Applied Sports Science newsletter – May 17, 2016

LeBron James has never had it any easier in the playoffs during his 13-year career, according to Cleveland Cavaliers coach Tyronn Lue.

As the Cavs have coasted through the playoffs, going 8-0 after sweeping the Detroit Pistons in the first round and Atlanta Hawks in the conference semifinals, Lue said the burden placed upon James’ shoulders this spring has been minimal.

“LeBron is letting the game come to him,” Lue said after practice Saturday. “When he wants to be aggressive and he sees fit to be aggressive when the teams have a good run or whatever they may have, then he just takes over the game … And with Kyrie (Irving) and Kevin (Love) playing at a high level, he can take a lot of mileage off of his body, reduce his (usage) rate and just kind of seeing and figuring out the flow of the game.”

The triathlon triumphs of the Brownlee brothers have been impossible to miss – Alistair was Olympic champion at London 2012, twice the world champion, the European champion, Commonwealth gold medallist; Jonny won Olympic bronze, world champion in the same year, Commonwealth silver.

Now, with the Rio Olympics closing in fast, a new BBC documentary explores how they do it – what sets them apart, what drives them on, what hurts and what works, and how a pair of brothers can compete with each other every day, yet stay so close.

… It is very important that we look at recovery as part of our training. You are not making any physiological changes during a training or workout session; this is when you cause the stress that is going to drive the desired responses. It is during recovery when we are making the physiological changes that we are trying to benefit from our training.

A Fusionetics user has shared their Recovery & Readiness dashboard and it really shows the great impact that travel can have on effective recovery. If you look at the graph over a month period, you can see the three dips that occurred were during days when the user was traveling. The early mornings, moving through airports, rushing from meetings to dinners, all keep our bodies moving all day and really don’t provide a proper, quality time to devote to recovery.

These findings also support the importance of tracking your training load with a platform like Fusionetics.

… If you’re among the 60% of Canadians that report fewer than eight hours of sleep, you likely need to get to bed sooner.

Under a threshold of seven hours of sleep, we can suffer from worsened mood, confusion, depression, and overall impaired cognitive function. At a chronic level of sleep loss, risk of health problems like cardiovascular disease and obesity greatly increases. Sufficient sleep is needed to keep our nervous, immune, and many other systems of your body healthy. For athletes, lack of sufficient sleep can be the reason for decreased performance and increased injury risk.

@bradwolverton @JonSolomonCBS it’s worse at high academic institutions. I avg. maybe 4 in order to keep up my GPA

… FIFPro: What is the key message you give to a player while he recovers from injury?

Bryan English: It is important to maintain focus on good quality sleep, nutrition and general lifestyle management. Listen to the advice from your medical team and try to comply with all aspects of rehabilitation with a positive frame of mind. If you miss any part of the process then ask questions from the people you work with. Trust is a key factor in returning to play.

Sports Analytics has been a steadily growing and rapidly evolving area over the last decade both in US professional sports leagues and in European football leagues. The recent implementation of financial fair-play regulations in European football will definitely increase the importance of Sports Analytics in the coming years. In addition, the popularity of sports betting is also ever-increasing. Sports Analytics approaches are used in all aspects of professional sports … To facilitate this, we have assembled a diverse program committee that includes statisticians, practitioners in sports-related matters, and Machine Learning and Data Mining researchers.

… Forget about FitBits counting steps and sweat. The S5’s precise GPS technology talks to satellites that track a player’s every move in real time. There are a dozen sensors – accelerometers, gyroscopes, magnetometers, heart rate monitors – which, combined, record more than 900 data points per second.

“People within Leicester City ascribed a significant contribution of their win to Catapult,” the company’s executive chairman, Adir Shiffman, says.

“There’s a very typical phenomenon around the world that the most enthusiastic and committed users of Catapult sports tend to win championships.”

Research shows that students who participate in extracurricular activities have better grades, better behavior and better graduation rates. While this is the accepted norm, Greenville County Schools, where I am the director of athletics, wanted current information on participation and performance. We believe in the value of extracurricular participation in all areas of athletics and arts, but we also wanted to look at protecting our students from being overstressed, overworked and injured.

One barrier to getting a complete picture of participation and performance had been that each individual school only knew about what was happening at that school; there was no coordination or understanding of what was happening elsewhere. The effectiveness of our efforts were also limited by formatting irregularities, different styles of record-keeping and paper versus computer records. So about four years ago, we started using an extracurricular management platform that our athletic trainers could use to track data for all 20 sports at the high-school and middle school levels.

Over the last few years, we have been able to introduce an injury-reduction plan, showing great improvement in reducing injuries in baseball and shortening “return to play times.”

Identifying loading patterns associated with Jones fractures and other common sports-related injuries can assist with the development of custom modifications to footwear, insoles, and training programs to help reduce injury rates and enhance athletic careers.

I’m Katie Rizzone and I’m a primary care sports medicine physician at the University of Rochester Medical Center. I specialize in musculoskeletal ailments including strains, sprains, tendonitis, fractures, sports concussions, and arthritis, as well as medical problems unique to the female athlete, and runners. As a lifelong athlete, with two young sons who are just getting into sports, I am very passionate about sports safety.

One area I’m particularly concerned about is school-age athletes overtraining and specializing in one sport all year long, rather than resting in the off-season. My research looks at what this may be doing to their bodies not just during their competitive years, but in the long term.

For the 3rd successive year, we will be running the KDD workshop on Large-Scale Sports Analytics. The objective of this workshop is to bring together researchers and analysts from academia and industry who work in sports analytics, data mining and machine learning. We hope to enable meaningful discussions about state-of-the-art in sports analytics research, and how it might be improved upon.

San Francisco, CA Sunday, August 14. Workshop precedes KDD 2016

Deadline for submissions is Friday, May 27.

United’s extensive revamp of the Reds academy includes the search for a scouting auditor – but the new recruit won’t watch any football! … The unusual role of scouting auditor will see the new recruit collating all the reports and data being sent to United’s Carrington training HQ from their new improved scouting network.

Not long ago, someone standing at 6’4, 320 pounds would be one of the biggest players in the NFL. But he’d be a smaller-than-average member of a couple offensive lines in the AFC West.

The Oakland Raiders somehow got lighter along the starting offensive line when the team acquired 6’5, 330-pound guard Kelechi Osemele from the Baltimore Ravens. The huge guard is slated to fill in for J’Marcus Webb, a 6’7, 335-pound giant who is projected to start at right tackle for the Seattle Seahawks in 2016.

But the swap wasn’t enough to knock the Raiders from owning the title of NFL’s heaviest offensive line.