Applied Sports Science newsletter – July 9, 2016

How high-priced travel ball is excluding poor blacks from the MLB.

… Bale’s 2015-16 season was disrupted by injury with his La Liga campaign restricted to 21 starts. … Bale explained that he requested Real physio Jaime Benito to join the Wales camp for the tournament.

… He’s on the comeback trail, but not with the team he helped win three World Series. The former Giant signed with the Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim in May, and debuted with his new club in mid-June. His performances have been underwhelming. In four starts, the once-overpowering righty has allowed 29 hits in 18 innings. His fastball is averaging a pedestrian 89 mph.

The extent to which Lincecum can return to his old form remains to be seen. His surgically-repaired hip appears to be holding up, and his damaged psyche is healing as well. He’ll likely never be an elite power pitcher again — or a power pitcher at all — but he feels he can be a productive starter. Only time will tell.

Lincecum talked about his early development as a pitcher, and his career going forward, prior to a recent game at Fenway Park.

… something happened during the summer of 2006. Ronaldo had a target on his back after his role in Wayne Rooney’s red card in their World Cup quarter-final clash but he returned to Manchester a different athlete.

“Physically, he changed from a boy to man”, Gary Neville told The Independent years later.

… As Priddy tirelessly worked his way back from the knee injury suffered during 2014 World League pool play, he constantly reminded himself to be patient and to block out everything and everybody who wondered about his current place in volleyball.

Would he still be the high-flying force at the net he once was? Would that new knee betray him with all the pounding?

There are a plethora of ways to increase running speed—track intervals, plyometrics and specialized strength training, to name a few. But one you may not be familiar with is overspeed training, which requires running at a speed that pushes the body past what it is accustomed to during sprinting pace, prompting neuromuscular development and training leg muscles to contract and legs to turn over faster.

Watch as Southampton’s players get put through a series of pre-season tests at Staplewood Campus.

… today we’re leaving Mr Rogers neighborhood and heading over to Bill Nye to get a little more sciencey (I bet he loves that term) with our data: RMR and VO2 MAX

… Referees have also shown fitness levels that are better than they ever have been. Players claiming a foul or a penalty are looking up to see the referee a few meters away and perfectly placed to rule on whether an offense has taken place.

`Dynamic sprinting’ is the term used by modern referees. Before being approved for matches at the highest levels, referees have to be able to sprint as fast as most players. That ability does not happen overnight and has been part of their daily training for the past two years.

Imagine you have a job where you’re asked to work full time hours, make immense sacrifices in your personal life and experience little development other than that which directly relates to your current job position. Now imagine that you get paid around $800 a month for the privilege.

While overly simplified, that’s the sort of life that junior hockey players currently live. Their jobs, and that’s what they are, dictate everything that happens in their lives. As children, and most of them are, they are drafted and sent to a team that may be hundreds or even thousands of miles away from their family.

This all benefits, you guessed it, the owners and sponsors and fans and professional hockey leagues a lot more than it benefits the majority of its players. That’s not to say that all those who work in junior hockey are fairly compensated, based on personal experience in minor league sports in America I imagine many are not.

The commissioners of the five autonomy conferences today announced an agreement in concept on changes they will propose that are intended to give students who play sports more time off. The purpose of the changes is to rebalance the student experience between athletics and campus life, providing students with more time to focus on other college interests, including academics, work experience, travel, and additional rest.

The first area of change, Flex 21, will provide students, in many cases, with at least an additional 21 days in which they are free of required athletic activities during the academic year. These 21 days are in addition to the current rules related to time off.

In sports over the last 8-10 years, we have seen an explosion of data collection. Screening protocols, sensors and wearables have provided an abundance of information about athletes during training and competition. The accumulation of data can (unfortunately) sometimes lead to ‘paralysis by analysis’. Gathering data can often become cumbersome and if not managed properly it can in fact obfuscate decision making. At Kitman Labs, we understand the importance of managing data in professional sports. By analysing and alerting on meaningful changes within screening variables, we hope to allow coaches to leverage their screening data and make informed decisions. In this post, we discuss our approach to data analysis and alerting in professional sports environments.

A few weeks ago, I was invited to speak at the Onestop Partner Summit. It was a day filled with passionate people who were producing stunning change in their fields. When you’re surrounded by that many successful people, you can’t help being inspired.

The most compelling speaker for me was Grant Hughes of FocusMotion. The L.A.-based startup, I believe, is the next big thing in the $15 billion wearables market.

Here’s the rub: It’s not a wearables company–it’s a software company. Let me explain.

The FocusMotion technology originated in fitness, but its implications are pretty mind-boggling. Users can install the software to track, learn, and analyze human motion on any sensor, OS, or platform. Yes, seriously.

