Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 19, 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

Far away from the limelight Quinn basked in as a bobsledder in Sochi, Russia, back in 2014, the 32-year-old was at the U.S. Olympic Training Site at ETSU taking his first steps on a journey he hopes will take him all the way to the 2018 Winter Olympics in PyeongChang, South Korea.

For athletes like Quinn, the decision to chase their Olympic dreams is a complicated one. Quinn dabbled with retirement following the 2012 games, but that decision didn’t have anything to do with concerns that his skills as an athlete were on the decline.

“The biggest challenge for Olympians is trying to find a way to finance the sport without going into debt,” Quinn said.

Sidney Crosby explains how he and Andy O’Brien worked for years to get his strengthen and conditioning where it needed to be to play at an NHL level.

Background: In patients who have undergone anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction (ACLR), the effect of neuromuscular re-education (NMR) programs on standard hop tests outcomes, including limb symmetry indices (LSIs), is unknown.

Hypothesis: Both legs will show improvement in hop test–measured units after neuromuscular training, but the involved leg will show relatively greater improvement leading to improved limb symmetry. Patients younger than 18 years will show more improvement than patients who are older.

Study Design: Retrospective cohort study.

Level of Evidence: Level 3.

Methods: Patients self-selected their participation in this NMR program, which was completed after traditional outpatient physical therapy. Pre– and post–hop test scores were recorded as the primary outcome measure.

Results: Seventy-one patients met the inclusion criteria and completed hop testing. Overall, the involved leg showed significant improvements (pretest/posttest) for single-leg hop (138.30 cm/156.89 cm), triple crossover hop (370.05 cm/423.11 cm), and timed hop (2.21 s/1.99 s). Similarly, on the uninvolved leg, improvements were seen for the single-leg hop (159.30 cm/171.87 cm) and triple crossover hop (427.50 cm/471.27 cm). Overall mean limb symmetry improved across all 4 hop tests, but there was significant improvement only on the single-leg hop (87% pretest to 92% posttest). Patients younger than 18 years showed mean significant LSI improvement on the triple crossover hop.

Conclusion: Utilizing an intensive 6-week NMR program after ACLR prior to return to sport can improve quantitative hop test measurements. Patients younger than 18 years had greater improvement than those 18 years and older.

Clinical Relevance: Advanced NMR programs can be successfully utilized in the postoperative ACLR setting to improve quantitative limb symmetry.

49ers coach Chip Kelly tried to use science to explain his team practice schedule, but two experts have no idea what he’s talking about

… Check in, however, with Notre Dame vice president and James E. Rohr director of athletics Jack Swarbrick and senior associate athletics director for student-athlete services Mike Harrity—and Irish head coaches—and they’ll all suggest French has the potential to be as crucial a long-term contributor to the success of Notre Dame athletics as anyone who makes a tackle or swims a lap.

[Duncan] French came on board in January as director of performance sciences for Notre Dame athletics. He works across all sports to provide a technical interface between coaches and support services, as well as coordinating the sports science initiatives that support competitive advantage.

Think of him as one of those old-fashioned, country physicians. He has the ability to go door to door with the 26 Irish sports and use his bag of tools to help keep all those athletes and programs running smoothly, if not even more efficiently than that.

Finch Farm, Thursday morning, and Everton players are putting another intense training session behind them with a game of head tennis. The mood is as lighthearted as the contest until Ronald Koeman interrupts. “One team was losing quite heavily and he wanted to know why,” Gareth Barry discloses. “He doesn’t want anyone losing their focus and with good reason. One team shouldn’t be getting beat so heavily at anything within the club, whether it’s head tennis, five-a-side or on a Saturday.”

Head tennis might not be as much fun as it used to be but Koeman has found a receptive audience since replacing Roberto Martínez in June. Five games into his tenure and the focus on not getting beaten – marginally or heavily – holds firm. Everton are unbeaten in the Premier League before

Managerial appointments are often a stark contrast to what has gone before and Everton’s decision to lure the man who took Southampton into Europe is no exception. One of Koeman’s first acts upon signing a £6m-per-annum, three-year contract was to bring forward the start of pre-season training. The pre-arranged break was too long, he believed. Players were told to report to Finch Farm at 9am each day to eat breakfast together. No mobile phones are allowed at mealtimes. Baseball caps and headphones are also banned when travelling to matches. Training has a sharpness that has been reflected in Everton’s play in the final third and when out of possession.

The Spurs coach was once driven to tears by his hero Marcelo Biesla, which is why he knows he has to be brutally honest with his Spurs players who are still growing up

The Chicago Cubs are among the favourites to win the 2016 Major League Baseball World Series, however, the club is counting on its players being deep sleepers to get it there. As part of its league-leading analytics offerings, the Cubs recently added Fatigue Science’s wearable sleep monitoring technology to their performance management programs.

“Sleep and fatigue represent some of the most significant pieces of the human performance puzzle remaining,” says Mark O’Neal, Director of Medical Administration for the Cubs. “And even though there is an enormous amount of interest and discussion around these topics, sleep and fatigue are still very difficult to accurately monitor and measure. Fatigue Science changes that for us in a very real way, letting our coaches and athletes see where we can and should make adjustments to improve performance.”

Blue Star Sports announced Thursday that it has added LeagueLineup, giving the Frisco-based youth sports company its sixth company acquisition in 120 days.

