Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 16, 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

… there are other factors specific to Real Madrid that make a repeat unlikely. Their coach, Zinedine Zidane, has less than a year of top-flight experience under his belt. There are off-the-pitch distractions to deal with, such as a looming transfer ban for signing underage players (the club have taken their appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport) and Cristiano Ronaldo’s contract, which expires in 2018.

There’s also a sense that the window of opportunity is beginning to close for the core of the club. Pepe (33), Ronaldo (31), Luka Modric (31) and Sergio Ramos (30) are all the wrong side of 30. Karim Benzema is 28 and, though he is coming off a prolific season, he has been slowed by injuries and off-pitch issues.

It’s not just the age of Madrid’s stars, it’s the mileage. This is the 15th season in the top flight as a starter for both Pepe and Ronaldo, the 12th for Ramos, 11th for Modric and 10th for Marcelo. It all adds up.

Major League Baseball announced today it has suspended San Diego Padres general manager A.J. Preller for 30 days without pay for his involvement in the July trade of pitcher Drew Pomeranz to the Boston Red Sox. On its face, that’s a pretty anodyne description by the league but it would stand to reason it’s for Preller’s involvement in the Padres setting up a two-tiered medical record keeping system seemingly intended to keep pertinent medical information from opposing teams.

As reported by ESPN’s Buster Olney, the Padres started storing medical information on its players in two bins: One for the club that tracked all medical issues and treatment, and another for other clubs to peruse and examine that basically catalogued the bare necessity about injuries. It’s that latter record that goes into MLB’s central administrative system and is used by teams when they need to check medical records ahead of trades. The Padres, Olney reports, set up their system this way so they could benefit in trades. The logic is simple: The healthier their player seemed, the less leverage a rival team could have in negotiations.

WIth Pomeranz, the Red Sox found out after the trade that the pitcher was undergoing some preventative treatment that hadn’t been logged. Though there’s no strict rules on it, standard procedure is to log if players even go and use a hot tub or take Advil for something.

… This isn’t Jim Brown’s NFL, and it hasn’t been for a long time. Virtual reality aside, today’s game is an aerial spectacle; a league record for passing yards has been established each year since 2009. Backs are so devalued that only three were taken in the first round over the past four NFL drafts. (Ten were chosen over the previous four.)

The new way of thinking: The guys who run the ball are interchangeable and -replaceable—even the veterans. Over the 2013 and ’14 seasons DeMarco Murray led the NFL with 2,966 rushing yards, and LeSean McCoy finished second with 2,926 (each also won a single-season rushing title), but going into last season, the Cowboys let Murray walk in free agency, and McCoy was traded to Buffalo for a linebacker who lasted only a year in Philadelphia. “People think you just tote the rock and go,” Bills coach Rex Ryan says, pantomiming a handoff. “That couldn’t be further from the truth.”

Few coaches have been as loyal to the ground game. During Ryan’s seven years as a head coach—six with the Jets and one with the Bills, all with Lynn overseeing the running backs room—his teams have rushed for the most cumulative yards in the league.

… Nobody that night could’ve predicted any of this – the US senior team goals before his 18th birthday, the Bundesliga minutes, the multi-million dollar Premier League transfer offers – but there was something different about it. Pulisic had technical abilities you so rarely see at his age: a razor-sharp soccer IQ without so much traditional athletic skill, a lightning quick trigger on ball, a storm spotter’s vision, unreal close quarters control, preternatural comfort in one-on-one situations.

These were enough to arrest the attention of the American public on their own. But they’ve been doubly extraordinary because of their rarity. Put simply, we don’t get many of Pulisic’s archetype filtering through American soccer’s youth machinery.

The broader question – and one academy coaches from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico to the Atlantic are feverishly trying to answer – is why not.

“He’s a perfect storm,” former US and D.C United midfielder and current D.C. United head coach Ben Olsen told PennLive.com earlier this year. “And it’s going to have to be perfect.

The NFL season finally kicks off this week, but for the players, preparation began months ago to get their minds and bodies in shape.

The company tasked with helping many of them do so is Phoenix-based EXOS. EXOS develops health and human performance game plans for professional athletes, corporations, and other clientele. This year, more than half of all players selected in the first round of the NFL draft were trained by EXOS. While the company has training facilities where athletes can focus on building up their muscle and speed, EXOS says that it also tries to help them improve from a “holistic” standpoint.