… the fascination with do-it-yourself medical testing continues. A New York Times article recently led with the story of Kristi Wood, a 49-year-old woman who was experiencing fatigue and cognitive problems. Rather than seeing a doctor, she turned to a direct-to-consumer testing service which told her that her vitamin D levels were too high, apparently because she had been overdosing on vitamin D supplements. Once she reduced her supplement dose, “she almost immediately felt better.” She credited the testing service for making this (obvious) diagnosis and now has a bunch of blood tests repeated every four months.

Although Ms. Wood would do well to read Ms. Hobson’s FiveThirty Eight article and the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force statement that found insufficient evidence for adults younger than age 65 to take supplemental vitamin D for any reason, at least the results were clear-cut and actionable. That isn’t true for most abnormal results, which require clinical context, careful interpretation, and sometimes additional testing, to distinguish a false from a true positive.

It’s a good time to be a machine learning startup. Two weeks after Twitter bought London-based Magic Pony, Google has purchased French firm Moodstocks. The acquisition was made for an unknown sum, and seems primarily a grab for talent. Moodstocks’ engineers and researchers will move to Google’s Paris R&D site, and the startup’s primary commercial product — an image recognition API for smartphones — will be phased out.

“Ever since we started Moodstocks, our dream has been to give eyes to machines by turning cameras into smart sensors able to make sense of their surroundings,” said Moodstocks in a statement. “Our [new] focus will be to build great image recognition tools within Google.”

When you watch any NBA game, the clock is always ticking. And today the NBA announced a way to make sure that clock ticks more perfectly than ever. By teaming up with TISSOT, the official timekeeper of the NBA, the NBA is introducing a new integrated timing system…

Goodell was at Jeremy Bailenson’s Stanford University lab to learn more about virtual reality empathy training.

“The immersion in virtual reality was so convincing and compelling,” said Michael Huyghue, a confidante of Goodell who accompanied him on the trip. “Roger was tremendously impressed.”

Goodell visited along with Huyghue and several executives — including Patriots president and chair of the NFL’s digital committee, Jonathan Kraft. The commissioner was so impressed that he had NFL Executive Vice President of Football Operations Troy Vincent tour the Virtual Human Interaction Lab (VHIL) a couple months later.

Huyghue, a former Jacksonville Jaguars senior vice president, NFL Diversity Committee member and United Football League commissioner, suggested to Goodell that the empathy training, which promotes tolerance and helps counteract biases of ageism, race, gender, disability, etc., would be useful to the league.

The recent increased use of injury and illness surveillance programmes has the potential to greatly advance our knowledge about risk factors and treatment effectiveness. Maximising this potential requires that data be entered in a format that can be interpreted and analysed. One remaining challenge concerns whether and when an increase in symptoms should be documented within an existing injury record (eg, exacerbation) versus a new injury record. In this review, we address this challenge using the principles of the multistate framework for the analysis of subsequent injury in sport (M-FASIS). In brief, we argue that a new injury record should be documented whenever there is an increase in symptoms due to activity-related exposures that is beyond the normal day-to-day symptom fluctuations, regardless of whether the athlete was in a ‘healthy state’ immediately before the event. We illustrate the concepts with concrete examples of shoulder osteoarthritis, ankle sprains and ACL tears.

CONTEXT:

?Greater anterior knee laxity (AKL) has been identified as an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury risk factor. The structural factors that contribute to greater AKL are not fully understood but may include the ACL and bone geometry.
OBJECTIVE:

?To determine the relationship of ACL width and femoral notch angle to AKL.
DESIGN:

?Cross-sectional study.
SETTING:

?Controlled laboratory.
PATIENTS OR OTHER PARTICIPANTS:

?Twenty recreationally active females (age = 21.2 ± 3.1 years, height = 1.66.1 ± 7.3 cm, mass = 66.5 ± 12.0 kg).
MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE(S):

?Anterior cruciate ligament width and femoral notch angle were obtained with magnetic resonance imaging of the knee and AKL was assessed. Anterior cruciate ligament width was measured as the width of a line that transected the ACL and was drawn perpendicular to the Blumensaat line. Femoral notch angle was formed by the intersection of the line parallel to the posterior cortex of the femur and the Blumensaat line. Anterior knee laxity was the anterior displacement of the tibia relative to the femur (mm) at 130 N of an applied force. Ten participants’ magnetic resonance imaging data were assessed on 2 occasions to establish intratester reliability and precision. Using stepwise backward, linear regression, we examined the extent that ACL width, femoral notch angle, and weight were associated with AKL.
RESULTS:

?Strong measurement consistency and precision (intraclass correlation coefficient [2,1] ± SEM) were established for ACL width (0.98 ± 0.3 mm) and femoral notch angle (0.97° ± 1.1°). The regression demonstrated that ACL width (5.9 ± 1.4 mm) was negatively associated with AKL (7.2 ± 2.0 mm; R2 = 0.22, P = .04). Femoral notch angle and weight were not retained in the final model.
CONCLUSIONS:

?A narrower ACL was associated with greater AKL. This finding may inform the development of ACL injury-prevention programs that include components designed to increase ACL size or strength (or both). Future authors should establish which other factors contribute to greater AKL in order to best inform prevention efforts.

