedure. The club identify exactly what type of player they need and then follow a process of due diligence as they look at typically just three or four players who fit their requirements.

… When the NBA added the lines in 1979, the players weren’t sure what to think. They sniffed and pawed at them like cats with a new toy. Only 3% of the shots they put up that season were 3-pointers.

Over the next three decades, that number crept higher. When it reached 22%, the growth curve flattened. It seemed that the sport had found its optimal ratio.

Then the Golden State Warriors came along and blew that assumption to pieces.