Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 1, 2017

Even when he was growing up, it was clear that David Johnson possessed a combination of talent and ability that have been described as “mutantlike.” That was confirmed when his life took a series of unexpected turns during two weeks at the beginning of 2017.

The United States national soccer team continues to get younger. Less than a year after making his debut for the squad, the 18-year-old midfielder Christian Pulisic is his country’s most indispensable player. Kellyn Acosta, 22; Jordan Morris, 22; and Bobby Wood, 24, have also become key figures in Coach Bruce Arena’s planning.

And then there is DaMarcus Beasley.

Seventeen years after making his debut, Beasley, 35, is the last player remaining from a generation that raised the level of, and the expectations for, the national team. Joining the team as a teenager a year before the 2002 World Cup, Beasley, along with his contemporary Landon Donovan, became a vital figure for a succession of coaches. Now, more than 100 appearances, and four World Cups, later, he remains a player the team cannot seem to do without.

… After the NFL levied the yearlong ban in March 2016 for multiple drug offenses, a humbled Bryant huddled with his agent, Thomas Santanello, to formulate a plan. Giving Bryant structure was important. But Bryant, despite having scored 15 touchdowns in 21 NFL games, also knew he hadn’t maximized his enormous potential.

Simply getting in the gym was the first step.

They settled on the Las Vegas suburb of Henderson, Nevada, where Bryant spent time with ESPN’s Dan Graziano this summer at his training hub, Van Hook Sports Performance, to outline his plan. Santanello had connections with housing and a gym schedule that provided Bryant access to nutrition advice, weights and acupuncture in a one-stop shop.

“It was about seeing who he could become,” Santanello said.

The LA Galaxy have named French soccer and fitness coach Pierre Barrieu the team’s Director of Sports Performance, the club announced today.

Barrieu, from Thionville, France, is the former Strength & Conditioning Coach for the U.S. Men’s National Team, serving stints under Bruce Arena and Bob Bradley from 2002-06 and 2008-11. He spent the 2002 and 2006 FIFA World Cup with Arena, while serving in the 2010 FIFA World Cup under Bradley.

If you ever fear that you are already too old to learn a new skill, remember Priscilla Sitienei, a midwife from Ndalat in rural Kenya. Having grown up without free primary school education, she had never learnt to read or write. As she approached her twilight years, however, she wanted to note down her experiences and knowledge to pass down to the next generation. And so, she started to attend lessons at the local school – along with six of her great-great-grandchildren. She was 90 at the time.

We are often told that “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks” – that the grizzled adult brain simply can’t absorb as much information as an impressionable young child’s. Many people would assume that you simply couldn’t pick up a complex skill like reading or writing, at the age of 90, after a lifetime of being illiterate.

The latest studies from psychology and neuroscience show that these extraordinary achievements need not be the exception. Although you may face some extra difficulties at 30, 50 – or 90 – your brain still has an astonishing ability to learn and master many new skills, whatever your age. And the effort to master a new discipline may be more than repaid in maintaining and enhancing your overall cognitive health.

… When the practices and weight trainings leave you with little to no time for homework, sleep and social events, they start to be less appealing. Not only that, but sometimes friends who aren’t as athletically inclined don’t understand why you can’t ever miss a workout. Your sport is a job, and if you don’t show up physically and mentally, you’ll get fired.

That consistency and dedication you put forward does have some payoffs, though. For one, you know how to shake things off because you constantly have to do so in practice and games. Not only does that help you move forward during a match, quarter, half, etc., it also helps you move forward in life.

… over the past five years, the sleep disorder field has moved more to doing studies at home, for “a lot of reasons,” according to Dr. Rachel Salas, an associate professor of neurology at Johns Hopkins Sleep Disorders Center. This includes FDA-approved portable monitoring systems that sleep apnea patients can take home with them, while the data is still being analyzed by a clinician.

“There is a need to do more of these studies quickly to get people treated,” Salas says. “I would say in general my colleagues and I have not been surprised that this [home treatment] movement is going even further. Like, How do we get rid of all the wires? How do we get information without being intrusive?”

Which is where a company like Fitbit could fit in. Fitbit’s wrist wearables have done basic sleep-tracking since 2011.

From biomechanics to blood analysis and beyond, here’s a primer on the next-gen technologies that NFL players and teams are embracing in perpetual search for an edge

… researchers at the University of Calgary say the players actually looked down at the line, making them more vulnerable to injuries.

The study points to medical evidence showing that if hockey players have their head down when they are pushed into the boards, they are at greater risk for head, neck and spinal injuries.

Researchers in the faculty of kinesiology spent a year testing the warning line in the Olympic Oval ice-hockey rink with the help of coaches and players from the men’s varsity hockey team at the university.