Objective: To characterize trends in the acute management (within 30 days) after lateral ankle sprain (LAS) in the United States.

Design: Descriptive epidemiology study.

Patients: Of note, 825 718 ankle sprain patients were identified; 96.2% were patients with LAS. Seven percent had an associated fracture and were excluded from the remaining analysis.

Setting: Primary and tertiary care settings.

Interventions: We queried a database of national health insurance records for 2007 to 2011 by ICD-9 codes for patients with LAS while excluding medial and syndesmotic sprains and any LAS with an associated foot or ankle fracture.

Main Outcome Measures: The percentage of patients to receive specific diagnostic imaging, orthopedic devices, or physical therapy treatments within 30 days of the LAS diagnosis and the associated costs.

Results: Over two-thirds of patients with LAS without an associated fracture received radiographs, 9% received an ankle brace, 8.1% received a walking boot, 6.5% were splinted, and 4.8% were prescribed crutches. Only 6.8% received physical therapy within 30 days of their LAS diagnosis, 94.1% of which performed therapeutic exercise, 52.3% received manual therapy, and 50.2% received modalities. The annual cost associated with physician visits, diagnostic imaging, orthopedic devices, and physical therapy was 152 million USD, 81.5% was from physician evaluations, 7.9% from physical therapy, 7.2% from diagnostic imaging, and 3.4% from orthopedic devices.

Conclusions: Most patients with LAS do not receive supervised rehabilitation. The small proportion of patients with LAS to receive physical therapy get rehabilitation prescribed in accordance with clinical practice guidelines. The majority (>80%) of the LAS financial burden is associated with physician evaluations.

Concussions can have a lasting impact on the structure of the brain months after the initial injury, according to new research. These changes can linger long after clinical symptoms — such as dizziness and impaired balance — have disappeared. The study could help scientist better understand the long term effects of concussion on injured athletes. However, the link between these structural changes in the brain and any long-term effect on the individual’s behavior and cognition are still not known.

Scientists already knew that sport-related concussions can cause structural wear and tear on the brain. But this study, which is being presented as an abstract at the American Academy of Neurology’s Sports Concussion Conference tomorrow, gives a clearer time frame. It shows that changes to individuals’ white matter — bundles of nerve cells that connect different regions of the brain — can persist for at least six months.

A recent study in rats suggests that acoustic shock waves could speed up a muscle’s healing process. This technique could help injured athletes to return to training and be able to compete more quickly than just with traditional methods.

Applying low-frequency shock waves in a therapy called Extracorporeal Shock Wave Therapy (ESWT) is already a promising technique for injuries like ligament and tendon damage. Dr Angela Zissler, leader of the study at the University of Salzburg, Austria, explains: “To our knowledge, there are no experiments exploring the benefits of ESWT in muscle damage, one of the most common causes of injury in competitive sports. By accelerating the muscle healing process, ESWT could get athletes back in the game faster after injury.”

The U.S. National Institutes of Health said it will fund a study to monitor U.S. athletes, coaches and members of the Olympic Committee staff for exposure to Zika virus while in Brazil, with the hope of gaining better understanding of how it persists in the body and the potential risks it poses.

The study, announced on Tuesday, seeks to determine the incidence of Zika virus infection, identify potential risk factors for infection, evaluate how long the virus remains in bodily fluids, and study reproductive outcomes of Zika-infected participants.

PURPOSE:

To investigate the effect of caffeine ingestion on the 3-min all-out test (3MT) performance and plasma electrolytes in athletes.
METHODS:

Fifteen collegiate male basketball players were recruited and completed two trials separated by at least 1 week in caffeine (CAF, 6 mg kg-1) and placebo conditions. During the first visit, participants performed an incremental cycling test to determine their 3MT resistance. After a familiarization trial, participants performed a CAF or PL trial according to a randomized crossover design. One hour after ingesting capsules, the participants performed the 3MT to estimate the end-test power (EP) and work done above EP (WEP). Blood samples for sodium (Na+), potassium (K+), pH, and lactate concentrations were drawn pretest, 1 h after ingestion, and posttest.
RESULTS:

Significant differences in WEP (CAF vs. PL, 13.4 ± 3.0 vs. 12.1 ± 2.7 kJ, P 0.05) were determined between the conditions. Compared with the PL condition, the CAF condition yielded significantly higher power outputs (60-150 s), a lower fatigue rate during the 3MT (CAF vs. PL, 0.024 ± 0.007 vs. 0.029 ± 0.006 s-1, P < 0.05), a significantly higher lactate concentration after the 3MT, and significantly lower K+ concentrations at 1 h after caffeine ingestion. There were no significant interaction effects for pH and Na+ concentrations.
CONCLUSIONS:

Caffeine ingestion did not change EP but improved WEP and the rate of decline in power output during short-term, severe exercise.

