Applied Sports Science newsletter – December 15, 2017

In 2017 Josh Sargent agreed to terms with Werder Bremen of the German Bundesliga and also achieved the rare feat of playing in both the U-20 and U-17 World Cups. ASN’s Brian Sciaretta spoke at length with the St. Louis native about his stellar year and his future ambitions.

Some sports stars appear destined for glory even at an early age. Chris Froome’s true ability on a bike, however, started to uncoil and manifest itself only after his mid-20s. Since then his achievements have been staggering. Four Tour de France yellow jerseys. The first man to complete the Tour-Vuelta e España double since 1978. And that rare ability to hang with the best time-triallers and nimblest mountain goats.

What makes Froome’s success even more extraordinary is that he grew up in Kenya, an athletics powerhouse but a cycling backwater, and only got into the sport, aged 12, when he asked a talented local rider David Kinjah to teach him to mountain bike. Soon the pair were regularly riding 30 miles up into the mountains above Nairobi where they would sometimes camp in a meadow. On one occasion a cow ate half their tent.

Two years later, Froome was sent to St John’s in Johannesburg, one of the most exclusive boarding schools in South Africa and more noted for its rugby players than its cyclists.

As everyone in the great state of Wisconsin (my original home state!), with an interest in football, or with access to the internet knows, Aaron Rodgers is approaching a comeback. October 15th, he was tackled by Anthony Barr of my current home state Vikings and fractured his clavicle (collarbone). He underwent surgery October 20th. Per report, he had 13 screws and 2 plates applied. He is now 7.5 weeks (53 days) from surgery….so the question of the hour is: Can he play?

… Knee injuries can be preventable but not always avoidable. Snell said his injury was wear and tear. Teletovic thinks pieces of cartilage came off years ago and finally just got to a point where he had to deal with it.

“It was something I had to get cleaned up,” Teletovic said.

Both players credit the Bucks training staff with getting them back on the path to recovery as efficiently as possible.

Teletovic marvels at the fact that he was released from the hospital in New York two hours after his Nov. 21 surgery, spent two days on crutches and upon his return to Milwaukee got to work immediately.

“We have these unbelievable physicians here and the Bucks are unbelievable,” Teletovic said. “I had surgery, what, two and a half weeks ago, and I’m running, I’m jumping, I’m shooting. Just look at Jabari Parker, and all that he’s been through. He’s out there and looks the same as before. His jump is as high as it was!”

… Now, some of those kids aren’t going to be in that. Which I have a super-big concern about. Because they go from what we did in residency, and what we did going to a World Cup, and those guys that aren’t pro — it’s such a difficult gap in this country for those guys. Do they go back to their clubs and play youth soccer? Do they go to college? What happens in their main developmental years, where they need the environments that we’re talking about?

Some of them are going to get [that], but that class of players, it’s not just Sargent, Carleton, Weah, Durkin, so on and so forth. That is a really talented pool, and it’s deep. There’s going to be guys that come out of that group, because they’re so deep and talented and have pushed each other.

But if you have Tim Weah at PSG playing in Champions League games; and at the other end of the spectrum, there’s a kid named Blaine Ferri who is a little younger, and he was going to go back and play with his club team in Dallas — that difference, about what they’re going to get, is shocking.

Last season there were many in the media and fans alike who took gratification from the fact that Pep Guardiola’s Man City side were ‘found out’. After an electric start to his first season in England Guardiola’s team started to struggle, performances and results became inconsistent and the aura of Guardiola was being questioned. It seemed that many who prophesised his downfall in England were being proven correct. This year however it seems that the excellent start shows little sign of capitulation. City are dominating the league and seem unstoppable.

So what has happened? Was it simply the additions of wing backs to the squad which provided the speed and physicality which City’s full backs lacked last season? They’ve helped without question. Has it been the addition of a new keeper, a goalkeeper who looks like a big, dominant keeper yet one who also has the passing quality of a deep lying playmaker? Yes that has helped also. But above all, and with the additions of these players, City’s players have learnt what Guardiola wants of them. They are beginning to master his philosophy. They are now making great decisions. And decision making is the key for Guardiola.

… I personally use ‘meal templates‘ whereby I calculate the individual requirements of each player, account for preferences, intolerances, likes/dislikes and then translate them into realistic meals across the day. This method at least provides the player with an idea of the quantity of food required and serves as an extremely useful tool. In the example provided you’ll notice I accommodated for the players favourite Italian restaurant and a pre-match meal that he’s consumed consistently throughout his career.

It is possible to restore glycogen within 24-hours after cycling exercise, although the muscle damage from eccentric contractions (decelerations) and potentially from collisions during team sports results in structural alterations to the muscle tissue, particularly the glucose transporter GLUT4, which significantly impairs rates of muscle glycogen resynthesis (13, 14, 15). Meaning it may take around 72-hours to completely restore muscle glycogen after a competitive football match. Furthermore the player is unable to ‘carb load’ to the same extent prior to the next game within that time. In the first 3-hours of recovery glycogen stores in slow twitch muscle fibres occur significantly faster than fast twitch muscle fibres, leading to the suggestion that the more explosive players within a team (wing backs, wingers, centre forwards) are likely to be effected most in the second game. But assuming there is at least 48-hours between each game there shouldn’t be much difference.

