Applied Sports Science newsletter – April 8, 2016

… So how does Biles pirouette, leap, and flip on a four inch–wide beam with such apparent ease? “It helps that I started when I was six,” she says, recalling the day her class took a field trip to Bannon’s Gymnastix in Houston. She began imitating the students’ cartwheels and flips; her grandparents, who have raised Biles since she was three (her mother struggled with addiction), thought the sport would be a good outlet for their granddaughter. “Simone was super-hyper and not afraid to try anything,” recalls her grandmother Nellie Biles (whom Simone calls Mom). “From the time she got out of bed in the morning she was jumping and flipping on the furniture.”

That tremendous energy, Biles believes, is what allows her to throw jaw-dropping vaults with two-and-a-half twists and perform a double layout with a half twist in her floor routine—a feat that is now officially known as “the Biles.”

Manuel Pellegrini is considering gambling on Vincent Kompany’s fitness for Tuesday’s Champions League showdown against Paris Saint-Germain, despite the concerns of Belgium’s coach, Marc Wilmots, that a further injury may rule the defender out of Euro 2016.

… At newly-promoted Mainz, minnows with an annual budget of €15m, Tuchel succeeded by ignoring all football adages. You can only win with a settled team, versed in a specific system, they said. But Tuchel, an economics graduate – “I studied it to make my mum sleep better” – shuffled his side constantly, according to every game’s needs, and believed that Mainz could only survive in the league if they could play in a variety of styles, nigh impossible to predict for opponents.

“We didn’t want to break rules for the sake of it,” he said in a talk for a German thinktank. “We had to come up with ideas because we knew were inferior as a team.” Doing things differently included cutting corners: Tuchel forced his team to make diagonal runs towards goal, not play down the line, by changing the training pitch to a diamond shape. “If I tell them what I don’t want them to do, I’m a critic,” he said. “But my role is that of a service provider: I’m here to help and support the player.”

Don’t look now, but LaMarcus Aldridge is rounding into playoff form. After a slow start to his San Antonio Spurs career, he’s made gradual progress and is playing arguably his best basketball of the season.

We can see his overall progression through Kevin Ferrigan’s Daily RAPM Estimate (DRE), which approximates box-score statistics into net points above average per 100 possessions. While Aldridge has a cumulative 2.6 DRE per 36 minutes, his performance has improved throughout the year.

Training specificity is considered important for strength training, although the functional and underpinning physiological adaptations to different types of training, including brief explosive contractions, are poorly understood. This study compared the effects of 12-wks of explosive-contraction (ECT, n=13) vs. sustained-contraction (SCT, n=16) strength training vs. control (CON, n=14) on the functional, neural, hypertrophic, and intrinsic contractile characteristics of healthy young men. Training involved 40 isometric repetitions (x3/wk): contracting as fast and hard as possible for ~1 s (ECT); or gradually increasing to 75% of maximum voluntary torque (MVT) before holding for 3 s (SCT). Torque and EMG during maximum and explosive contractions, torque during evoked octet contractions, and total quadriceps muscle volume (QUADSVOL) were quantified pre- and post-training. MVT increased more after SCT than EST (23 vs. 17%; effect size [ES]=0.69), with similar increases in neural drive, but greater QUADSVOL changes after SCT (8.1 vs. 2.6%; ES=0.74). ECT improved explosive torque at all time points (17-34%; 0.54?ES?0.76) due to increased neural drive (17-28%), whereas only late-phase explosive torque (150 ms, +12%; ES=1.48) and corresponding neural drive (18%) increased after SCT. Changes in evoked torque indicated slowing of the contractile properties of the muscle-tendon unit after both training interventions. These results showed training-specific functional changes that appeared to be due to distinct neural and hypertrophic adaptations. ECT produced a wider range of functional adaptations than SCT, and given the lesser demands of ECT this type of training provides a highly efficient means of increasing function.

Darryl Nelson likes to remind people that in hockey – or any other team sport – a player’s top speed doesn’t really mean anything.

Why? Well, think about it. How often does a hockey player ever have an opportunity to truly reach his or her top speed?

That’s why working on a player’s acceleration, not their speed, is a crucial focus for offseason training.

… When one ventures into the training room or to the local PT, often the kitchen sink is thrown at them. From Ice to compression boots to muscle stim to lasers to graston to dry needling to ultrasound; they are all used. Undoubtedly some of these things work and some don’t. The problem is, often we don’t know exactly what does and doesn’t work. So everything gets thrown at an injury.