However, the risk of chronic inflammation can be reduced through modifying one simple habit—eating choices. Researchers from Harvard University have found that there are specific foods that can lead to increased inflammation in the body.

Low-protein diet given to pregnant mice can interact with their offspring’s DNA, leading to low weight throughout the progeny’s lifetime, study finds

The growing popularity of visual feedback during football punditry has undoubtedly flagged the potential benefits of adopting telestration solutions at professional football clubs. Paint by ChyronHego, which is the software used for video analysis by pundits during Sky Sports’ Monday Night Football Show, is at the forefront of telestration solutions in sport. The software boasts an impressive range of graphics making it the ideal tool for emphasising tactical opinions in a visual and engaging way. This was demonstrated perfectly by a number of speakers live at the Tactical Insights Conference held at Leicester City Football Club in February. But why choose Paint?

… the underhanded free throw reveals a faultline in sports analytics, between aesthetics and results. When I criticised Gladwell on Twitter for misunderstanding the nature of basketball in this piece, a few analysts piped up, incredulous that a player might want to do anything less than score as many points as humanly possible in a game.

But in speaking to and working with people on the “other side” of the club wall, it’s clear that aesthetic considerations aren’t mere “fluff” to be cast aside in the name of winning at all costs—clubs often discuss attractive football as an end in itself, a goal not secondary but equal to table finish.

Over the next few weeks, the Boston Red Sox might trade for a pitcher to improve one of the American League’s worst starting rotations. President of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski estimated that he and general manager Mike Hazen checked in with about 10 teams on Tuesday alone.

In the meantime, though, the Sox are adding to their coaching staff in an attempt to help their pitching.

Brian Bannister, an ex-major leaguer and the son of former All-Star lefty Floyd Bannister, will serve as an assistant to pitching coach Carl Willis, Dombrowski announced Tuesday. Bannister will be in uniform before games, but in accordance with big-league rules, he must watch games from the clubhouse or the stands.

Roughly 14% of regular season National Hockey League games since the 2005–06 season have been decided by a shoot-out, and the resulting allocation of points has impacted play-off races each season. But despite interest from fans, players and league officials, there is little in the way of published research on team or individual shoot-out performance. This manuscript attempts to fill that void. We present both generalised linear mixed model and Bayesian hierarchical model frameworks to model shoot-out outcomes, with results suggesting that there are (i) small but statistically significant talent gaps between shooters, (ii) marginal differences in performance among netminders and (iii) few, if any, predictors of player success after accounting for individual talent. We also provide a resampling strategy to highlight a selection bias with respect to shooter assignment, in which coaches choose their most skilled offensive players early in shoot-out rounds and are less likely to select players with poor past performances. Finally, given that per-shot data for shoot-outs do not currently exist in a single location for public use, we provide both our data and source code for other researchers interested in studying shoot-out outcomes.

… Thankfully for hockey fans, War on Ice became a meticulous counterpoint to the league’s incompetence; just about any analytical tool—from possession numbers to shift charts and shooting maps—that are publicly cited could be traced back to its database. But what grew into an invaluable resource began much more humbly.

“As it happened, we’d already built a lot of the mechanics to collect the play-by-play data beforehand,” A.C. Thomas, one of the site’s co-founders, explained via email. “Sam [Ventura, another co-founder] and I were on a hockey panel at a statistics conference and we all wished out loud we had far better exposure for our research than the academic sphere offered, so we all resolved that we were going to make a much bigger push to release things publicly. At the time we didn’t know what that would be.”

When Germany met Argentina at the 2006 FIFA World Cup quarter-final for a penalty shoot-out, then-goalkeeper, Jens Lehmann, brought with him a crumpled piece of paper onto the pitch. It was a cheat sheet written by his goalkeeping coach and contained tips on how to stop Argentina’s likely penalty takers. Germany won the shootout 4-2.

Fast forward a decade and current goalkeeper Manuel Neuer had at his disposal slightly more advanced means of stopping Italian penalty takers in a nail-biting 6-5 penalty shootout that his team won to progress to the semi-finals of the 2016 UEFA European Championship.

The German Football Association (DFB) teamed up with software company SAP to develop two new technologies that tapped into the potential of Big Data analytics to identify strengths and weaknesses of opposing teams ahead of the competition.