Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 23, 2016

Basketball fans know the Las Vegas Summer League, if they know it at all, as a place to see promising lottery picks for the first time, and observe less-than-sober Los Angeles Lakers fans in the wild. But for the players on the court, most of whom will never play in the NBA, the Summer League is something different—part job fair and part audition, the world’s highest-stakes open run. People come to Las Vegas to gamble, but players like Josh Magette go there to bet on themselves.

After graduating from the University of Alabama-Huntsville in 2012, Magette has bounced back and forth between Europe to the D-League, which he led in assists per game last year; his Los Angeles D-Fenders made a surprising run to the finals. This summer, he headed out to Vegas to take another shot at the NBA call-up that’s eluded him for four years. It’s part of a year-long process that encompasses both Magette’s lifelong dream of playing in the NBA and the mundane economic realities of being a basketball player in a global marketplace.

For a veteran free agent like Magette, each offseason is essentially a less-hyped version of the pre-draft meat market college players go through every summer. Shuttling to and from team practice facilities for mini-camps with 20-25 other players at a similar stage in their careers, Magette attempted show executives what he could bring to their team, always in just a few hours over a few days. It’s not any easier than it sounds, especially when everything is so heavily based on the age-old “eye test.”

… Like many coaches, Chip Kelly doesn’t like to appear afraid of injury, or prone to change his game plan to avoid it. But if you read between the lines of his press conference comments Thursday, the balancing act is apparent.

For one thing, Chip always avoids predicting who will start or even play, because an injury the day before your game can change everything. This comes up almost every press conference. For example, on August 14th he was asked whether he wanted Colin Kaepernick to start a preseason game. Kelly replied:

I’m not an ‘if’ guy, in terms of hypotheticals. So, I don’t really know and for me to talk about it and then to find out that Blaine rolls his ankle on Thursday, [QB] Jeff Driskel is starting and then we’re having a whole different conversation. So, we’ll just take it day-to-day as we go with those guys.

The NFL confirmed Sunday a streamlined policy for reporting an injured player’s game status during the regular season, a move that addresses the rise of gamesmanship among teams that want to limit that information for competitive purposes.

Under the revised policy, approved recently by the NFL competition committee, the “probable” category has been eliminated and the remaining classifications have been redefined.

Two days before kickoff, teams must list injured players as “questionable,” “doubtful” or “out” for that game.

… So with fellow female swimmers trailing in Ledecky’s wake, do men really provide her only serious competition? And how near is she to closing the gender gap in athletic performance?

To find out, BuzzFeed News analyzed swimming and track-and-field events over Olympic history. We also looked at current world records, plus the full history of world record performances for the long-distance swimming events where Ledecky is most dominant.

The analysis confirms that Ledecky is a truly remarkable athlete who is narrowing the gender gap between male and female athletes. She isn’t yet into uncharted territory. But then again, she’s probably still a couple of years away from her peak.

… We recently caught up with Zusi between flights, where we discussed his physical fitness, how he’s able to juggle club and country commitments, and his take on the USMNT’s upcoming World Cup Qualifying schedule.

The winds of change are sweeping through the world of coaching and structural hierarchies are being torn down. Coaches and managers are no longer the authoritative rulers who dole out knowledge and wisdom to players like a mother bird feeds her chicks. Today, coaches are facilitators: respected figures who help guide elite teams and athletes down the path to knowledge but leave the problem solving up to those who have to perform on the field of play. CONQA Sport speaks with John Pitts, an elite coach with experience in a wide variety of sports, to unpack this modern approach.

In the interest of preserving your mental energy, let’s start this article with the eventual takeaway: Don’t make important decisions when your brain is on empty.

I know you’ve heard this advice before, and it sounds reasonable enough, but does the science really support it? Increasingly the answer is — yes. More and more it seems that our brains hit an energy-drain threshold, beyond which impulsiveness increases and sound decision-making suffers.

The latest evidence comes from a small study by researchers at the French Institute of Health and Research (INSERM). The research team put a group of volunteers through six hours of challenging memory tasks. At various points while doing the tasks, the volunteers were faced with choosing either a small amount of cash now or a larger amount later.