The premise is that if we throw enough at it, something will help. Something has to be better than nothing.

I think that’s a false premise. We often perform treatments not to actually get something better, but to make us, and the athlete, feel better.

Gov. Andrew Cuomo on Wednesday announced that New York state is committing $20 million to Binghamton University, matching a federal National Manufacturing Innovation Institute award announced last fall, to support the University’s flexible electronics research initiative.

In a visit to the Center for Advanced Microelectronics Manufacturing (CAMM) at the Huron Campus in Endicott, Cuomo said the funding will support the New York node in the NextFlex Flexible Hybrid Electronics Manufacturing Innovation Institute by helping to retrofit space in the former IBM facility.

The modern amateur athlete loves data. Marathoners and triathletes devour information about their workouts, gleaning stats from sophisticated gadgets strapped to their wrists, chests, and bikes.

Richard Schwabacher wants to give them more, by going deeper inside the body. He runs Quest Diagnostics’ Sports and Human Performance unit, the medical testing giant’s effort to take a product directly to consumers. Not just any consumers, but endurance athletes willing to spend a lot of money to enhance their performance.

Are you building a robot that’s supposed to autonomously navigate in a useful way? Cool, that means you’ll be needing a LIDAR system, then. For better or worse, it’s usually just that straightforward: LIDAR is arguably the best sensor we have right now for reliable navigation, localization, and obstacle avoidance for ground robots. In terms of relatively low-cost sensors, sonar is poor resolution and short range; structured light and time-of-flight sensors are short range and don’t work well outdoors; and camera-based vision systems aren’t robust enough for reliable navigation.

The “relatively low cost” bit is the problem: LIDARs are pricey, and an “affordable” 2D unit, with a range of 10 meters or less, can cost you over US $1,000. This is an enormous problem for both hobbyists and cost-conscious commercial robotics developers (i.e. every single commercial robotics developer).

A San Leandro, Calif.-based startup called Scanse has developed a 2D LIDAR system that promises to be simultaneosly much cheaper and much better than what’s out there. For $250, you get a spinning LIDAR sensor with a range of 40 meters, even outdoors.

Stadia Ventures, the St. Louis sports-tech accelerator, selected five startups for its Spring 2016 Sports Accelerator program. The companies represent the second cohort for Stadia.

I recently had the pleasure of speaking on a few panels about analytics to my fellow MBA students and alumni, as well as many Penn undergrads. After these talks, I’ve been asked for my advice on what the best resources are for someone coming from the business world (i.e., non-technical) who wants to develop the skills to become an effective data scientist. This post is an attempt to codify the advice I give and general resources I point people towards. Hopefully, this will make what I have learned accessible to more people and provide some guidance for those who realize that the future belongs to the empirically inclined (see below) but don’t know where to start their journey to becoming part of the club.

Leicester City’s rise to the top of the Premier League has led to many an analysis by now. Reasons for their ascent have mainly focused on smart recruitment and their counter-attacking style of play, as well as a healthy dose of luck. While their underlying defensive numbers leave something to be desired, their attack is genuinely good. The pace and directness of their attack has regularly been identified as a key facet of their style by writers with analytical leanings. … An obvious and somewhat unaddressed question here is whether the pace of Leicester’s attack is the key to their increased effectiveness this season? Equating style with success in football is often a fraught exercise; the often tedious and pale imitations of Guardiola’s possession-orientated approach being a recent example across football.

We find consistent evidence of negative autocorrelation in decision-making that is unrelated to the merits of the cases considered in three separate high-stakes field settings: refugee asylum court decisions, loan application reviews, and major league baseball umpire pitch calls. The evidence is most consistent with the law of small numbers and the gambler’s fallacy – people underestimating the likelihood of sequential streaks occurring by chance – leading to negatively autocorrelated decisions that result in errors. The negative autocorrelation is stronger among more moderate and less experienced decision-makers, following longer streaks of decisions in one direction, when the current and previous cases share similar characteristics or occur close in time, and when decision-makers face weaker incentives for accuracy. Other explanations for negatively autocorrelated decisions such as quotas, learning, or preferences to treat all parties fairly, are less consistent with the evidence, though we cannot completely rule out sequential contrast effects as an alternative explanation. (pdf)

… Downsizing is taking over the NBA, and many expect it to come out in full force for the upcoming playoffs — when putting your best five players out becomes more important than ever.