“A lot of the secondary work that we do is education based–habit building, strategy building–teaching them and helping to provide with tools that they can then utilize on their own once they leave our facilities,” says Denis Logan, a performance specialist with EXOS.

A story at the start of Take Pride, a forthcoming book by University of British Columbia psychologist Jessica Tracy, is a typical one of youthful aimlessness, at least at first. Tracy writes about her post-college life in the late 1990s, when she moved across the country to San Francisco and got a job as a barista in a cozy cafe. It was a pleasant life, filled with lots of people to talk to and lots of time to read, along with few anxieties or responsibilities. But after about a year, she started missing something she’d had in college, an emotion that she used to experience often as a student, especially when working on the magazine she started with friends, but that she rarely felt as a barista.

“I was missing the feeling of pride I experienced from creating that magazine — the feeling of building something that seemed important,” Tracy writes. “I’m not talking about the feeling I had when I saw our first completed issue of the magazine dispersed all over campus. I wasn’t missing the feeling of pride in a job well done or of basking in others’ (remarkably restrained) appreciation of the magazine. What I was missing was that late-night, hard-working knowing-we-were-doing-something-we-cared-about pride.”

Good chess players are more intelligent than bad ones, according to a study that suggests that talent is the most important factor in success across a wide variety of intellectual disciplines.

While this may sound obvious, it has been the subject of intense debate between academics since the 1920s.

On the one side of the argument are determinists such as Sir Francis Galton, the 19th-century statistician, who found that distinction in music, science and art ran in families and argued that natural ability was everything. On the other are behaviourists, who believe that practice outweighs any innate skill.

… Coaches and trainers have long known that hard, sustained efforts can deplete the endocrine system, which in turn impacts the body’s ability to build muscle, lowers red blood cell counts, and contributes to fatigue. The surprising news of this study, says Anderson, is that cortisol levels rebounded rather quickly—in about 24 hours—while testosterone requires up to 72 hours. Coaches who have used cortisol measurements as a recovery marker therefore must now consider the fact that testosterone is likely still suppressed, and take reactive measures to return its level to normal. The good news is that there’s a relatively simple (and research backed) way to accomplish this: getting social with your recovery.

With the industry scrambling to match Apple’s wireless earbuds, adding Valencell Inc.’s tiny PerformTek biometric measurement module to an earbud goes beyond Apple’s newly announced AirPods. AirPods house a single microelectromechanical system (MEMS) accelerometer as a sensor. In contrast, PerformTek adds to biometric sensors already fine-tuned for health-care caliber performance metrics for sports, fitness and medical applications.

According to analyst Nick Hunn at WiFore Consulting who predicted a $30 billion market for wireless earbuds by 2020 before the iPhone 7 AirBuds announcement, he’s considering upping his prediction now that the “keep up with Apple” factor is in play.

“It gives me confidence that we will probably meet or exceed that number,” Hunn told EE Times

… The same year Garmin released its first wearable, the Forerunner 201, a pager-size, GPS-equipped running watch that cost exactly $160.70. Garmin followed it with several similar products, but its wearables business remained modest and dwarfed by the much larger automobile division. At the time, wearables were still quite expensive to manufacture and were powered by large chips that made the gadgets cumbersome and unattractive. And in the pre-smartphone era, customers didn’t really think much about–or demand–personal GPS-tracking technology.

Yet as soon as the iPhone began clobbering Garmin’s GPS sales, Pemble, then chief operating officer and top lieutenant to Kao–who had lasted past Burrell’s retirement in 2004–realized wearables might save the company from extinction. “We saw them as something that had some legs,” he says. The shift to wearables intensified after Pemble replaced Kao as chief executive in 2013, and Garmin accelerated to expand beyond running watches to specialized ones aimed at cyclists, runners, triathletes, swimmers, golfers and hikers.

As Keenan Allen lay on the turf Sunday, the steps that will lead to his return were already starting. From the moment James Collins, the Chargers’ head athletic trainer, laid his hands on the knee, confirming that the ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) was ruptured, Allen’s fate became part of an all-too-common process. The NFL is a factory, creating patients for surgeons and clients for rehab professionals. However, few understand that process, so let’s take a look at what happens along the road to recovery.

