Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 21, 2017

… This summer, the line knows what to expect from Solari and strength and conditioning coach Aaron Wellman. They know they will be asked to be more physical, and one of the tenets of Solari’s philosophy is hand speed. Several of the linemen have taken up boxing to refine the use of their hands and increase speed.

“A lot of guys got into some boxing,” said Pugh at last week’s minicamp. “I know Coach Solari talked about working on getting your hand speed up, and things of that nature. But at the same time, offensive line play is still offensive line play. So, you still have to work on those fundamentals that are going to make you a successful offensive lineman.”

… He earned it, because it turned out the fast track wasn’t so fast. The kid who could throw 100 had too many months where he couldn’t throw at all, too many days and nights when instead of pitching at Camden Yards or Fenway Park he was rehabbing on his own in Sarasota, Florida.

There was an elbow injury so common it seems every pitcher has had it, and a shoulder injury so unusual that even Dr. James Andrews wasn’t sure what to do about it. There were the frustrating days recovering from Tommy John surgery, and the even more frustrating times when the bone growth in his teres minor muscle caused a pain that wouldn’t go away.

He would show up at 6:30 in the morning to do his work, so he could get in and out and not get in the way of the younger prospects who could still throw. He would run and bike and even go to the beach and get in the water, hoping the ocean might bring a cure.

… To Fultz, he has succeeded for two reasons: his small but powerful support system and the many times he has been overlooked, cheated, marginalized, held back and kept in the shadows. Driven less by hubris than insecurity, he remembers coaches who cut him and players who once overshadowed him; when he goes online, he skips the mock drafts, which almost universally list him as the top pick, and instead occasionally searches his name on Twitter to read the barbed ramblings of strangers.

“A lot of people find slights in everything,” says Mike Jones, Fultz’s coach at DeMatha Catholic High School. “Some people are just built that way, and it seems like Markelle is.”

… The 10,000m at the recent Portland Track Festival was your first race since the injury that kept you out of Boston back in April. When did you decide, number one, to have a track season at all and, number two, to give that particular race a go?

Yeah, it was a very last-minute kind of decision. I had kind of pinpointed, like two months ago, trying to get back and be ready [to race] by Peachtree. That’s what I thought, “OK, I need something on the calendar to get focused on and really work toward,” so I picked that out. I had hoped to be fit by June, but I was still having some lingering pain in my hip and just weird soreness in weird areas. I think psychologically, too, I was just so concerned and worried that I would get re-injured. Jerry [Schumacher] just kept on saying, “Take it easy. Take it easy.” He really held me back for quite a while, but as soon as he allowed me to do one workout, I think physically and mentally, I completely shifted to where I needed to be. It’s like everything in my body clicked all of a sudden and I didn’t have any more pain, which is so strange. I think there’s also a psychological component to it. It’s finally just letting go of that fear of injury. The first workout back was actually pretty good. I joked around and was like, “Man, I should just get ready for a track season. This would be fun. I feel like I could actually run a pretty good 10K,” and it was just one workout.

Then, the further we got into some of the workouts — and I was working out with Amy [Cragg], who was pretty fit, and able to decently hang with her — I realized, “Man, I actually really think I could have a shot at running a 10K.”

