Applied Sports Science newsletter – July 7, 2017

… Vandeweghe is a talented 25-year-old American, ranked 25th in the world. She reached the semifinals at this year’s Australian Open and the quarterfinals at Wimbledon two years ago. But other than that, her results have not matched her potential, at least in Cash’s eyes.

“I don’t understand why she is No. 25 in the world,” Cash said after running her through a workout on the No. 1 practice court. “She should be No. 5 in the world. I know she’s had some injuries and that doesn’t help.”

He added, in an almost fatherly tone: “She needs to step up. It’s time to step up.”

… It’s easy to knock yogi wisdom as being rife with a positivity bias, but recent studies have shown that science supports mindful breathing. Generally, we know that inhaling provides oxygen to the lungs and bloodstream while exhaling releases carbon dioxide. But our breaths can do so much more: they can affect our mental states, and subsequently, lead to positive changes in our body like the suppression of genes expressing for inflammation, as well as lower levels of cortisol in our bloodstream.

… Imagine someone had tested my genes as a podgy kid and told me: don’t worry, you’re an athlete inside, it’s only your Sherbet Dip Dab habit holding you back. What wonderful reassurance and motivation that would have been. But wait. What if they had looked at my results and said: sorry, it’s not through lack of effort that you are sub-mediocre – it’s down to your DNA. What then?

I was intrigued to find companies offering to do just that – test my DNA to determine my sporting potential. Could it really work? I decided to find out.

I got in touch with DNAFit, the leading provider, and asked if they would blind-test my DNA plus a few other samples. To my surprise, they said yes. A call to some friends with connections in elite sport secured a sample from a multi-Olympian and world champion runner (on condition I wouldn’t reveal his identity) — let’s call him Mr Swift — and another from pro cyclist James McLaughlin. If their results tallied with their achievements, I figured, DNA testing would be worth taking notice of.

… In the concentrated, intense span of a World Cup or a continental championship, the fleeting and the unforeseen take on an outsize significance. One bad game, after all, is all it takes, and years of preparation can be wasted.

A raft of injuries, or poor form, might take hold. A referee — even one with a video monitor — might make a mistake. A rival — Brazil or Argentina, Italy or France — might build a momentum so impressive it takes on the air of destiny. The best team in the world does not always win the World Cup; the best team in the world that month ordinarily does.

Whether Germany wins twice on Russian soil in two years, though — and it is worth noting both that no winner of the Confederations Cup has ever won the subsequent World Cup, and that a World Cup winner has never repeated since Brazil in 1962 — should not detract from the broader pattern its latest gilded summer has brought to the surface.

Last week, local Seattle tech site Geekwire hosted its second annual Sports Tech Summit, which started last year with the assistance of Sounders majority owner Adrian Hanauer. Last year, Hanauer was on a panel with a couple other franchise owners, and MLS commissioner Don Garber held a ‘fireside chat.’ This year, the only representative from the Sounders (aside from Hanauer, who gave opening remarks) was High Performance Director Dave Tenney, who was on a panel with Sportsradar US deputy president Dr. Laila Mintas called “The Future of Sports Data.”

The panel, hosted by Geekwire reporter Taylor Soper, focused on a few different areas of sports data, from predictive analytics to ownership of biometric data. Tenney gave his views on how each of these areas affect his job and the Sounders organization, shedding light on how important data is to a successful club.

… Study after study has shown that teams are more creative and productive when they can achieve high levels of participation, cooperation, and collaboration among members. The success of a team is more likely when effective task processes emerge; causing members to engage wholeheartedly. Three conditions are essential Trust among members, sense of group identity – pride in the group, sense of group efficacy – the belief that they are more effective working together than apart. (Druskat and Wolff, 2001)

Below are 10 reasons why teams need to have training tin emotional intelligence to maximize it and utilize it for top performance

1. More work is being done in teams.

This study examined if a particular profile of internal and external workload existed prior to injury. Forty-five professional soccer players were monitored over two seasons. For each non-contact injury, a profile of workload variables was determined for 4 weeks and expressed as (i) an absolute, (ii) week-to-week change and (iii) relative to the player’s season mean. Variables included exposure, session rating of perceived exertion (s-RPE) workload, total distance, low-, high-, very-high-speed running distance, mean speed, bodyload, monotony and strain. Acute:chronic workload ratio was also calculated and sensitivity of the relative workload was tested. Absolute and relative exposure and s-RPE workload were greater in all 3 weeks compared to the injury week (P < 0.05). However, no significant differences were evident between the 3 weeks prior to injury for all variables (P > 0.05). Acute:chronic workload ratio for s-RPE was significantly greater than acute:chronic workload ratio for very-high-speed running (P = 0.04). A workload threshold of 114% of a player’s season mean reported low sensitivity and specificity for exposure (25.6[20.2–33.5]% and 73.9[22.6–28.2]%,) and s-RPE workload (16.3[12.6–24.9]% and 79.9[20.3–26.1]%, respectively). No specific load profile existed, although high-sustained exposure and s-RPE were evident for the 3 weeks prior to injury. Consequently, load prescription should be aware of sustained high workloads.