… If the fourth industrial revolution delivers on its promise, what lies ahead? Super-intelligent AI, perhaps? Killer robots? Telepathy: Elon Musk’s company, Neuralink, is on the case. Nanobots that live in our blood, zapping tumours? Perhaps, finally, Rachael? The toilet-paper principle suggests that we should be paying as much attention to the cheapest technologies as to the most sophisticated. One candidate: cheap sensors and cheap internet connections. There are multiple sensors in every smartphone, but increasingly they’re everywhere, from jet engines to the soil of Californian almond farms — spotting patterns, fixing problems and eking out efficiency gains. They are also a potential privacy and security nightmare, as we’re dimly starting to realise — from hackable pacemakers to botnets comprised of printers to, inevitably, internet-enabled sex toys that leak the most intimate data imaginable. Both the potential and the pitfalls are spectacular.

Whatever the technologies of the future turn out to be, they are likely to demand that, like the factories of the early 20th century, we change to accommodate them. Genuinely revolutionary inventions live up to their name: they change almost everything, and such transformations are by their nature hard to predict. One clarifying idea has been proposed by economists Daron Acemoglu and David Autor. They argue that when we study the impact of technology on the workplace, we should view work in bite-sized chunks — tasks rather than jobs.

… Last September, the NFL pledged $100 million, doubling down on its previous commitment as one of the largest funders of concussion research in the United States. The league and its advisers say the money will go toward the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of head injuries. But after years of donating to outside entities — an approach that league officials said was designed to keep the research independent — the NFL has taken the science in-house and under its control.

“I would view it just as if any giant corporation was doing internal research,” said Stefan Duma, a concussion researcher who is the interim director for Virginia Tech’s Institute for Critical Technology and Applied Science. “This is internal research that the NFL controls.”

… one of the challenges is teaching a young athlete that has skill and athleticism to buy into what’s important for career longevity, for injury prevention, for consistency of play (night in, night out), for developing a routine and developing a mindset. All of these things are outside of physical strength and conditioning.

But basketball is slowly coming around, and even during my time with the Pacers, I’ve noticed the players coming into the NBA now may not love to lift weights, but they accept that it’s part of their development. So I am slowly seeing the shift in the basketball world.

One of the other things difficult with Strength and Conditioning, especially in professional sports — maybe even more so in college sports, but specifically in basketball — is the turnover in Strength Coaches. And I feel like, just through my observations of other teams and situations, for instance, I hire a strength coach and he is with me for four years, and either that person moves on, or they get fired or just start over with someone new. And it’s not always that they insert someone starting out with a lot of NBA experience or basketball experience. So your athletes never really grow or that position never really grows because it’s like a recyclable position.

… What impact did the Research Paper competition have on your career and getting to your current role with the Dodgers? Why the switch to baseball, and were there any specific challenges you faced when switching sports?

The Research Paper competition definitely helped spread my work to a larger audience, and my first conversations with the LAD front office involved work I had presented at SSAC. I really like baseball and basketball both as sports and from an analysis perspective. I think data-driven strategy decisions are more complex in basketball, since team and player interaction plays a larger role. However, topics such as projections and roster organization are more complex in baseball, since there is a much longer pipeline for player development and skills are harder to measure. The decision to join the Dodgers was not about baseball vs basketball, it was really about the fantastic and talented front office the Dodgers have and my enjoyment working with them.

… His teams have made the postseason eight times since he took over Oakland’s front office in 1998 — including the 2002 season that “Moneyball” chronicled, a trip to the American League Championship Series in 2006, and a three-year boon kick-started by an out-of-nowhere 2012 team that won the American League West on the final day of the regular season.

But the periods between sometimes have been bleak, no more so than this current stretch that finds the A’s last in their division for the third year in a row.

“The biggest thing is that unless Billy wins a championship — that will be it,” “Moneyball” author Michael Lewis said of Beane’s legacy. “But it’s a huge thing: He made it cool to bring science into player evaluation, and because of that, every businessperson in America wants to meet him.

“When you think of people who’ve had that kind of cultural effect on sports, it’s very few. Branch Rickey breaking the color barrier, really jarring the culture. … It’s hard to think of anyone else. Billy burst out of baseball the way people in baseball really just don’t.”

… On most fronts, the decades-long war over how to best explain what happens on a baseball field has been won decisively by the nerds; analytics, also known as sabermetrics by baseball people, have definitively changed the way teams build rosters. But even though fewer baseball writers, managers and players crankily dismiss analytics, statistics like FIP (Fielding Independent Pitching, which tries to measure a pitcher’s effectiveness by taking into account the fallibility of his teammates in the field) and UZR (Ultimate Zone Rating, one of several attempts to quantify defensive performance) don’t get a lot of prime real estate on the Jumbotrons. Nor do they generate much discussion on sports talk radio, where ideas like ‘‘locker-room presence’’ and ‘‘clutch hitter’’ still prevail.

Baseball isn’t the only sport that suffers from this disconnect between how its top evaluators see the game and how fans do. Cameras that track players’ movements have also been installed in N.B.A. arenas, for example. But while the data they generate — like the total mileage a player runs in a game or the frequency with which he drives to the basket — have helped coaches and team executives better evaluate talent and performance, these stats still remain abstractions to most spectators. So why has exit velocity, which doesn’t really seem to tell us anything we can’t see with the naked eye, spread so quickly, including to video scoreboards in several major league ballparks and the commentary on highlight shows? Or to put it more broadly, why do some stats catch on while others stagger off into the cemetery of useless acronyms?