The badminton serve is an important shot for winning a rally in a match. It combines good technique with the ability to accurately integrate visual information from the shuttle, racket, opponent, and intended landing point. Despite its importance and repercussive nature, to date no study has looked at the visual search behaviors during badminton service in the singles discipline. Unlike anticipatory tasks (e.g., shot returns), the serve presents an opportunity to explore the role of visual search behaviors in movement control for self-paced tasks. Accordingly, this study examined skill-related differences in visual behavior during the badminton singles serve. Skilled (n = 12) and less skilled (n = 12) participants performed 30 serves to a live opponent, while real-time eye movements were captured using a mobile gaze registration system. Frame-by-frame analyses of 662 serves were made and the skilled players took a longer preparatory time before serving. Visual behavior of the skilled players was characterized by significantly greater number of fixations on more areas of interest per trial than the less skilled. In addition, the skilled players spent a significantly longer time fixating on the court and net, whereas the less skilled players found the shuttle to be more informative. Quiet eye (QE) duration (indicative of superior sports performance) however, did not differ significantly between groups which has implications on the perceived importance of QE in the badminton serve. Moreover, while visual behavior differed by skill level, considerable individual differences were also observed especially within the skilled players. This augments the need for not just group-level analyses, but individualized analysis for a more accurate representation of visual behavior. Findings from this study thus provide an insight to the possible visual search strategies as players serve in net-barrier games. Moreover, this study highlighted an important aspect of badminton relating to deception and the implications of interpreting visual behavior of players. [full text]

… Miguel Gómez is manager of the under-18 side that do not have a full FIFA competition to aim for, but that play a crucial role in the development of players who will go on to play at higher levels and age groups. He spoke to These Football Times to explain the realities of coaching youngsters at a delicate stage of their development, and reiterated the concerns that many hole regarding distractions: “In this category [born in 2000, referring to the under -7 CONCACAF champions] there is plenty of talent and good football qualities, but they are just at the halfway stage of their process to go pro,” he said.

“Some of them manage to make their debut and become really good players, but others get stuck on the road for many different circumstances; distractions such as parties, girls, that kind of stuff … and they deviate from the commitment that requires a youth player to become pro.”

… The holy grail for coaches and sport scientists is to derive additional insight and competitive advantage from existing protocols and datasets – without any additional data collection. We aim to offer such a solution for speed testing data in this article.

A common mistake made by S&C coaches, with respect to speed testing data is that a 40 m time is assumed to be representative of top speed ability. However, a total 40 m time is an all-encompassing “outcome” variable and contained within it is 0-10 m times much more representative of accelerative ability. So for example, an athlete with exceptional short-acceleration ability over 10 m may be distinctly average from 30-40 m but he has already put enough distance between him and the opposition to finish with a top ranking 40 m time. So we assume “good top speed” but the reality is “top accelerator, average-to-poor top speed”. From our anecdotal experience, the reverse is even more common. Some athletes have poor acceleration but relatively higher maximum velocity abilities – a combination which yields merely an “average” 40m time1. Martin Bucheit, head of performance at Paris St. Germain football club, has empirically demonstrated examples of these “profile-types” in his 2014 paper “Mechanical determinants of acceleration and maximal sprinting speed in highly trained young soccer players”1.

Manny Schellscheidt was never a man given over to delirious spasms of hyperbole when it came to young prospects. He’d been doing this too long, had seen too many young players fall victim to a development process that can be hard to understand at best and viciously duplicitous at worst. Freddy Adu had once passed through his U.S. U14 ID camps, after all.

So when Schellscheidt first saw the young, diminutive kid embarrassing defenders one afternoon on a small field in Pennsylvania in 2011, there was little broader fanfare about it. Nobody knew who the kid was yet on any substantive level, and Schellscheidt had his reservations, although he knew the kid was special. The old coach stuck around a few days, noted the kid’s name in his notepad, talked to the club coaches on hand and then left assured of at least one thing in the absence of all else.

He would see Christian Pulisic play again. And this time he’d be running the camp.

… “I think one of the best things they did was allowing us to bring them up early for summer school. Because football you have to adjust academically, athletically and socially all at once. So, allowing them to come up and take a couple of classes in the summer and experience what a college class is like before getting a full load of 15 credits, as well as football full time, as well as adjusting socially, it allows them to get used to the training, ease them in from that standpoint.

Franklin added that summer school is a big reason so many players graduate on time or early.