Led by CEO Rob Wechsler, Blue Star Sports seeks to centralize and simplify technology for youth leagues, clubs, associations and governing bodies in all aspects of sports management. The company claims 20 million users in 23 countries including the United States.

As he explained to Dalton LaFerney of The Dallas Morning News, Wechsler envisions his firm solving a common problem for thousands of youth sports leagues. When nobody will step up to coach or manage a team, parents must volunteer. Those volunteers turn to technology for help.

There are 2 main kinds of Hamstring strains: sprinting-type and stretching-type, with different injury mechanisms. This systematic review included 24 articles and shows an overview of the determinants of return to sport and their influence on prognosis and recovery.

Athletes aren’t supposed to have emotions. They are meant to be superheroes – immune to fear, doubt and mental health issues. They’re not.

“I think a lot of people do a very good impression of being a superhero,” says Victoria Pendleton, who seemed to spend much of her glittering track cycling career on the verge of an emotional collapse.

The double Olympic champion was wracked with anxiety, but stands out as one of the few high-level athletes who have opened up about their issues.

“I’ve always been very honest and open about my own insecurities and vulnerabilities from a mental perspective,” she tells us. “I’ve never been too embarrassed about it, even though I have been criticised by people within my sport, saying it was making me an easier opponent to beat.”

Read more at http://sport-magazine.co.uk/features/alone#bQAQ6vtACEbmqCS1.99

Objectives

To explore the effects of kinesiology taping (KT) and athletic taping (AT) on ankle proprioception when tested in functional, full weight-bearing stance.
Design

Cross-sectional study.
Methods

Twenty-four healthy university students participated. Proprioception was measured using the Active Movement Extent Discrimination Apparatus (AMEDA). The three testing conditions: no-taping, KT, AT, and foot tested were randomly assigned. Perceived comfort, support and proprioceptive performance under two taping conditions were recorded.
Results

Proprioceptive discrimination scores with 95% CIs for no-taping, KT and AT were 0.81 (0.79-0.84), 0.81 (0.79-0.83), and 0.79 (0.77-0.81). Repeated measures ANOVA showed neither any significant difference associated with taping compared with no-taping (p?=?0.30), nor any difference between KT and AT (p?=?0.19). The group was then divided, according to their no-taping scores, into two sub-groups: with scores below the no-taping mean (n?=?13), and above the mean (n?=?11). ANOVA revealed a significant interaction (p?=?0.008) indicating that above-average no-taping performers proprioception scores were worse when taped, whereas below-average performers improved. For both KT and AT, only ratings of perceived comfort when taped were significantly associated with actual proprioceptive performance (both r?>?0.44, p???0.03). Other perception ratings (support and performance) were significantly inter-correlated (both r?>?0.42, p0.31).
Conclusions

Taping of the foot and ankle may amplify sensory input in a way that enhances proprioception of poor performers but produces an input overload that impairs proprioception in those who originally performed well when no-taping. Screening of ankle proprioception may identify those who would benefit most from taping.

… I wonder what is happening out there, in real football, in the training grounds. Do coaches make plans to such level of detail? Do they write them down, communicate them to the players, and practise them in training? Somehow I doubt it: rarely the word plan is mentioned by pundits and media analysts of the game. A notable exception was after England’s unexpected defeat by Iceland when the manager was blamed for not having one. Formation is the word that seems to be used in its place. But formation only specifies position, not action. Should we then assume that whatever players do is part of a plan, and just judge the execution?

Given a formation, for example, how can we judge accurately the performance of a midfielder that always attempts long passes (and loses most of them) when he also had the option of an easy forward pass to his right? We can’t! Our stats will show that he has performed poorly. But without knowing the plan this may be the wrong conclusion. We don’t know if the coach has instructed him to act in this way. Perhaps the forward is at fault for not taking the right position to collect the passes. As for the free player on his right, may be the plan says that he should not be there, but yards forward, and thus taking a defender with him, etc. etc…

So, what is the worth of our analysis if we only know what we can see?

A new TD Ameritrade survey reveals sports parents are invested in helping kids achieve athletic aspirations, yet often sideline their own financial goals. Sports parents are often the unsung heroes behind top athletes and their dedication to their children is admirable. The survey results highlight that natural desire to put their children’s needs before their own. In addition to sacrificing family vacations and other extras, parents of elite athletes admit to saving less, delaying retirement and tapping college funds to pay for sports.

It was inevitable, the way most any outcome is when it’s given ample time and opportunity: The Athletics have, at last, zigged and zagged their way to near-oblivion.

Billy Beane, David Forst, and their parliament of front-office owls had spent their tenures going against every widespread strategical trend to find a metaphorical nut — akin to the good little hipster squirrel small-payroll teams must emulate to compete on a regular basis — and had done well in doing so, reaching the postseason each fall from 2012-14. At some point, though, the mathematical principles guiding Oakland’s decisions were going to trump their resourcefulness.

“Some point” passed in 2015, when Oakland’s nearly two-decade-long stretch without a 90-loss campaign ended. The A’s are going to drop another 90 this season, giving them consecutive such efforts for the first time since the ’70s. Shy of blind faith in Beane and Forst — and that used to be enough — there isn’t sufficient reason to believe things will be different for Oakland in 2017.