Despite the singular focus by the media on concussion in sports and its supposed universal and dire consequences, if you ask any athlete what injury he or she fears most, the answer is likely to be: torn ACL.

The reasons are simple. Most players will return in weeks from a concussion. A torn ACL is always a season-ender and all too often — 40 percent of the time — a career-ender. Then, decades into the future, the victim of an ACL tear faces a 50/50 prospect of needing a knee replacement necessitated by severe arthritis. The long-term consequences of an isolated and properly managed concussion are usually negligible.

Rather than accept these discouraging numbers, though, Norwegian physiotherapists authored an editorial in this month’s issue of the Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy (JOSPT) that explained how athletes and those treating them should do better.

“We cannot afford to ‘sit and wait’ until posttraumatic knee (arthritis) has developed,” they wrote. “There is high-level evidence that higher body mass index (BMI), physical inactivity and quadriceps weakness are significant risk factors for development of (arthritis).”

The NHL is overhauling its concussion monitoring system.

Deputy Commissioner Bill Daly said the league will have four concussion spotters watching all games from a centralized location in either Toronto or New York, as well as spotters at each game to check for visible symptoms. Those spotters will have the authority to have players removed from games.

“It’s a pretty major revamp from what it was last year,” Daly said Wednesday. “We’re going to have both those (remote and on-site) spotters, plus you have the clubs’ medical staffs. We’re just building in reinforcements, really, to make the system work better.”

In what has already been a summer unlike any other in recent memory for the Colorado Avalanche, the front office has reportedly turned its attention towards the burgeoning world of hockey analytics to further bolster its ranks. Earlier today, BSN Denver confirmed through various sources the organization has hired both Arik Parnass and Zac Urback.

The pair will report directly to Assistant General Manager Chris MacFarland, whose influence in the front office seems to show more with every move the team makes. Both Parnass and Urback are well-known in the analytics community for their various works and the hirings signal an organizational shift away from the Patrick Roy-era. Roy was notoriously critical of analytics and despite the team dabbling in them during his tenure, did not fully embrace them until this summer, which might have helped set the table for the curious manner in which Roy departed.

… On the challenges of building a roster in a league with complicated cap, designated player, and allocation money rules…

I look at it, first and foremost as a big jigsaw puzzle, basically. I think it’s very exciting, and it gives us a level playing field, ultimately. We can carry, with all the different technicalities, we can essentially carry a twenty-nine man roster, so every team starts with that, and it means that other teams can only have three players that they can spend wildly on. So we’re really all in the same boat for twenty-six players. And I think that means that if you are intelligent, and if you’re smart with your player acquisition strategy, that you can put yourself in a position to be successful year-in, year-out. And that’s really what we want to do here. We want to be a perennial playoff team. And I think that, while there are constraints in place, the constraints are the same for everybody. And I certainly believe that what we’re putting in place here now; the strategy, the player evaluation database, and the structures that we’ve got in place, will enable us to be strong for years to come and on a consistent basis.

The mantra “fail fast” can inject confidence into the efforts of an inexperienced entrepreneur: Try out your idea, see where it goes, hope that if it’s not going to work it tanks quickly, and then start over again.

But there’s a problem with how the phrase is sometimes applied. As a general concept, it can sound like a major failure is just part of the process of building a great startup. That may be the cases in some scenarios, but venture capitalist Marc Andreessen cautions that the approach is most useful in targeted applications.

“I think ‘fail fast’ works really well on tactics,” he said during the Disrupt SF technology conference hosted by TechCrunch in San Francisco. “I think ‘fail fast’ is catastrophic when it’s applied to strategy, if it’s applied to goals.”

… In football, the inevitable response to an extended run of poor results is to replace the club’s manager or first team coach. In business, this would be seen as a sign of instability and unlikely to have a long-term positive effect; the same is often true for football clubs.

Analysis by Dutch economist Dr Bas ter Weel suggests changing managers mid-season does nothing to change the fortunes of clubs. There can be a short-term improvement in results when a new manager comes on board, but ter Weel argued this is misleading because teams suffering an uncharacteristic slump in form will usually bounce back regardless.