As smartphone and sensors continue to become more ubiquitous across the world, digital biomarkers have emerged as a scalable and practical tool to explore disease states and advance health. However, as the digital divide of access and ownership begins to fade, a new digital divide is emerging. Who are the types of people who own smartphones or smart watches, who are the types of people who download health apps or partake in digital biomarker studies, and who are the types of people who are actually active with digital biomarker apps and sensors – the people providing the high-quality and longitudinal data that this field is being founded upon? Understanding the people behind digital biomarkers, the very people this emerging field aims to help, may actually be the real challenge as well as opportunity for digital biomarkers. [full text]

… Last October, our in-house object detection system achieved new state-of-the-art results, and placed first in the COCO detection challenge. Since then, this system has generated results for a number of research publications and has been put to work in Google products such as NestCam, the similar items and style ideas feature in Image Search and street number and name detection in Street View.

Today we are happy to make this system available to the broader research community via the TensorFlow Object Detection API. This codebase is an open-source framework built on top of TensorFlow that makes it easy to construct, train and deploy object detection models. Our goals in designing this system was to support state-of-the-art models while allowing for rapid exploration and research.

Every human being has a unique DNA “fingerprint”. In other words, the genetic material of any two individuals can be clearly distinguished. Computational biologists at the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have now determined that the impact of these variations has been greatly underestimated. The new insights could importantly impact advances in personalized medicine.

… ”In recent years, we’ve realized our microbiota performs functions – either directly or through the products they make – that could impact the functioning of our body,” says Simin Nikbin Meydani, DVM, PhD, vice provost for research at Tufts University and director of the Nutritional Immunology Laboratory at the Jean Mayer Human Nutrition Research Center on Aging. “For example, scientists are exploring how the microbiota may be involved in the maturation of the immune system, energy metabolism and how our brain functions.”

That’s not all. Disruption of the normal human gut microbiota has been associated with many different health conditions, such as asthma, allergies, irritable bowel syndrome, obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and colorectal cancer, among others. Exactly what role the microbiota might play in these conditions is uncertain. But, it’s wise to do your best to support a healthy microbiota.

… The current front office began by focusing on position-player talent with premium draft picks, believing such prospects were safer bets to become impact major-league players. So far, so good.

When the world shifted three infielders to the right or left of second base, the Cubs started to shift less — and continue to do so. The result: one of the game’s most efficient defenses in recent history.

The club is interested in soft power, too. The Cubs have facilitated communication and collaboration between different departments — as have many other clubs — and better ways to facilitate cooperation. One way might be through the game’s only round clubhouse.

… When it comes to a company implementing or expanding their advanced analytics programs, the technical part is relatively easy. It’s the commonplace built-in culture of unconscious bias, miscommunication, and not understanding what actual analytics success is, that often cause these programs to fail

That’s the assertion from Gerhard Pilcher, the CEO of Elder Research, and Jeff Deal, the company’s vice president. In a recent webinar, they were the first to admit that they “sometimes got in the way of analytics or an analytics model that could help us.”

Pilcher and Deal found that in the order of their business, they were able to achieve a 90 percent success rate in rolling out the technical side of an analytics solution, but that only 65 percent of those projects achieved an actual return on investment (ROI).

Q. I know the NBA draft is coming up soon. Do the potential players get a physical prior to the draft? If an athlete has medical problems, is this shared with the team and would this affect whether the player is drafted?

A. The NBA identifies the top 60 to 80 players who are likely to be taken in each year’s draft. These players are invited to Chicago for the Combine, where physicals are performed at Northwestern University Medical Center. Each player receives an extensive physical exam, which includes an orthopedic exam, cardiology exam, ECG, Echocardiogram, stress test, bloodwork, body fat analysis, urinalysis, X-rays and MRI scans where indicated.

After these tests are completed, each NBA team physician will examine the players for their exam and analysis of the data. These findings are then discussed with team managment, trainers and scouts. Healthy athletes and players with orthopedic and medical problems are identified. At the time of the draft, the management will then decide whether it is appropriate to draft the best player that is right for their team.

Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/living/health-fitness/jock-doc/article156749959.html#storylink=cpy