Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 22, 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

… To understand how Pedroia got back here, to a level at which he’s in line for his first Gold Glove since 2014 and bound to get MVP votes for the first time since he finished seventh in 2013, you have to rewind to the offseason and a change in his workout program.

Earlier in his career, Pedroia was a regular at Exos (formerly Athletes’ Performance), a training center for elite athletes in Phoenix, Arizona. But he fractured his left index finger late in the 2012 season, played the entirety of 2013 with a torn ulnar collateral ligament in his left thumb that eventually required surgery and had another procedure in 2014 to repair a tendon in his left wrist.

All the injuries forced him to alter his workouts. In 2013, because the Red Sox won the World Series, he was unable to have surgery until November, preventing him from doing his usual upper body conditioning. Perhaps as a consequence he posted career-lows in home runs (seven) and slugging (.376) in 2014. Following that season, he focused on strengthening his upper body, an approach that caused him to lose some flexibility and athleticism.

Pedroia was finally healthy this past winter, which enabled him to return to Exos and get back to the training regimen that worked in the past.

Adam Oates was an unemployed N.H.L. coach in the spring of 2015 when he tuned in to watch the N.B.A. finals.

At one point, the broadcast turned to a discussion about LeBron James of the Cleveland Cavaliers and his use of a private shooting coach, Idan Ravin, who had also worked with Kobe Bryant and others. Oates already knew that the Dallas Mavericks’ sharpshooting forward, Dirk Nowitzki, had been tutored by a coach, Holger Geschwindner.

“It got me thinking that there might be some guys that want a little extra attention or extra thoughts, depending on their schedule,” Oates said of N.H.L. players. “So I reached out to a couple guys, and every single guy said, ‘Yeah, I’d love that.’”

… Before August practices commenced, a sheet of paper appeared in Corey Clement’s locker. Across the top, in black block letters, it read: WISCONSIN FOOTBALL FALL CAMP RSVP. It asked the recipient to check YES or NO to an “invitation” to preseason camp, a micro-motivational ploy from the Badgers coaching staff. It set six conditions for participation, asking the invitee if he was willing to approach each day of camp with energy, with persistence, with belief in the process, with toughness and grit, with a mindset to see opportunity and seize it, and with enjoyment. Check YES or NO to each, sign at the bottom.

On the third line of his invitation, Clement saw another message scribbled next to the “belief in the process” question. STAY IN THE MOMENT! it read. He turned to friend and fellow running back Dare Ogunbowale and asked what was written on his card. Ogunbowale said his paper was clean.

Wisconsin running backs coach John Settle had added those four words to the pre-printed form, specifically for his most talented protégé, and specifically because Clement wasn’t mentally present and accounted for last season. “In my opinion, he was kind of out there in a fog,” Settle says. “They say a double-minded man is unstable—that’s what he was. He tried to concentrate on the football thing when he was over here, he tried to keep himself engaged, but not playing, it was hard on him. And then when he wasn’t here, he was totally disconnected. It was rough on him. Everybody could see it.”

… This season, Major League Baseball allowed wearable technology on the field during games for the first time. Only two products were given clearance: the Zephyr Bioharness, which measures heart rate and breathing, and the Motus sleeve. While the inroads — or intrusion, depending on one’s perspective — are inevitable, it still raises interesting and difficult quandaries.

Like every part of society, technology will only become more readily apparent and ingrained in baseball too. Already, Trackman and Pitchf/x — once revolutionary — are commonplace. Statcast cameras, which have turned defense into a quantifiable skill, were installed into all 30 MLB parks last year.

The new issue to solve is how to approach it all. Concerns about privacy and what happens to the newly available information have already popped up. Making it more inflammatory is that the new wearable tech, and whatever follows it, can and will siphon up information on the health of players.

… Had Mourinho not let De Bruyne go or continued the tradition of bouncing young players from loan to loan, he may never have developed into the player he is today. Admittedly, Mourinho clearly missed out on De Bruyne and would probably have loved to have had him in his disastrous final season at Stamford Bridge where the champions eventually finished 10th, but if you’re like youth football coach Matt Whitehouse, you’ll see that De Bruyne, Guardiola, Manchester City and Belgium all owe a debt of gratitude to the Portuguese manager.

