Applied Sports Science newsletter – July 15, 2016

… “We were cautious going into L.A. so we can regroup and I’ll feel good. I do feel good now,” Linden says. “I’m conscious of my body and taking care of my body but I don’t feel like I’m being overly cautious where I sacrifice training. I’m going to push as hard as I can and be smarter about it. It’s a delicate balance.”

Linden trained on an indoor treadmill where she ran for an hour at 89 degrees (33 C) and 75% humidity to simulate the conditions for the Olympics. The USOC provided the training session and gave her a pill in morning (3 hours before her run) that allowed them to test and monitoring her core temperature.

PURPOSE:

To examine the association between combined session-RPE workload measures and injury risk in elite Gaelic footballers.
METHODS:

Thirty-seven elite Gaelic footballers (mean ± SD age of 24.2 ± 2.9 yr) from one elite squad were involved in a single season study. Weekly workload (session-RPE multiplied by duration) and all time-loss injuries (including subsequent week injuries) were recorded during the period. Rolling weekly sums and week-to-week changes in workload were measured, allowing for the calculation of the ‘acute:chronic workload ratio’ that was calculated by dividing acute workload (i.e. 1-week workload) by chronic workload (i.e. rolling average 4-weekly workload). Workload measures were then modelled against all injury data sustained using a logistic regression model. Odds ratios (OR) were reported against a reference group.
RESULTS:

High 1-weekly workloads (?2770 AU, OR = 1.63 – 6.75) were associated with significantly higher risk of injury compared to a low training load reference group (1.5), players with 1 year experience had a higher risk of injury (OR = 2.22) and players with 2-3 (OR = 0.20) and 4-6 years (OR = 0.24) of experience had a lower risk of injury. Players with poorer aerobic fitness (estimated from a 1 km time trial) had a higher injury risk compared to players with higher aerobic fitness (OR = 1.50-2.50). An acute:chronic workload ratio of (?2.0) demonstrated the greatest risk of injury.
CONCLUSIONS:

These findings highlight an increased risk of injury for elite Gaelic football players with high (>2.0) acute:chronic workload ratios and high weekly workloads. A high aerobic capacity and playing experience appears to offer injury protection against rapid changes in workload and high acute:chronic workload ratios. Moderate workloads, coupled with moderate-high changes in the acute:chronic workload ratio appear to be protective for Gaelic football players.

The France goalkeeper Hugo Lloris has conceded that the extra day’s rest afforded to Portugal after their semi-final win against Wales could have contributed France’s shattering extra-time defeat in the final of Euro 2016 on Sunday night. … “In one game everything is possible and it’s even more the case in a final. We had a good game but we needed to be more clinical up front. But it’s difficult. We tried our best. We maybe had a lack of freshness as well. One more day for them maybe made a difference, but this is football. We have no excuses.”

It’s the last week of June and about 40 high school students from throughout Fresno Unified School District have gathered at Fresno State’s North and South Gyms to take part in the Sports Science Camp. Although it is the middle of summer break, these students are excited to be on campus to learn about the programs offered through the University’s Department of Kinesiology.

For the next five days, they will learn about four core areas encompassing the Kinesiology field, including athletic training, physical education, sport psychology and exercise science. Each session is taught by kinesiology students and includes hands-on learning and interactive activities.

… There was a brief flurry of excitement out here in France on the eve of the Tour when Sir Dave Brailsford declined to say whether he had had any contact with the Football Association over the vacant England managerial position following Roy Hodgson’s departure. He was forced to go on Sky Sports to clarify the state of play, which is that he sits on an FA panel advising on the next appointment. But would it be so mad to give Brailsford a central role? No doubt I will be accused of being a Sky fanboy here – believe me, there is no tag you want less in cycling – but I can think of worse ideas. Not as head coach, of course. Brailsford is not a great coach, even in cycling.

His skill, as was the case with Sir Clive Woodward, is to create a winning environment.

… A lot of pundits and startups don’t think so, many believe the wearable industry will connect everywhere from your head to your toes, using smart clothing. … Clothes can now be embedded with sensors, connected to smartphones, and relay all types of information to the user about their fitness and health.

Printed inks and conductive yarns will get stitched into high volume clothing later this year thanks to a partnership from fabric maker MAS Holdings and electronics manufacturer Flex, formerly Flextronics International. The two demoed at an event a safety garment embedding 18 LEDs using materials they will start using later this year.

The two companies are working to identify materials, connectors, encapsulation techniques and antennas to fill in “quite a few gaps between making electronics and fabrics,” said Lenny Richiuso, a senior director in the consumer group at Flex.

Flex is testing several types and vendors of printed inks and conductive yarns. They believe wearables will embrace a range of materials depending on the distance and amount of power or data needed.