… An invisible but important factor controlling complicated sensory-motor responses is brainwaves. Brainwaves are oscillations in activity of millions of neurons taking place over large areas of the cerebral cortex. The waves result from the combined activity of large populations of neurons that generate fluctuations in the electrical field in the surrounding brain tissue. These voltage surges can oscillate locally or sweep across large territories of the brain, but they can be picked up by electrodes placed on the scalp. Waves of electrical activity sweep through the brain at different frequencies like ripples, waves, and tides in a harbor all happening simultaneously, but each one acting in response to different forces and with different effects. Oscillations in the electric field of brain tissue help coordinate the firing of neurons in phase with each other, just as boats are rocked in synchrony by waves in a harbor. That coordinated firing is critical for organizing and coupling information transmission across distant regions of the brain. Like all waves, brainwaves interact constructively and destructively to filter, sort, and coordinate the flow of information in the brain. Different brainwaves oscillate at different characteristic frequency bands from 1 Hz to several hundred Hz, named alpha through delta, like broadcasts from different radio stations operating in their own frequency band.

Urban Meyer said last week would be the most important of camp, to see what kind of guys he had. This week, it’s determining ‘Game Ready’ — who will play and who won’t.

“We call it Code Green around here. It’s about game ready,” Meyer said Monday. “That’s what this week’s about. Next week, you’re not getting game ready. You’re installing game plan.

“Game ready is a term. I use a green marker. When we put a check next to your name, that means you’re a go. … This is that week we start making phone calls about, ‘Hey mom and dad, get ready to make some trips, because your son is starting at Ohio State.’ That’s what this week’s all about.”

The Giants’ new strength and conditioning coach wakes up at 3:15 a.m. Maybe 3:30 a.m. when he sleeps in.

Aaron Wellman is in his office at the helm of Big Blue’s glistening, revamped weight room by 4:15 with a focus so intense he could intimidate the sun into not rising, or more likely motivate it to reach its peak.

“If you want to ‘Go Wellman,’ man, you’ve got to go to a different place,” says Giants safety Nat Berhe, a former Wellman disciple at San Diego State. “The guy is amazing. He would be in the (Aztecs’) weight room lifting, it’d be 100 degrees and he’d have his poncho on, and everybody would be like, ‘What?’ The guy’s unbelievable.”

… Older sister Elizabeth may well be the answer. Herself a keen track and field athlete in high school, Liz’s coach, Eric Lehmann, approached her one day to demand “You have to get your sister to start running”. Gwen, however, was in love with swimming, refusing to miss a day in the pool for any other sport.

Lehmann, clearly unperturbed and aware of the potential talent in his midst, said he would be flexible, allowing her to swim around two run sessions a week. Success on two feet came swiftly, even though the hours devoted to running were significantly less than those swimming.

Moving to the University of Wisconsin, Madison, to study general accountancy (“not knowing what I wanted to study, but I just found this very interesting”) in 2004, Lehmann continued to encourage her, convincing her to try for the college team – “I just thought he was nuts,” admits Gwen now. “But he called up the coach, Jim Stintzi and I was on the team later that year. And then I did a time-trial and qualified for the NCAA’s [National Collegiate Athletic Association], so it was crazy.”

The Major League Baseball Players Association is worried about the effects wearable use on and off the field will have on players.

It follows the MLB approving two wearables, the Zephyr Bioharness and Motus elbow sleeve, which log heart-rate and strain on arms, respectively.

Some union representatives and players have argued that wearable data collection could be used to bench players that don’t get enough sleep or have a bad day on the practice field. Others suspect that MLB teams may use data to lower the contract value of players.

In this video, Prof. Dr. Guido Ellert from the Macromedia University of Applied Science in Munich, Germany, explains how he uses eye tracking in order to obtain insights into human behavior. Tobii Pro Glasses 2, the world’s most advanced wearable eye tracker, allows him to conduct novice versus expert studies unobtrusively in dynamic environments where the focus of attention is crucial, such as surfing, snowboarding, and refereeing sports games.

Division I men’s soccer coaches have begun a public campaign to revolutionize their sport by stretching the compact fall season across the full academic year.

The proposal would reduce the number of fall games, create a winter break, add games in the spring, reduce weekday games and bring both the conference and national tournaments to weather-friendly May and June.

“It’s a model whose time has come,” said Maryland Coach Sasho Cirovski, Division I men’s committee chair of the National Soccer Coaches Association of America. The current NCAA soccer calendar, which runs through the fall semester only, has been in place since 1959.

You’re a hotshot manager. You love your dashboards and you keep your finger on the beating pulse of the business. You take pride in using data to drive your decisions rather than shooting from the hip like one of those old-school 1950s bosses. This is the 21st century, and data is king. You even hired a sexy statistician or data scientist, though you don’t really understand what they do. Never mind, you can proudly tell all your friends that you are leading a modern data-driven team. Nothing can go wrong, right? Incorrect. If you don’t pay attention, data can drive you off a cliff. This article discusses seven of the ways this can happen. Read on to ensure it doesn’t happen to you.

1. Pretending uncertainty doesn’t exist