Applied Sports Science newsletter – April 27, 2016

Following three consecutive mediocre seasons from 2012 to 2014 and being left off NFL rosters entirely during the 2015 regular season, former University of Alabama star Trent Richardson is out to prove he can make it in the league, and he appears to have revamped his body in the process.

… Blessed with a sturdy, seemingly indestructible body, Smith never missed a football game, much less a practice, throughout high school and college. His durability was something Fighting Irish defensive coordinator Brian VanGorder no doubt would’ve gushed about to NFL scouts.

“It’s hard for me to picture him getting hurt,” VanGorder says now. “He’s strapped together too well.”

Football is often over-complicated by coaches and it’s easy to forget how much can be taught within small-sided games where players have to deal with the three key elements of the game – attacking, defending and transition.

Academy Coach, Dave Wright has used this session with players from aged 7 through to 17. In this blog post, Dave takes you step by step through this possession vs. progression practice, from the organisation to the different elements that can be coached within the practice.

Since SUU’s football program debuted in 1963, the school didn’t produce a single draft pick until 2012 when San Diego selected quarterback Brad Sorensen in the seventh round of that draft. Now Killebrew, defensive end James Cowser — the FCS’s all-time sack leader — and cornerback LeShaun Sims are on the verge of making the small school in Cedar City the unlikeliest of draft powerhouses. … The story of how SUU produced three pro football-caliber draft prospects for the 2016 draft actually began seven years ago during SUU’s 2009 freshman recruiting class. James Cowser wasn’t just playing basketball at Davis High, he was Region 1 MVP and leading the Darts with 12.3 points per game, in addition to playing football.

… I wanted to follow on from my Plinths and Platforms article by applying some of the analysis discussed to real world data.

To give some background to this case study: the athlete had suffered a groin injury and once ready to advance to working outdoors, underwent an 8 week progressive on-field rehabilitation programme. Unfortunately after approximately 3 weeks of the return to training and playing, a reinjury occurred.

Brilliant insight by Pete Carroll on building culture and player-coach relationships in NFL.

Analyzing athletes’ performance during games and workout sessions is essential to assess their fitness and skill levels. Sports science is evolving continuously to enable different stakeholders to understand the athlete’s needs and how to get the best performance possible out of them. This panel will discuss how to avoid in-game injuries by analyzing the athlete’s health and techniques, designing the proper workload, correcting techniques, and designing the proper apparel and equipment for each athlete.

… Georgia United sprang out of the red dirt of the south in 2010, positioned in Atlanta and aiming to change the national discussion about the Deep South’s place in American soccer. Tony Annan, one of the club’s three founders, set the bar high. Five years after its founding, Georgia United pushed its U16 squad into the semifinals of the Development Academy Finals last summer.

It was an outrageously bold achievement, made even more impressive by the fact that the club sent four of its own locally-sourced players to the most recent U17 Men’s National Team camp. No club, MLS representatives included, had more.

Georgia United’s achievement did not go unnoticed.

… “I am convinced that all the teams today look at themselves and think ‘how could that happen?’, but when you win so many times 1-0 like Leicester have done, you see they have been absolutely efficient.

“It is true that technically many teams in the league are better, but many teams have had more problems. Leicester have had no injuries, many teams have had more competitions. Leicester went out of the FA Cup quite early, but you have to give them credit when everybody expected them to drop they didn’t and when they had to turn up they did.

“It will be interesting psychologically to study Leicester because it’s a very interesting case. There is a theory that says to go to the absolute utmost of your talent you need to suffer in life. When you look at the Leicester team, not one career of all these players was obvious, like starting on the red carpet at 18 years of age in the Champions League.

Science rests on data, of that there can be no doubt. But peer through the hot haze of hype surrounding the use of big data in biology and you will see plenty of cold facts that suggest we need fresh thinking if we are to turn the swelling ocean of “omes” – genomes, proteomes and transcriptomes – into new drugs and treatments.

The relatively meagre returns from the human genome project reflect how DNA sequences do not translate readily into understanding of disease, let alone treatments. The rebranding of “personalised medicine” – the idea that decoding the genome will lead to treatments tailored to the individual – as “precision medicine” reflects the dawning realisation that using the -omes of groups of people to develop targeted treatments is quite different from using a person’s own genome.

Because we are all ultimately different, the only way to use our genetic information to predict how an individual will react to a drug is if we have a profound understanding of how the body works, so we can model the way that each person will absorb and interact with the drug molecule. This is tough to do right now, so the next best thing is precision medicine, where we look at how genetically similar people react and then assume that a given person will respond in a similar way.

While the technology world’s attention is on virtual reality, a team of researchers at Case Western Reserve University (CWRU) is fixated on another way to experience the world — augmented reality (AR).

Microsoft’s forthcoming AR headset, HoloLens, is at the forefront of this technology. The company calls it the first holographic computer. In AR, instead of being surrounded by a virtual world, viewers see virtual objects projected on top of reality through a transparent lens.

CWRU was among the first in higher education to begin working with HoloLens, back in 2014. They’ve since discovered new ways the tech could help transform education. One of their current focuses is changing how students experience medical-science courses.

Overuse injuries, (chronic injuries) are a category of sport-related injuries that result from cumulative trauma or repetitive use and stress. Overuse injuries are often found in low-contact sports that involve repetitive movements.

Females are typically at higher risk of overuse injury than males: One study that examined injury rates in 16 Division I NCAA sports found highest overuse injury rates occurred in women’s soccer, hockey, volleyball and softball. Chronic overuse injuries are responsible for a substantial amount of time loss for athletes across sports, however, risk factors that predispose athletes to incur overuse injuries are, to an extent, more controllable (through effective management/monitoring) than acute/contact injuries. Additionally, managing and monitoring the factors that increase an athlete’s risk of overuse injury largely transfer to reducing likelihood (or at least severity) of acute injury incidence.

Merely 5 percent of healthcare organizations worldwide are “operating at the highest level of digital health innovation proficiency and expertise,” according to a report from digital health consulting firm Enspektos. That means the vast majority have yet to scale and share their innovations, even within their own walls.

Instead, most are in the testing and experimentation phase, not unexpected, given that digital health still is relatively new and that healthcare has historically been slow to embrace change. More than a third are just getting started in digital health.

… Because late-round picks provide almost no risk (most are expected to be cut), finding even a few value players worthy of making the roster is a bonus that can make all the difference for a championship-contending team.

So which teams are the best and worst at finding value in Rounds 4 to 7? To answer that question, we utilized Pro Football Reference’s Approximate Value (AV) metric to break down every NFL draft pick over the past 10 seasons. To read the full explanation of our methodology, see the bottom of the article.

It’s getting more and more crowded on baseball’s bleeding edge. As sabermetrics has expanded to swallow new disciplines and data sets,1 the number of quantitative analysts in MLB front offices has multiplied to keep up, producing an army of number crunchers, modelers and decision scientists who would have seemed out of place at the ballpark even a decade ago.

Because we, too, are statheads at heart, we’ve mined the data and charted the proliferation of these numbers-savvy front-office staffers over time. Yes, there are more of them now than ever, and yes, they’ve had a demonstrable effect on their teams’ fortunes. But contrary to the “Moneyball”-era hand-wringing about battles between scouts and statheads, their rise hasn’t come at the expense of old-school analysis. Rather, the two main points of contention are how much the “Moneyball” mindset has spread from the game’s most frugal teams to the richest ones; and why the front-office hiring boom hasn’t helped its gender diversity.