Whitehouse works at the academy at Chesterfield FC, a small club south of Sheffield that plays in the third tier of English football. He also runs a well-respected blog that unpacks the challenges and joys of youth development. He believes that one of the best things a young player can do to further his career is to leave the comforts of a big club and go struggle in the world. That requires bravery on the part of the player and a willingness from the manager to let him go.

Firstly, like so many graduates around the globe taking gap years, young footballers who ply their trade in foreign lands develop a holistic understanding of the world. “Emotional maturity on and off the field is a massive contributor to succeeding,” Whitehouse says. “With everything else being equal, coaches and managers will always choose to work with a player who possesses a strong mental game.”

Samuele Marcora, the 47-year-old director of research at the School of Sport and Exercise Sciences at England’s University of Kent, doesn’t consider himself an endurance athlete. But he’s fast becoming one of the most talked-about researchers in the field. Marcora, who is originally from Italy, started making Maverick’s-size waves in 2009, with a study showing that a tired brain can have nearly as much impact on athletic performance as muscle exhaustion. The article, titled “Mental Fatigue Impairs Physical Performance in Humans” and published in the Journal of Applied Physiology, suggested that fatigue and the role it plays in endurance sports might be mostly in your head.

The implications are huge. If fatigue is grounded in perception, the logic goes, then an athlete can train to manage it, opening up new frontiers of performance. The theory, which Marcora calls the psychobiological model of exercise tolerance, because it combines the fields of psychology and biology, revises the long-dominant “central governor” theory, attributed to South African exercise physiologist Tim Noakes. Noakes argues that fatigue is a largely physical phenomenon that occurs when the brain signals depleted muscles that they’re out of gas.

Penn State has announced the appointment of David Hamilton as Assistant Athletic Director for Applied Health and Performance Science.

Hamilton is charged with establishing and leading a world class applied health and performance science program with a goal of optimizing the health and performance of Penn State’s 800 student-athletes. In the newly created sports science position, he will work closely with the Nittany Lions’ medical, athletic training, performance enhancement, sports psychology and sports nutrition staffs and student-athletes.

“We’re ecstatic that Dave Hamilton is joining the Penn State family,” said Sandy Barbour, Penn State Director of Athletics. “His expertise, education, and experience in working with elite student-athletes, along with the collaboration with our coaches and Sport Performance teams, will take our care and performance to the next level.

Over the weekend I wrote that no program in America dots it’s i’s (no pun intended) and crosses its t’s like Ohio State. Urban Meyer’s program runs the tightest of ships — not in terms of a militaristic buttoned-up attitude, but in how not a single area of the program underperforms and not a single stone gets left unturned. … But it all starts with little things like this, when Ohio State strength coach Mickey Marotti takes time to capture each player’s foot with a 3D image to ensure he’s in the perfect shoe for him. [video, 0:57]

A hamstring injury intervention program is effective for reducing the rate of hamstring injuries and reinjuries in professional baseball players, according to ongoing research from the University of Delaware presented in July at the annual meeting of the American Ortho­paedic Society for Sports Medicine.

Although more general injury prevention programs have been associated with reduced rates of hamstring injury, the authors thought a more baseball-specific protocol would have additional benefits.

“We attempted to make the dynamic movement patterns relevant to the sport of baseball to enhance player adoption and compliance,” said lead author Holly Silvers-Granelli, MPT, a PhD candidate in the Department of Biomechanics and Movement Science at the University of Delaware in Newark. “We designed a neuromuscular program that had an emphasis on eccentric hamstring strengthening and a posterior chain musculature, in addition to lateral hip strengthening. We also included movements to encourage dynamic stability with respect to the lumbar spine and pelvis during dynamic hip flexion and extension.”

Watching baseball when your team has a top-flight pitcher has become the leading cause of anxiety among sports fans. The injury rate of pitchers — whose elbow ligaments, flexor tendons, shoulder labrums, and rotator cuffs are all sources of high attrition — has gone up as pitchers have become more dominant at the seeming expense of durability. The most infamous injury — tears of the ulnar collateral ligament — lead to Tommy John surgery, which usually requires a year or more of arduous rehab that promises no return to prior form.

Naturally, technology that can predict which pitchers are most susceptible to UCL tears would be nothing short of revolutionary, not to mention lucrative. A company purporting to deliver just that, Digital Video Predictive Pitching Analysis, launched a site this spring with little fanfare and even less notice, despite an unbelievable promise: “We can tell you if your pitchers will need ‘Tommy John’ surgery.”

