Applied Sports Science newsletter – October 3, 2016

… From a playing standpoint, Wondolowski is fine, really. For every time Wondolowski’s been included in a camp roster over the past two years, there has been at least one young striker who could’ve done more with the opportunity projecting outward. But Wondo isn’t bad, exactly. He’s just kind of there, like worn but serviceable piece of furniture you’re too lazy to replace.

And yet digging into Klinsmann’s past – into Germany’s coaching past – digs out the real reason the likes of Wondolowski and Beckerman (who is more serviceable than Wondo but would likely get call-ups even if he were not) will continue to be roped into camps. And it has less to do with form – part of the equation, no question – and more to do with holistic utility.

Klinsmann knows them. He trusts them. And he leaves them with the tender hooks of what can otherwise be a locker room barbed with egos and infighting. Not that the American locker room specifically is any of those things, but every locker room threatens to unravel into degenerative chaos without the proper attention. Klinsmann is simply more attentive than most. Sometimes detrimentally so.

… How can we challenge common misconceptions in education?

When communicating with teachers, connect research to something they’ve experienced – get them thinking, being critical, so that the next time a fad or model comes around, they don’t immediately accept it, but think about it instead. Enter into a genuine dialogue. Many researchers fall back on all other types of techniques, e.g. telling people “facts” – that this doesn’t work has been shown time and time again. One’s own experience is often the strongest proof that you can give people: you have to be creative and get into their heads, and say it in a way that they feel and understand.

Don’t ever say “because research shows X” – this is a conversation killer. If brain-based learning is a pseudoscientific fad, and if Learning Styles are a pseudoscientific fad, then why should I then accept that YOUR research is valid and not the same?

… TR: What has been the biggest advantage of utilizing Omegawave within your “system”?

MM: Now, one of the biggest advantages is using the Omegawave as a teaching tool for the athletes, helping to drive home behavioral change in areas such as sleep hygiene, nutrition, hydration, stress reduction and other areas. As coaches, we are not always going to be there to monitor. Omegawave gives me and the athlete a very comprehensive view of how the biological systems are responding to training and recovery. This helps the athlete understand the multifaceted nature of performance, and that training is just one small part of it.

We tend to wait until momentous occasions – say, Thanksgiving or a birthday – to look outward and acknowledge all that we’ve got and all that we should be thankful for. In other words, to cultivate an “attitude of gratitude.” This feeling, however, is often short-lived. Twelve days after our birthdays, we’re typically back into our habitual ways of thinking and acting, which, for many of us, doesn’t involve deliberately practicing gratitude repeatedly. After all, it’s difficult to sustain gratitude for something that we experience on a daily basis, such as a spouse’s dinnertime cooking, a workout buddy’s constant encouragement or the trail right behind the house that’s perfect for a morning run.

But there’s good reason to be thankful on a regular basis. Research has linked gratitude to better physical and mental health, sounder sleep, less anxiety and depression, healthier marriages, higher long-term satisfaction with life and kinder behavior toward others. And then, there’s the application to athletics: Sport psychology studies have shown that grateful young athletes are more satisfied with their teams, less likely to burn out and enjoy better well-being overall.

… Making failure visible sets off a chain reaction with two benefits: 1) you create emotional connection and motivation; 2) you provide knowledge that helps others avoid the same mistakes. Failure isn’t something to be hidden, but a valuable resource to be exploited, a tool that helps a group become smarter and more connected.

Which leads to another question: what’s the best way to do this? Here are a few ideas

The players filed past a table and picked up the electronic wristbands as casually as any of other piece of equipment designed to make the Seattle Seahawks perform at their peak.

But rather than protect or help them power through a game, this new one, distributed to the players at practice on Monday, is aimed at a more subtle effect. Very subtle.

“Get your nine hours of sleep!” receiver Doug Baldwin shouted to Trevone Boykin, the backup quarterback, as Boykin fiddled with his band, a motion-sensing monitor designed to ensure he does just that.

The Seahawks want to become sleeping giants.

Hamstring injury is one of the most common acute musculoskeletal injuries sustained by amateur and professional athletes, particularly in sports requiring explosive sprinting, jumping or flexibility – such as football or dancing. Correctly diagnosing the type and grade of hamstring injury is crucial in treatment planning; chiefly at the elite level where immense pressure is placed on sports physicians and physiotherapists to return athletes to competition as quickly as possible. Medical imaging plays a pivotal role in guiding the immediate management of athletes while also helping to predict the risk of recurrent injury.

… The fact is shoulder pads are meant to do one thing: protect the shoulder from linear impacts at the top level. Coaches talk about “pad level” and “getting your pads level to the ground.” This is a technique that has been taught for decades. Dropping the shoulder pads and running like a battering ram worked in the “three yards and a cloud of dust” era, but those same pads don’t work in a Heads Up, West Coast offense era.

When I was in high school, a friend’s dad had a huge Ford truck. It was jacked up a bit and had a welded “cattle cage” on the front. He could use it as a ram if he wanted to and used to push over small trees with it. Unfortunately, he was driving down the road one day and was hit from the side by a station wagon. The cattle cage was fine, but the truck was totaled. (He broke his ankle, but was thankfully otherwise fine.)