“This lets you capture video with your cell phone out in the Alps and do body tracking. Doing this in 3D, in real-time and just with a camera like the one on your mobile device — that is a big leap,” reports Dushyant Mehta, PhD student in the Graphics, Vision and Video Group headed by Professor Christian Theobalt at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics in Saarbruecken (MPI).

Together with his colleagues, he developed a software system that needs only a conventional camera to digitally capture a person, along with their movements, in real-time. “So far, several video cameras, or a so-called depth camera as in the Kinect, have been necessary for this task,” explains Srinath Sridhar, also a researcher in the Graphics, Vision and Video Group.

… The most sophisticated statistical techniques currently available for evaluating NBA performance are not kind to Mr Westbrook. According to Regularised Adjusted Plus-Minus (RAPM)—a measure developed by Jeremias Engelmann of ESPN, which compares a team’s scoring margin when a player is on the court versus when he sits on the bench, and adjusts for the quality of everyone else playing at the same time—Mr Westbrook’s 2016-17 was in fact rather humdrum. It found that the Thunder scored 2.7 more points per 100 possessions when Mr Westbrook was on the court than they would have with an average player in his stead, and allowed 0.3 fewer. The combined impact of 3.0 placed him just 26th in the league.

It’s hard to reconcile such a modest mark with either Mr Westbrook’s apparent domination of virtually every contest he played in, or with the Thunder’s performance as a team.

I’ve been compiling my annual Freaks list of college football’s top workout warriors in the sport for almost 15 years now. I set out to showcase the guys who create some of the biggest buzz inside their programs by displaying the rare physical abilities that wow folks who are typically used to observing gifted athletes. This list is compiled with the help of many coaches, players and sports information directors around the nation. One caveat: I try to avoid having multiple players from one program, but this year I had two instances where I felt I needed to bend that rule. This year we’re doing a top 40 countdown and start with Nos. 40–21. Part 2: Nos. 20-11.

All 30 NBA teams are engaged in building rosters for the 2017-18 season and beyond, with free agency in action and the NBA Draft recently concluded. Among a myriad of factors influencing decisions is the science of NBA analytics.

To get a good sense of where the math and technology are taking the sport of basketball, it’s first necessary to get a sense of how we see analytics having affected the past NBA season. Mathematics professor and basketball analytics consultant Stephen Shea, along with ShotTracker chief marketing officer Lori Gery recently discussed how advanced statistics and the analysis of them have produced the NBA that fans see today and will continue to shape the future of basketball.

The paper presents a plus-minus rating for use in association football (soccer). We first describe the standard plus-minus methodology as used in basketball and ice-hockey and then adapt it for use in soccer. The usual goal-differential plus-minus is considered before two variations are proposed. For the first variation, we present a methodology to calculate an expected goals plus-minus rating. The second variation makes use of in-play probabilities of match outcome to evaluate an expected points plus-minus rating. We use the ratings to examine who are the best players in European football, and demonstrate how the players’ ratings evolve over time. Finally, we shed light on the debate regarding which is the strongest league. The model suggests the English Premier League is the strongest, with the German Bundesliga a close runner-up.

… I hate the current rate of strikeouts. I think the ever-rising percentage of strikeouts is Problem #1 in baseball, just ahead the pesky notion that lefthanders shouldn’t be allowed to play shortstop. I’d like to see the strikeout rate change.

But I would like to see it change because baseball teams realize that strikeouts are suboptimal outcomes of at-bats, and try to adjust to a more contact-focused approach. I am less interested in solutions like moving the mound back, or reducing the number of pitching changes, or narrowing the strike zone. I prefer on-field, in-play solutions to the more distant and external changes that are occasionally suggested. Hitters are the ones that have gotten themselves into this situation: I’d like to think they can get themselves out of it, if there is enough of an incentive for it.

College students who major in the humanities always get asked a certain question. They’re asked it so often—and by so many people—that it should come printed on their diplomas. That question, posed by friends, career counselors, and family, is “What are you planning to do with your degree?” But it might as well be “What are the humanities good for?”

According to three new books, the answer is “Quite a lot.” From Silicon Valley to the Pentagon, people are beginning to realize that to effectively tackle today’s biggest social and technological challenges, we need to think critically about their human context—something humanities graduates happen to be well trained to do. Call it the revenge of the film, history, and philosophy nerds.