How? The company claims to have an algorithm that combines the pitching insights of former pitcher and executive Matt Keough and the tech work of digital video pioneer Chuck Colby, who played three years of minor league ball, co-founded the streaming start-up Vosaic, and now owns an environmental company, SOS Mold.

We have today announced a medical partnership agreement with Aspetar, one of the world’s leading specialised sports medicine and orthopaedic hospitals, giving the Club priority access to the hospital’s advanced sports medicine services and facilities in Qatar.

Individual players act as a coherent unit during team sports performance, forming a team synergy. A synergy is a collective property of a task-specific organization of individuals, such that the degrees of freedom of each individual in the system are coupled, enabling the degrees of freedom of different individuals to co-regulate each other. Here, we present an explanation for the emergence of such collective behaviors, indicating how these can be assessed and understood through the measurement of key system properties that exist, considering the contribution of each individual and beyond These include: to (i) dimensional compression, a process resulting in independent degree of freedom being coupled so that the synergy has fewer degrees of freedom than the set of components from which it arises; (ii) reciprocal compensation, if one element do not produce its function, other elements should display changes in their contributions so that task goals are still attained; (iii) interpersonal linkages, the specific contribution of each element to a group task; and (iv), degeneracy, structurally different components performing a similar, but not necessarily identical, function with respect to context. A primary goal of our analysis is to highlight the principles and tools required to understand coherent and dynamic team behaviors, as well as the performance conditions that make such team synergies possible, through perceptual attunement to shared affordances in individual performers. A key conclusion is that teams can be trained to perceive how to use and share specific affordances, explaining how individual’s behaviors self-organize into a group synergy. Ecological dynamics explanations of team behaviors can transit beyond mere ratification of sport performance, providing a comprehensive conceptual framework to guide the implementation of diagnostic measures by sport scientists, sport psychologists and performance analysts. Complex adaptive systems, synergies, group behaviors, team sport performance, ecological dynamics, performance analysis. [full text]

I caught the bug to write this after reading yet another ‘does Moneyball work in Soccer’ article yesterday. I’m not going to link it, but ironically it uses a small sample size, mentioning 4 clubs: Brentford, Man Utd, Liverpool & Coventry and one cherry picked match to focus on. Why is nobody writing about how time and time again ‘traditional methods’ fail to produce the results people are paid to deliver?

As the final push of the summer, warm weather rolled in over Göteborg, and the Swedish national hockey team “3 Kronor” stepped inside the city’s ice castle Scandinavium to practice and get ready. Saturday 17 September marks the beginning of World Cup of Hockey in Toronto. This version of 3 Kronor is not just any version. Just about everyone in the business will agree it’s the most competent group of hockey players ever to wear the Swedish jersey, extracted from the highest number of Swedish NHL players ever available. So it has not been without challenges to select the right set of players that collectively as a team has the highest chance of winning the tournament. Or, as I would put it, a team with the highest chance of delivering a performance that will yield the best possible result.

With players belonging to better or worse NHL teams, getting different amounts of game time on ice, being used differently, playing with stronger or weaker fellow players and against stronger or weaker opponent units it is difficult to compare their individual level of skills and performance. Selecting objectively *best* players is hard enough, to say the least. Selecting the *right* players for the team in this tournament is even harder.

… Data analytics became a hot topic in the NBA a few years ago, especially with the introduction of SportVU cameras, which are installed in every NBA arena and track every single movement and action on the court. The influx of data created by tracking technologies has changed the way the game is evaluated and played.

With all of the different technologies on the market, Williams and his staff try to stay ahead of the curve. Since Tech has its own unique statistics and performance indicators that nobody else really uses, the Hokies are in the process of developing their own in-house tracking technology.

“Right now we’re not using SportVU, and what we’re looking to develop is something kind of like that, but just specific to us … They have a lot of good things out there, don’t get me wrong, and we use a lot of good things that they have, but we’re just looking for something that’s specific to us, so that’s what we’re trying to develop,” Johnson said.

The people who are leading the project from the conceptual and basketball side are Johnson and assistant coach Jamie McNeilly. For the actual programming and development, however, they have sought out help from the instructional technology department at Virginia Tech.