Applied Sports Science newsletter – April 12, 2016

… Having taken so long to arrive at this unlikely prime, Curry is exploring new thresholds of implausibility. His ambition is to “leave an impression on the opposition every night,” he says. The main impression he has left is astonishment: it only took him to the end of February to break his own record for most three-pointers made in an NBA season, set just last year (286), and by the first week of April he was openly campaigning to hit 400.

“To go from MVP last season and to be glaringly better this season? That doesn’t happen,” says teammate Andrew Bogut.

Initially, Curry meant to take a long break after the Warriors won the title last June. “I told myself I wanted a month off completely and not touch a basketball, to kind of refresh,” he says. But his palms got itchy. “I think I made it two and a half weeks,” he estimates. One day he went into the Warriors’ facility for some treatment, and he couldn’t resist getting a handful of some leather. “I had to get some shots in for fun,” he says.

Alec Burks had to test himself.

The last time he drove to the basket during a game, it had ended with a sickening thud as his body crashed to the court after a hard foul. The fall fractured his left ankle, causing him to miss most of his season for a second straight year. But now, back on the court for the first time in three months, Burks had to try again.

“That’s what I wanted to test,” he said. “See if I was ready or not.”

Local athletes, coaches, trainers, students and fitness fans who attended the international Gatorade Sports Science Institute (GSSI) Symposium, held recently at the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel, have cited the event as a success.

Over 150 participants who pre-registered for the symposium themed ‘The Science and Practice of Running’, were engaged in discussions on sports nutrition and exercise science by local and international experts. The topics, aimed at helping attendees to optimise their performance, included nutrition control, weight maintenance, running assessment and monitoring, rehabilitation, physiotherapy, injury prevention and management.

A key concept in preventing and managing running injuries is understanding the balance between training load and your capacity to handle that load. In a nutshell it’s a case of working within your limits and not pushing your training beyond what your body can cope with. Today we look at finding the balance and some important recent research…

Eccrine Systems, a privately held company co-founded by UC Professor Jason Heikenfeld, announced that CoreSyte, Eccrine’s athletics partner, has been selected as one of four innovation partners by Gatorade.

… “We’ve talked about this for 30 years,” Joseph Hamill, professor of kinesiology and head of the Biomechanics Laboratory at UMass-Amherst, told me. “The fact is, foot pronation or impact force have never been conclusively linked with any kind of running injury, or even the prediction of injury.” Hamill and I were discussing a recent review in The British Journal of Sports Medicine by a biomechanics expert named Benno M. Nigg. After digging through 40 years of research, Dr. Nigg and his co-authors concluded that most of our assumptions about running shoes and injuries are, in a word, hogwash. Pronation, it turns out, isn’t a problem that requires correction or benefits from attempts to correct it via shoe design. And there is almost no evidence that impact force causes injury, or that changing or removing shoes (in the Vibram/barefoot vein) alters impact much at all.

To wit, everything we think we know about running shoes is wrong: footwear designed to somehow “fix” your running form and prevent injury – that is, basically all running shoes – according to Hamill and Nigg, are at best ineffective, at worst counter-productive. Despite decades of research and costly advances in shoe design and materials, running injuries haven’t abated one lick; in fact, more than half of runners still get injured every year, a rate comparable to what it was 30 years ago.

Wearable tech being allowed in NBA games is inching closer to becoming a reality.

According to league sources, the NBA players’ union will be meeting Tuesday with Whoop, a wearable tech company that recently made headlines after Cleveland Cavaliers point guard Matthew Dellavedova illegally wore its biotracker wristband in games during almost all of March.

E-health has the potential to facilitate implementation of effective measures to prevent sports injuries. This article form the study of Miriam van Reijen evaluated whether an interactive mobile application containing a proven effective exercise programme to prevent recurrent ankle sprains resulted in higher compliance as compared with regular written exercise materials.

A total of 220 athletes participated in this randomised controlled trial with a follow-up of 8 weeks; 110 athletes received a booklet explaining an 8-week neuromuscular training programme; 110 athletes participated in the same programme in an interactive mobile App (Strengthen your ankle). The primary outcome was compliance with the exercise programme. Secondary outcome measure was the incidence density of self-reported recurrent ankle sprains during the period of the exercise program.

This Warriors manifesto came from the heart, as always, but was not spoken out loud, and didn’t ever need to be.

Draymond Green thought about it, typed it up, sent it out, heard back from his teammates, and the Warriors emerged from the moment, standing and texting together, as always.

You want to know the true pulse of this extraordinary team and feel the true rhythm of this momentous season?

It’s all in their team group chat, it’s private, but it touches on every emotional and competitive connection between these 15 players.

Background: The effect of precollegiate orthopaedic surgery on injury risk in the elite collegiate athlete is unknown.

Purpose: To (1) assess the relationship between precollegiate surgery and subsequent injury requiring surgery in National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I athletes at a single institution and (2) compare the risk of subsequent surgery in the ipsilateral versus contralateral extremity in those with a history of precollegiate surgery.

Study Design: Cohort study; Level of evidence, 3.

Methods: A retrospective chart review was performed of all athletes who began participation from 2003 to 2009 until completion of eligibility. Athletes who received orthopaedic surgery in college were identified through the Sports Injury Monitoring System and were cross-referenced with medical records. The risk of orthopaedic surgery was evaluated using multivariate Cox and Poisson regression models, with sex and sport as additional covariates. Risk of subsequent surgery in the ipsilateral versus contralateral extremity was compared using Kaplan-Meier survival estimates and Cox proportional hazards regression. Hazard ratios (HRs) and rate ratios (RRs) with corresponding 95% confidence intervals were used to compare groups.

