Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 12, 2016

I recently joined an applied research group at Georgia Tech, the Wearable Computing Center (WCC).

WCC is interdisciplinary and skilled in both technology development and communication. The group works with industry through contract services or on an ongoing basis. So if you are a sports team that isn’t getting desired results from athlete performance technology, the Center can create an educational workshop that gets your organization on the same page technically. WCC can also develop custom technology to help achieve unmet objectives. If you are a sports technology vendor, WCC can help with content, service designs, user interfaces and business models. Please get in touch if I can tell you more or if you have questions I can answer.

You are also invited to check out the blog at http://sports.bradstenger.com where I am writing essays that work on making sense of the rapid and often technical advances in sports science. The blog is to be a staging area for reports that should go on sale in early-2017. If your organization needs custom research into an applied sports science issue, please get in touch.

Thanks.
-Brad Stenger

… He tore a ligament in his thumb in a spring-training collision at first base before he could pitch, missed more than four months and was not right when he returned to the Red Sox. He strained his biceps the following April.

“That was pretty much the start of everything,” Bailey said. “I just wasn’t the same after that.”

He returned again unsound and pitched through pain for seven weeks, until it overwhelmed him. He saw doctors and was told he would effectively require a full shoulder reconstruction. Dr. David Altchek, the New York Mets’ medical director, performed an anterior capsule repair and dredged through his labrum and rotator cuff. He told Bailey he would need at least 18 months, and probably two years, to pitch again, if he ever did. Two-time Cy Young Award winner Johan Santana had the same surgery the same year and never made it back.

Sixteen months later, after the treachery of rehab, Bailey signed with the New York Yankees, where Billy Eppler, now the Angels’ general manager, encountered him.

… Compete, compete, compete.

If there was an over/under on how many times Coach Carroll would say that in a day, I’d take the over every time. His coaching philosophy is to create a culture of competition. I didn’t recognize it right away when I got to Seattle. I was a part of his second Seahawks draft class, so Coach Carroll hadn’t yet fully implemented it. It takes time to change the culture of an organization. But over time, you could see the change. He started purging the guys who didn’t buy in. There were older guys who thought they were too good for practice — that they could sit out most of the week and just play on Sundays. They were the first to go, replaced by Doug and me and other guys who were also hungry and ready to work, including Ricardo Lockette, Bobby Wagner and Jermaine Kearse. By the end of my second season, Coach Carroll’s philosophy had started to manifest itself.

You could tell, because it felt like college.

… Gurley missed four games of the 2014 season at Georgia, serving a suspension after receiving more than $3,000 for signing memorabilia. His first game back was against Auburn. With 5 minutes and 21 seconds remaining in the fourth quarter and Georgia leading 27-7, his left leg planted awkwardly on a 6-yard run. He tore his ACL and was out for the season.

A franchise back is the player you’re waiting to see get up after the others peel themselves off the pile on top of him. Eddie George, in an interview with Esquire last September, defined the running back role as “me and 11 defenders trying to take me down.” This time, Gurley didn’t get up.

After nearly a year of rehab, he fell to the Rams at No. 10 overall in the 2015 draft. “These guys only come out once every 10 years,” Fisher told the NFL Network last season. “We had done all of our research with the knee. We were just hopeful that someone didn’t trade up ahead of us.” They limited his work in camp and continued to pump the brakes once the season began, not fully integrating him into the offense until Week 4. With the Rams out of playoff contention, they sat him in Week 17.

.After the Browns’ final preseason game, Scooby Wright sat in silence, leaning forward in his chair, eye-black still freshly smudged on his face, his head buried in his phone in his locker. As his teammates undressed and headed for the showers, Wright checked his messages.

His agent had texted: You did what you needed to do.

The Browns’ new regime, in an effort to overhaul the roster, had made a record-tying 14 picks in the draft, and Wright, the last of those 14 picks, was now fighting to make the roster as a linebacker. In the first three preseason games Wright felt he had been lost in the shuffle. But in this the fourth and final game, with the starters sitting for most if not all of it, Wright played about two and a half quarters, recording four tackles and a sack and making one great last impression on the coaching staff late in the fourth quarter.

World number two Angelique Kerber reveals her tips for getting grand slam fit – just in time for the final slam of the year.

As part of this site I do a lot online coaching with individual players and consultations with strength and conditioning coaches who work with teams. One of the questions that comes up again and again is how to structure the training day- should you train in the gym first then do rugby, or do rugby then weight training?

In my experience 90% of professional rugby teams train heavy in the gym before doing any on-field training. The primary reason for this is usually a desire to train hard and heavy in the gym when players are freshest. Teams fear that if they perform weight training after an intense field session, the session might not be as productive (and obviously strength is the MOST important thing right?! Wrong, but let’s save this for another post).

Secondary reasons often include the desire to take advantage of any potentiation effect (a temporary boost in strength and power triggered by high force or speed exercise) during the field session. These reasons may be true and valid but I disagree wholeheartedly.

