Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 23, 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

Something important is happening with Jordan Morris and Christian Pulisic, American soccer’s dynamic duo of “next big thing-ness.” In tandem, they are providing an important lesson for those willing to see it, for supporters with their soccer eyes wide open.

For our rising U.S. stars and their important professional choices, there is no “right path,” no clearly faster track to glory and coveted mainstream-mag cover status. Players are different. Circumstances are varied. And here we have two living, breathing embodiments in our sport, both on the stampede toward advancement: one remained home while one went abroad. Both choices were correct.

… Really good feet, lovely soft feed. A fantastic spring. Not only is he big, but he’s quick. And then he wanted to get better. He wanted to stay out there longer and work. He wanted to watch video. There are a lot of kids who say they want to get better, but aren’t prepared to do what it takes. He stayed out longer, he ate better, he would look after his body. We’d watch every touch of his from every game. And I realized, he does want to get better. As a coach, that’s a great feeling.

Right away we needed to get him in better physical condition, and through no fault of his own. When you’re only playing four or five months out of the year you’re just not physically in as good shape as you should be. He probably in them early days lost six, seven, eight pounds from when we first got him in. We wanted to make him physically better, better aerobic capacity. He had pace and we wanted to get him to a stage when he could do that more often.

In this work, we aim to contribute to the understanding of human prosocial behavior by studying the influence that a particular form of social pressure, “being watched,” has on the evolution of cooperative behavior. We study how cooperation emerges in multiplex complex topologies by analyzing a particular bidirectionally coupled dynamics on top of a two-layer multiplex network (duplex). The coupled dynamics appears between the prisoner’s dilemma game in a network and a threshold cascade model in the other. The threshold model is intended to abstract the behavior of a network of vigilant nodes that impose the pressure of being observed altering hence the temptation to defect of the dilemma. Cooperation or defection in the game also affects the state of a node of being vigilant. We analyze these processes on different duplex networks structures and assess the influence of the topology, average degree and correlated multiplexity, on the outcome of cooperation. Interestingly, we find that the social pressure of vigilance may impact cooperation positively or negatively, depending on the duplex structure, specifically the degree correlations between layers is determinant. Our results give further quantitative insights in the promotion of cooperation under social pressure.

… Ever since that 2012-13 season, though, the practice of sitting healthy players has become commonplace, rising 668 percent over the next three seasons. The champion Cleveland Cavaliers were among six teams in the NBA whose healthy scratches rose into the double digits during the 2015-16 season. In 2014-15, there had been only two such teams: the Spurs and the Hawks, led by Pop disciple Mike Budenholzer.

As the practice has taken hold across the league, commissioner Adam Silver has deviated from Stern’s policy. Before last season, Silver held a news conference in which he said the league “has taken a new approach” when it came to handling schedule-related matters. And while Stern called the Spurs’ tactics “unacceptable” back in 2012, Silver in October deemed it the “sophistication of minutes management.”

League sources say NBA players had occasionally taken games off before 2005-06, with teams typically covering it up with bogus injury labels such as hamstring soreness or a back strain. This season, with a record 46 players competing in the Summer Olympics in Rio, many around the league expect the number of healthy scratches to climb as teams manage the schedule.

… Upon arrival, each player in our charge has a baseline capacity to play the game. Our role is to assess that capacity quickly and effectively.

We must look at a players’ cognitive ability. How well does she perceive her environment and respond intelligently to the challenges at hand? What solutions does she propose? What decisions does she make?

We must analyze her competence. Can she receive, pass, and dribble? We can test individual skills within the context of a dynamic session as long as we observe and observe well.

We must assess her character. Is she ambitious? How well does she respond to mistakes? Is she energetic and engaged?

… “It’s definitely not a taboo anymore to be a young guy,” said Walt Bell, Maryland’s 32-year-old offensive coordinator. “Even when I got my first assistant coaching job at 26, that was a big deal because I was one of the youngest coaches in the country. Now it’s more common.”

How does someone rise so fast in the coaching ranks? Why are more head coaches comfortable giving headsets to guys with nary a gray hair? The backstories of these precocious playcallers answer those questions. It takes the right early connections, sometimes years of grunt work while waiting for a big break and then taking full advantage of an opportunity.

Watch this video case study and learn how Everton Football Club, a member of the English Premier League, leverages ChyronHego’s TRACAB Optical Player Tracking and Coach Paint to gain training insight and improve match performance.

Chances are you’ve never seen a fully autonomous self-driving car out on the street. But if you have, you probably couldn’t help but notice the distinctive spinning sensor adorning its roof. It’s what helps an autonomous vehicle understand the world around it, but it’s also what’s keeping autonomous vehicles from being affordable enough for the average consumer to buy. Lidar (light radar) is complex and expensive right now, but within the next few years, it’ll be cheaper and more reliable—and everywhere.