Shoulder pads are essentially the same thing, helping in one dimension and doing nothing in the others. All of the quarterbacks above were injured on essentially the same kind of play. They were standing in the pocket, they got hit by one or more defenders at the waist level or lower, and fell to the side while holding the ball.

Half the beauty of high school sports is being able to see athletes at their genesis: think Valor Christian’s Christian McCaffrey before he became a Heisman Trophy front-runnner, or Mountain Vista’s Mal Pugh before she ascended to soccer stardom on the U.S. Women’s National Team.

But what if the best athletes in their respective sports didn’t play for their local high school? What if we missed that first fleeting look into the window of greatness? What then? Would the importance of Colorado High School Activities Association games become diluted? Would prep teams serve as a junior varsity level of sorts, while all the top-tier talent flocked elsewhere?

Right now, such a phenomenon can be seen clearly in boys soccer, which is in the midst of the regular-season home stretch with the start of postseason looming Oct. 26.

… Having massively exerted themselves in battling to a narrow victory over Porto in midweek, the Foxes arrived back at the King Power Stadium with the expectation that they would be able to build on that against Southampton. Last season their superior energy and will to win tended to carry them through tight encounters such as these. But, with the extra workload already playing its part, many in the east Midlands are being forced to temper their preseason expectations.

Few believed that there would be a repeat of the title success of last season or even a sustained challenge to defend their crown given the improvements others have made. But, having picked up eight points from their opening seven league games of the season, there is already a feeling that this squad could fall back into mid-table obscurity sooner than expected.

… Did Watt push himself too hard and come back too soon?

It’s probably a combination of all three of those impossible to quantify things. Hindsight being 20-20, surely all parties involved are wondering what they did wrong.

What is quantifiable, in so many ways, is the lost value of not having Watt on the field for the Texans.

Watt probably pushed too hard — that’s his natural reaction to “adversity.” But the Texans are not devoid of blame here, either.

… In Harden’s case, his athletic profile is very similar to the average NBA guard assessed. Looking at high-level performance metrics, he is generally right in the middle of the pack. Still, despite lacking obvious, elite athletic qualities, Harden has made a career out of keeping the defense off-balance — creating space when it suits him and drawing the defender into a foul when the opportunity presents itself.

“He has astoundingly consistent spikes in metrics associated with a single characteristic — braking,” Elliott says of Harden. “He has the best all-around NBA braking system we’ve ever measured.”

After starting out as a researcher for Football Manager when he was just 15, Matt Neil’s eye for talent was picked up by Plymouth Argyle. He now works as the League Two club’s lead first team analyst, providing data on player performance, opposition reports and potential transfer targets. Here’s Matt’s story, as told to Matt Stanger:

I initially applied for the Truro City researcher job eight years ago, which was advertised on the Football Manager website. I went to five or six Truro games a season back then because it was only about three quid on the train and the ticket was about six quid. I already knew quite a bit about some of the players because they’d been at Argyle, so I thought I’d try to help out in that area because nobody had been doing it for a couple of years.

… Major League Baseball Advanced Media, a company owned jointly by all 30 franchises, introduced Statcast before the 2015 season. BAM, as it is known, was created in 2001 as a sort of in-house tech start-up to help standardize baseball’s presence online, where teams maintained their own sites of variable quality. Since then, its tracking of pitch speeds and home-run distances has become hugely popular with fans on M.L.B.’s website and app. As something of a side effect, the service has been producing valuable insights for the executives who run teams.

BAM’s latest breakthrough comes from combining the same radar system that records pitch locations with two groupings of three high-definition cameras. Together, the technologies generate three-dimensional snapshots of every movement on a baseball field, some 40,000 frames per second converted into digital data. That electronic output, captured from all games, is accessible to each major-league team after the last out every night.

Statcast churns out an overwhelming amount of information; describing the movements of all the players on the field during a routine ground out, according to Willman, who is an analyst at BAM, can fill the equivalent of 21,000 rows on a spreadsheet. Teams are still learning how to dig through the digital sediment for usable knowledge. For now, they rely mostly on Willman and a couple of other colleagues to serve as electronic archaeologists. The nuggets extracted are typically fan-friendly conversation-starters, like which outfielders reach the most fly balls or where Bryce Harper’s hardest hits tend to end up. They are disseminated haphazardly — through Twitter, a dedicated podcast and enhanced game broadcasts on MLB.TV, whose announcers receive a steady flow of Statcast-generated talking points.

The structure of social networks is a key determinant in fostering cooperation and other altruistic behavior among naturally selfish individuals. However, most real social interactions are temporal, being both finite in duration and spread out over time. This raises the question of whether stable cooperation can form despite an intrinsically fragmented social fabric. Here we develop a framework to study the evolution of cooperation on temporal networks in the setting of the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma. By analyzing both real and synthetic datasets, we find that temporal networks generally facilitate the evolution of cooperation compared to their static counterparts. More interestingly, we find that the intrinsic human interactive pattern like bursty behavior impedes the evolution of cooperation. Finally, we introduce a measure to quantify the temporality present in networks and demonstrate that there is an intermediate level of temporality that boosts cooperation most. Our results open a new avenue for investigating the evolution of cooperation in more realistic structured populations.