… “The key is a good, solid dynamic warmup,” said Pete Friesen, the head trainer and strength and conditioning coach for the Carolina Hurricanes. “That means incorporating movement in each exercise, and integrating components that make your muscles contract, elevate your heart rate, increase your body temperature.”

Additionally, a good dynamic warm-up will help your neurological system begin firing and deepen your breathing, so you’re entire body is ready to compete.

FC Dallas coach Oscar Pareja has developed a reputation in the US as a youth development guru.

From playing in the league himself to leading FC Dallas’ academy, before becoming a head coach in Colorado and then taking the same position in Dallas, Pareja has been hands on in various levels of youth development.

He’s also put his money where his mouth is, not only bringing through the “Rapkids” era by playing a core group of young pros in Colorado in his time there, but regularly giving playing time to young players in Dallas, including several Homegrown players.

The University of Michigan football team took the field for its season opener on Sept. 3 accompanied by Michael Jordan, the team’s honorary captain for the game, in uniforms bearing his signature Jumpman logo. Such pageantry is the fruit of a new apparel contract, worth about $170 million, between the university and Nike.

But one significant aspect of the deal, among the richest in college sports, was not apparent to the crowd. A clause in the contract could, in the future, allow Nike to harvest personal data from Michigan athletes through the use of wearable technology like heart-rate monitors, GPS trackers and other devices that log myriad biological activities.

As debates about athletes’ rights intensify in big-time college sports, the next frontier, independent experts say, could be privacy issues related to wearable tech, which in coming years could expand beyond health trackers like Fitbit and the Apple Watch to so-called smart clothing, with sensors embedded in the material itself.

The most ambitious projects are still on the drawing board. But at Michigan, a range of devices could eventually collect data including “speed, distance, vertical leap height, maximum time aloft, shot attempts, ball possession, heart rate, running route” and other measurements, according to the contract.

MIT has used machine learning to create video from still images, and the results are pretty impressive. As you can see from the above image, there’s a lot of natural form to the movement in the videos.

The system “learns” types of videos (beach, baby, golf swing…) and, starting from still images, replicates the movements that are most commonly seen in those videos. So the beach video looks like it has crashing waves, for instance.

But like other machine-generated images, these have limitations. The first is size: what you see above is the extent to which the program can render its video. Length is also an issue: only about a second of video gets produced.

Fingerprints can be stolen, iris scans spoofed, and facial recognition software fooled. It has become increasingly challenging to unassailably authenticate a person’s identity, so academic teams have turned to brain waves as the next step in biometric identification.

Many of these efforts seek to outdo one another, boasting how accurately and accessibly they can verify a person’s identity using electroencephalograph (EEG) data. In April, for example, a team in New York achieved 100 percent accuracy at identifying individuals using a skullcap with 30 electrodes. Last week, we reported on a simple set of earbud sensors that worked with 80 percent accuracy.

George Parros has joined the NHL Department of Player Safety, the League announced Wednesday.

Parros, who played nine seasons in the NHL, was named director, player safety and will work from Las Vegas. He is part of the core group that includes Stephane Quintal, Patrick Burke, Damian Echevarrieta and Chris Pronger that handles disciplinary decisions within the department.

“It’s an interesting opportunity to not only watch a lot of hockey and remain in the sport, but kind of affect what’s going on in the sport in a way that things move forward,” Parros told NHL.com. “You’re trying educate the players, and the thing that best suits me for the job is that I’ve played the game for a long time and played as physical as anybody else, perhaps more so, and never once got fined or suspended.

… Too small to play football in college, McAdoo had thrown himself into his studies. He spent many of his after-school hours as an assistant coach at a local high school — football is a passion in Western Pennsylvania — but at other times, McAdoo began to see himself as an academic.

“Academics became a way for me to compete; I enjoyed it,” he said last month.

And McAdoo had not abandoned sports altogether. Pursuing his master’s was part of a grander plan that included applying to law school. He then intended to parlay his various degrees to get a top administrative job in intercollegiate athletics.

… So far the maximum outlay for buying a player by any club has hovered around 20 per cent of total turnover. Going by that rate, the days of the €200m transfer are probably only three to five years away, as the super clubs inch closer to €1bn revenue.

Manager’s salaries will increase, but the most under-paid members of staff, relative to their ability to add value to their teams are currently those tasked with identifying talent. A good sporting director/chief scout, able to sign cheap and sell expensively will be worth millions over the course of the next two or three years as average player fees grow in tandem with overall revenue.

… Freelap USA: Managing training and recovery data requires a lot of cleaning because even automated data from devices and sensors has limitations. While some equipment and software companies claim streamlined solutions, could you share the difficulties of dealing with sports technology in team environments?

Ryan Smyth: When working with a team, the data collected can be useful for a number of different people, for a number of different reasons. And each of these people needs to look at their own specific piece of the puzzle, in their own specific way. So, while many products offer real-time metrics, there’s just not a quick one-size-fits-all way of organizing things yet.

It’s important to know the shortcomings of the technology, look for the key metrics that shape decisions, and focus on those that have the greatest impact at the moment. Past that, know what’s right and what’s wrong with the data you are collecting and get rid of the garbage, so you’re tracking the same things the same way over time.