Interestingly, it’s now common for players to partake in active recovery methods after a game, but this actually results in hormonal alterations that lead to glycogen breakdown. So from a nutrition perspective the promotion of sedentary behaviours or limiting the duration of active recovery to <20-mins would be advised, especially with very limited time between games (<72-hours) (16). That said, the slower rates of recovery will ultimately lead to a marked drop in intensity in the second game, potentially requiring alterations to tactics or style of play, particularly as the high-intensity, pressing style of play is becoming more prevalent.

… 4. Want more scouting? Then cut meetings

Daly credits Patriots’ head coach Bill Belichick for keeping meetings to a minimum.

“One refreshing thing about Bill: He doesn’t do lots of meetings where you sit and talk through every player’s performance. We have a few quick hitters, he may make a few comments, ‘That guy was brutal, get him out of there,’ but it doesn’t drag. Same with the draft process: One of our scouts told me that in Denver and Arizona, they gather every scout and position coach, the GM and head coach—and everyone sits as they discuss every possible collegiate prospect. This lasts a week! Not Bill.

… Eccrine Systems is set to introduce its first product, a wearable armband, in early 2018. It is designed to monitor dehydration status during thermally intensive activities and provide real-time alerts to end users and safety personnel to help avoid the dangerous effects of serious heat stress. The Sweatronics platform continuously monitors sweat biomarkers and sends the data to a remote system through a transceiver. The unique sensors and arrays allow a device to effectively analyze sweat rate and other biomarkers in a single, continuous, or repetitive manner.

In this paper, we propose a pose grammar to tackle the problem of 3D human pose estimation. Our model directly takes 2D pose as input and learns a generalized 2D-3D mapping function. The proposed model consists of a base network which efficiently captures pose-aligned features and a hierarchy of Bi-directional RNNs (BRNN) on the top to explicitly incorporate a set of knowledge regarding human body configuration (i.e., kinematics, symmetry, motor coordination). The proposed model thus enforces high-level constraints over human poses. In learning, we develop a pose sample simulator to augment training samples in virtual camera views, which further improves our model generalizability. We validate our method on public 3D human pose benchmarks and propose a new evaluation protocol working on cross-view setting to verify the generalization capability of different methods. We empirically observe that most state-of-the-art methods encounter difficulty under such setting while our method can well handle such challenges.

… There’s an extra variable to consider when assigning blame for this post-OKC boost. Based on their age, most of the players in this sample should have improved. Harden was 23 in his first full season after leaving the Thunder. Waiters and Reggie Jackson were 25, and Green was 26. This year, Oladipo and Kanter are 25, while Sabonis is only 21. Research shows that basketball players improve throughout their early 20s, peak around 27, and decline from there, so it makes sense that the young Thunder exports would have posted better numbers when — a year older and more experienced — they found new teams.

Splitting the group into younger and older players reveals sharp, age-based differences between their last year in OKC and their first year elsewhere. Eight of 11 players in their 20s have increased their points per game in their first post-Thunder season, while just one of six in their 30s have; nine of 11 players in their 20s have boosted their PER, versus just three of six in their 30s.

They’re mostly young by managers’ standards, media-savvy and well-versed in analytics. All five played in the majors, four of them at least 10 years. Two are fluent in Spanish.

The new wave of major league managers who will debut next season bear little resemblance to the old-school skippers of the recent past, many of them onetime marginal players who honed their craft for years in the minors before getting a crack at a big-league job. Think Bobby Cox for a point of reference.

Of the six managers taking over major league teams for the 2018 season, only the Detroit Tigers’ Ron Gardenhire, 60, has served in that capacity before.

… If it were all about player health and safety, there wouldn’t be Thursday night games. The NFL says the injury rates on Thursdays are in line with (or better than) those of Sunday and Monday games, but that’s a semantic argument. It doesn’t take into account those who can’t answer the bell for the game but could if they had three more days to get ready. And it doesn’t take into account the long-term toll that playing a game on a short week of preparation can have on players’ bodies. You don’t have to be a doctor, a physical therapist or a psychiatrist to figure out that it would be better for NFL players to get six days off between games than three. Especially by this point in the season, when they’re all battered and bruised from the long season anyway.

But that’s the thing, right? It isn’t all about player health and safety.

“Visualization projects with high visibility focus on two main purposes: inspiration and explanation. Visualization can however be used (and is actually used) to increase understanding of complex problems through data analysis. These project are less visible but by no means less important.”

… From the moment a player walks into a pop-up medical tent on the sideline and the doctor pulls down the zipper, he enters a secret injury world.

A player’s name on an injury report? The tip of the iceberg.

Below the surface is where the real story is, where only a few can see it and understand its magnitude.

“Usually, the owner knows, the GM knows, the head coach knows, the position coach knows, and the doctor and the player,” one former general manager says. “It’s just that little circle—the people who need to know.”

Injuries are a strategic card in NFL poker games, so teams and players hold them close to the vest.