Join the Seattle Sports Tech Meetup for our first annual Hackathon, hosted by the Seattle Sounders with data provided by Sportradar. We’re seeking teams and individuals who have a desire to contribute to the integration of technology with sports. How exactly does that work? Well, we’ll leave the great ideas up to you.

For one weekend in September, we’ll bring together geeks, jocks, and entrepreneurs into the same room to pitch ideas and build them out. Our panel of judges will hear presentations from each team and award prizes for the best projects.

Our vision at Nokia is to expand the human possibilities of the connected world. Last month, we announced our plans to acquire Withings, a pioneer in the connected health revolution. Bringing Withings — known for simply and elegantly reimagining products such as scales, watches, and blood pressure monitors — into the Nokia family unites a shared vision to empower people to live happier, healthier lives. We believe the smart use of technology in people’s everyday lives will help them take steps to address preventable conditions such as hypertension, diabetes, and obesity before they become chronic conditions. In fact, according to a recent JAMA Oncology study, even cancer may be a preventable disease, and taking a proactive approach to health may help prevent half of all cancer deaths. The connected health revolution will be a major driver of this kind of preventative approach – and the potential impact is huge.

What is the connected health revolution? Bringing improved technology to healthcare isn’t simply about wearable gadgets or new apps, but about empowering people with the tools and information they need to reach their personal health goals.

The International Press Telecommunications Council (IPTC) released SportsML 3.0, the recently approved comprehensive update of the open and highly flexible standard for the interchange of sports data.

Developed by the Sports Content Working Party of IPTC, which includes organisations from eight different countries, SportsML 3.0 is designed to be easy to understand and implement, and covers the full gamut of sports events. Sports Markup Language is the tech-industry standard XML vocabulary for Sports scores, lineups, schedules, standings and statistics. The specification and documentation can be downloaded from https://iptc.org/standards/sportsml-g2/

SportsML has been adopted by many international news organizations, including the BBC (UK), NTB (Norway), TT (Sweden), APA (Austria), AP (USA), and more. It has been applied to results from the Olympics, European football competitions, as well as the major North American sports leagues, for team, individual and head-to-head sports.

In the last post, I showed how to use the broom package to collect results of individual player regressions. Specifically, I collected quadratic fits to home run rates of players who have hit 500 career home runs, and estimated the ages where the players achieved peak performance.

There was one issue that I ignored — these estimates of peak performance using individual player data can be pretty poor. I hid this problem in the earlier post by presenting only the “reasonable” estimates that fell between 20 and 40 years.

Here I demonstrate this problem, and show how one can correct this problem by use of a simple multilevel model.

Risk-sensitivity theory predicts that decision-makers should prefer high-risk options in high need situations when low-risk options will not meet these needs. Recent attempts to adopt risk-sensitivity as a framework for understanding human decision-making have been promising. However, this research has focused on individual-level decision-making, has not examined behavior in naturalistic settings, and has not examined the influence of multiple levels of need on decision-making under risk. We examined group-level risk-sensitive decision-making in two American football leagues: the National Football League (NFL) and the National College Athletic Association (NCAA) Division I. Play decisions from the 2012 NFL (Study 1; N?=?33?944), 2013 NFL (Study 2; N?=?34?087), and 2012 NCAA (Study 3; N?=?15?250) regular seasons were analyzed. Results demonstrate that teams made risk-sensitive decisions based on two distinct needs: attaining first downs (a key proximate goal in football) and acquiring points above parity. Evidence for risk-sensitive decisions was particularly strong when motivational needs were most salient. These findings are the first empirical demonstration of team risk-sensitivity in a naturalistic organizational setting.

… Vardy turned down Arsenal’s offer and instead accepted an improved contract from Leicester; why would the Foxes have been wise to encourage Vardy to move to North London? Let’s run through the reasons.

Player aging is a thing. We know that people get physically stronger as they mature from a teenager into an adult and then some time later they begin to lose some of their physical edge. That much is a fact, but what is open to some debate is when exactly those transitions happen, what is the extent of the improvement and subsequent decline and also whether players’ increasing tactical knowledge and “game sense” as they gain experience can help offset some of their loss in physical edge.

There have been other pieces written on player aging. Simon Gleave did a presentation at one of the OptaPro forums on this topic, and he wrote this follow up piece. Michael Caley has also written about this, as he has done with just about everything else to do with football analytics, but while most of the current writings tend to focus on the share of player minutes at each age I wanted to have a more detailed look at how some individual components of players’ performances are impacted as they age.

Planning is a key process that underpins the achievement of sustainable high performance outcomes. Australia’s Winning Edge 2012-2022 describes the Australian Sports Commission (ASC) and Australian Institute of Sport’s (AIS) game plan for moving from world class to world best, and identifies the need for planning and review processes to be contemporary and provide for elevated accountability across the sector.