Results: In total, 1141 athletes were identified for analysis. Of these, 186 athletes (16.3%) had a history of precollegiate orthopaedic surgery. There were 261 documented intracollegiate orthopaedic surgeries in 181 athletes (15.9%). Precollegiate knee surgery was an independent predictor of orthopaedic surgery (HR, 1.85; 95% CI, 1.16-2.83) in college. When examining only surgeries resulting from acute or primary injuries, precollegiate knee surgery was an independent predictor of primary knee injury requiring surgery in college (HR, 4.45; 95% CI, 2.51-7.59). Athletes with a history of precollegiate surgery were more susceptible to subsequent surgery in their ipsilateral extremity compared with their other extremities (HR, 1.89; 95% CI, 1.03-3.53). In contrast, there was no additional risk of receiving subsequent surgery in the contralateral extremity (P = .54).

Conclusion: Precollegiate knee surgery in the Division I athlete is associated with subsequent injury requiring surgery in college. Athletes with a history of precollegiate surgery are at higher risk of subsequent surgery in their ipsilateral extremity compared with other extremities.

It was news that caused a huge stir but, on proper reflection, should not have been that surprising. On Monday, Chelsea changed the football headlines by finally confirming Antonio Conte will be their new manager. It was what everyone expected, yet there was still a curiosity to the coverage. Not mentioned in the press release nor in any of the outlines of the Italian’s career was something that would probably be a landmark development – and lasting stain – in any other sport. It was all the more relevant because of the previous day’s headlines, that a Dr Mark Bonar had admitted to undercover reporters from The Sunday Times that he had doped footballers.

For four years, Darren Eales worked to take Tottenham Hotspur from the butt of fifth-place jokes to the top of the English Premier League. As executive director of the North London club, he helped oversee transfers totaling in the hundreds of millions of pounds as the club backed up its ambition with a sizeable budget.

And yet – despite international stars such as Gareth Bale, Luka Modric and Hugo Lloris, among others, in the squad – Tottenham never finished higher than fourth in the league, never came closer than within 17 points of the title and only once qualified for the UEFA Champions League.

In September 2014, Eales traded White Hart Lane for the Peach State, becoming the first-ever president of Atlanta United FC, where he believes MLS’ structure will reward the sort of efficient management he hopes to bring the expansion hopefuls.

… The football data expert Mark Taylor was asked to examine every Premier League match since 2005-06 where a penalty was awarded between 0 and 70 minutes, kicking out games where the rebound was converted and/or a red card was awarded – a sample of 68 games. To assess whether a team was demoralised from missing a penalty, Taylor used the betting odds at kick-off to calculate the relative chances of each side as well as the in-running odds just before the penalty was awarded.

Armed with that information, Taylor came up with a league points expectation for each side immediately before the award of the penalty and then ran a series of mathematical simulations. Surprisingly, perhaps, they indicated that teams who miss a penalty when scores are level actually tend to do slightly better afterwards than one would expect them to do based on their pre-game odds.

Shoot from better positions, score more goals. At least, that’s what the stats say. Sounds logical, right? But not all managers and players seem to know this, as our columnist Raphael Honigstein explains to us.

… BROWNS’ NEW CHIEF strategy officer is most intriguing NFL prospect of the last decade. Bob Bowman, MLB president of business and media, called DePodesta hire “most interesting sports story of 2016.” Elite-level thinker spent 20 years as leading mind behind sabermetrics revolution in baseball made famous by best-selling book and movie Moneyball, based on his then-radical approach with Oakland Athletics. In January, with zero football experience, hired by Cleveland to oversee progressive, analytics-first overhaul of its front office, roster, culture. Will face major obstacles while attempting to challenge decades-old NFL scouting, drafting, team-building and performance models. At stake: fate of franchise, future of analytics in football and DePodesta’s legacy. “Paul had a big impact on the way the entire baseball industry operated,” states Ben Baumer, a statistical analyst with Mets from 2004 to 2012. “This is a chance for Paul to do it all over again in a different sport. We all want to know: Is it all going to translate, can Paul get lightning to strike twice?”

… Hiring is hard. General managers know it. Startup founders know it. School principals and casting directors know it. But for readers who are none of those things, consider America’s most public hiring processes—aside from presidential elections, perhaps—which are sports drafts.

Every year, millions of Americans watch professional talent evaluators try to predict who will be the best future athletes in the NBA and NFL Drafts. Again and again, audiences get valuable lessons in the inability of experts to divine future talent. Scouts aren’t dumb. Overall, the first pick tends to be better than the tenth pick, and he tends to be better than 100th pick. But years after the draft, at least one squad almost always looks foolish. For every top five team that can’t believe it picked a Darko Milicic or Ryan Leaf, there is a top five team that can’t believe it missed a Stephen Curry or Tom Brady.

Hiring is hard for the same reason that dating is hard: Both sides are in the dark. “The fundamental economic problem in hiring is one of matching with costly search and bilateral asymmetric information,” Paul Oyer and Scott Schaefer write in Personnel Economics. In English, that means hiring is expensive, time-consuming, and inherently uncertain, because the hirer doesn’t know what workers are the right fit, and the worker don’t know what hirers are the right fit.