Lidar is a sensing technology similar to radar that detects objects with pulses of laser light. Though lidar has a shorter range than radar (tens to hundreds of meters), the much shorter wavelengths used by lidar result in a massive increase in resolution. The uniquely reliable and high-quality data that lidar provides has made it the sensor of choice for the majority of vehicle autonomy applications. In fact, many experts feel that lidar is a necessity for driverless cars.

“Lidar is a critical sensor for driverless vehicles because it enables highly precise and robust localization across a wide range of conditions,” explains Karl Iagnemma, CEO of nuTonomy, a ­Cambridge, Mass., startup that is currently testing self-driving cars in ­Singapore. But Iagnemma points out that the size, complexity, and cost of the current generation of lidar sensors are significant obstacles to the commercialization of any technology that depends on them.

Testosterone may strengthen the anterior cruciate ligament in men’s knees, helping to explain why women are up to 10 times more likely to suffer ACL damage, a common and serious sports injury.

A new study show that normal male rats with natural supplies of testosterone had stronger ACLs than castrated rats whose bodies no longer produced the male hormone.

“The primary implication of the study is that testosterone may contribute to the ACL’s ability to withstand tensile loads and may be one of multiple factors responsible for the disparate ACL injury rate between men and women,” says William Romani, a physical therapist, sports medicine researcher, and former visiting faculty member in the biomedical engineering department at Johns Hopkins University.

The increasing number of young athletes suffering from concussions has become an area of significant focus in the medical community. Prevention of these injuries by altering athletic participation of children in high risk sports is becoming more of a common place discussion. Proper evaluation and treatment helps to ensure optimal outcomes for a healthy recovery. Nutritional strategies to support recovery are still in early stages of research but there has been some promising new information coming out. Dietitians working with post concussive patients will most often focus on fueling in the setting of nausea and/or dizziness. Alterations in sleep cycles can also have a negative effect on appetite leading to under or overeating. Overall, the nutrition role thus far has been to ensure that an athlete is maintaining a healthy weight while recovering from injury.

I am writing this post more to save me time but also I have answered this, I want to be a Performance Analyst question, in much shorter versions hundreds of times over the last few years. So here is 10 years + of my experience. Take it for what it is. One persons opinion.

… Tottenham have been taken to a new level under the tutelage of Mauricio Pochettino, with a blend of astute transfer dealings, a few phenomenal young players beginning to flourish and an intense pressing style of football aimed at recovering the ball as quickly as they lose it and harassing their opponents into mistakes. Leicester won the league last season utilizing a formidable counter-attacking approach that specialised in them sacrificing possession in return for a lethal and devastating break of speed to intercept their opposition and a ruthless streak to ensure they capitalized on their chances when they came.

Liverpool have also begun to foster the now infamous ‘gegenpressing’ style that became the hallmark of Klopp’s supremely talented Dortmund team. A high intensity, rock n’ roll approach to football aimed at retrieving the ball, using the ball, and attacking at high intensity. Harass and pressurise the opponents and eventually they will make a mistake.

And these teams are not alone in their physical sentiments. Pochettino’s Argentinian counterpart Marcelo Bielsa is one the game’s most cherished innovators and characters, and is well known for utilizing a similarly taxing strategy. Diego Simone’s Atleti are regarded as arguably Europe’s hardest working team, absolutely resolute defensively and capable of reducing most teams to a shadow of their former selves, broken by Atleti’s physical superiority.

The NBA will have a new distributor for its statistical information and its player tracking data starting in the 2017-18 season.

The league announced deals with Sportradar and Second Spectrum on Thursday that it says will expand the distribution of statistics and data across the globe. Sportradar will distribute statistics for the NBA, WNBA and the D-League to people in more than 80 countries.

In addition, the NBA will switch from SportVu to Second Spectrum for player tracking information. Second Spectrum will spend this season installing tracking cameras in every arena in the league. It can provide highly detailed data on player movement, including how much ground they cover, where they touch the ball most and the ability to guard the pick-and-roll.

… As a human, the challenge is to find any pattern at all. Of course, we have intuitions that limit our guesses. But computers have no such intuitions. From a computer’s standpoint, the difficulty in pattern recognition is one of surplus: with an endless variety of patterns, all technically valid, what makes one “right” and another “wrong?”

The problem only recently became of practical concern. Before the 1990s, AI systems rarely did much learning at all. For example, the chess-playing Deep Thought, predecessor to Deep Blue, didn’t get good at chess by learning from successes and failures. Instead, chess grandmasters and programming wizards carefully crafted rules to teach it which board positions were good or bad. Such extensive hand-tuning was typical of that era’s “expert systems” approach.

… Knowing all this you can see how important the lower part of the strike zone is to the Pirates, and how the club was able to benefit – wittingly or unwittingly – in taking advantage of a growing lower part of the strike zone.

But then a funny thing happened this season: the strike zone started to shift upward.