Applied Sports Science newsletter – April 28, 2018

… It all had to do with the lower half of Zunino’s body.

And it started with his stance. His hands start above his helmet and his feet are more narrow, which fixes his load. Then he gets into what Micucci called a front-side “K” position, with his leg planting and attacking the pitcher while he pinches his shoulder in and slightly angled downhill.

The weight on his front foot allows the back to slide out, keeping his hips locked in.

“There were a lot of things we talked about, but it’s two things to clean up six,” Micucci said. “That was the mentality. Just worry about your stance and that will clean up three things.”

Four years after the Titans made him the eighth pick in the 2011 draft, Jake Locker quit the game and told his agent not to listen to any offers to return. It wasn’t his spotty performances or the recurring injuries that ended his desire to play—it was the growing realization that he wanted something else in life

To gain some insight into how Georgia Tech guard Josh Okogie’s decision about whether to stay in the NBA draft will be made, it might be worthwhile to consider his three older siblings.

His eldest brother Evaristus is a dentist who for a time in college held three jobs. The second and third eldest, Nathaniel and Rachael, both earned degrees in computer science and made dean’s list, Nathaniel at Georgia Southern and Rachael at Kennesaw State. Nathaniel, 28, has a job in IT. Rachael, 25, wants to be a teacher.

The point being, Pius and Anthonia Okogie didn’t raise their five children (the youngest, Emmanuel, is in seventh grade) to go blithely chasing after rainbows. Evaristus told the AJC that the decision will be based largely on the feedback that the family receives on Josh’s draft stock from NBA scouts, not on caprice.

Pop.

Feeling any part of the body snap or pop is enough to send chills down the spine of any athlete.

For Dalton Feeney, the unwelcome “pop” occurred last Oct. 15 while pitching for North Carolina State, and he knew precisely the signal his body was sending.

“On the third pitch I felt a distinct pop in my elbow and I just walked off the field,” recalled Feeney, a sophomore right-hander. “I knew it was like the partial tear in my junior year (of high school), but this one was more distinct.”

“It happened in a fall scrimmage with the Czech Republic. … It was the last scrimmage before we went home for Christmas break,” Feeney continued. “They wanted one more inning out of me. It was my last outing. I’d pitched probably 30 innings in the fall.”

… Currently Martinez is the only female strength and conditioning coach listed on any of the 32 team websites, which Brandon is thrilled to see almost 30 years after she entered the league.

Brandon spoke with the Bay Area News Group on Monday about Martinez joining the Raiders, what it means to her and what she thinks the future holds for women in the NFL.

… An active RWU clearly reduces the halftime decline in temperature and
improves subsequent performance (4,6,8). However, passive muscle heating did not did not improve second half soccer per-
formance (6) whereas whole body warming did improve rugby performance (10,11). Thus, it is not clear if an active RWU
affects performance via muscle thermoregulation or other factors. An inactive recovery during the halftime period, coupled with carbohydrate consumption could result in reduced blood glucose concentrations. Early studies (2,5) show that consuming carbohydrates prior to exercise often elevate blood glucose, followed by a large insulin response. As a result, glucose levels decline resulting in a rebound hypoglycemia. It is not clear if
this happens during the halftime interval, particularly when combined with carbohydrate consumption. However, Wahren et al. (14) found that insulin levels rise quickly after exercise, reaching a peak within five minutes. Further, Russell et
al. (9) found reductions in blood glucose following an inactive
halftime, extending into the first 15 min of the second half. It is possible engaging in RWU during halftime may attenuate a possible rise in post-exercise blood insulin and limit reductions blood glucose that may otherwise be present at the start of the second half. At present, there is only circumstantial evidence to support this idea.

… There is no getting around the fact that tennis is becoming an early specialization sport – if we consider that Martina Hingis won her first junior slam at the age of 12, we must be creating high skilled players from an early age. The dangers of early sports specialization are that athletes can become one-dimensional in their movement skills (this is a very interesting topic that would demand an article of its own) – which may then lead to a narrow bandwidth of movement. They can end up with overdeveloped sport-specific skills and underdeveloped global motor skills. Now in the case of tennis, I support the fact that in order to excel in our sport, early exposure is vital, however, it is within our remit as coaches to also expose players to a much wider diversification of movement skills via developing motor skill proficiency.

Arguably the optimal time to focus on this type of training is with junior players. From a neural standpoint, youth athletes’ brains are much more ‘plastic’ – meaning they are quicker to learn, develop and refine new tasks. But, this training is not exclusive to these ages; even at the age of 25 we can still be refining our walking gait – so this type of training can still be highly beneficial for players of all ages. I use coordination tasks with all my athletes, integrating them into warm-ups, movement sessions and rest periods in the gym or on court drills.

PURPOSE:

This study examined the trajectories of elite swimmers’ recovery-stress states and cardiac vagal-related markers during a three-month training period preceding the national championship and their within-person relationships with perceived control.
METHODS:

A Multilevel Growth Curve Analysis (MGCA) approach was used with 21 male elite swimmers. Four waves of assessments of psychological (stress, recovery, perceived control) and physiological (heart rate variability, HRV) markers were completed during a three-month training preparation leading to a major competition.
RESULTS:

Results of MGCA revealed: (a) a significant positive linear effect of time (i.e., linear increase over time) and a significant negative quadratic effect of time (i.e., inverted U shape over time) on perceived stress whereas the opposite pattern of results was observed for perceived recovery; and (b) a significant positive linear effect of time for nHRR60. Both at level 1 (within-person level of analysis) and 2 (between-person level of analysis), perceived control was: (a) positively associated with athletes’ perceived recovery and parasympathetic markers (i.e., MeanRR; pNN50); and (b) negatively related to swimmers’ perceived stress. Results also indicated that within-person interactions of perceived control with time reached significance for general recovery and HRV. Finally, within-person interaction of perceived control with squared time reached significance for subjective sport-specific and total stress.
CONCLUSION:

Overall, this study provided insights into the key role played by perceived control on both psychological and physiological markers related to recovery-stress states’ levels during the three-month training period preceding the national championship.

… “This event was something that intrigued us as a club,” Lonestar SC Academy Director Victor Pace said. “We found it very interesting and very supportive. For us, on both ends of the scale, it was important that we looked at this to see how it could benefit us as a club. Especially in our younger ages, we’ve got a lot of late developers. The physical challenges our players face in our conference, which is very strong, are insurmountable in some games just because of the physical nature. So, this environment provided them with another opportunity or another avenue to see what they can do.”

… When it comes to sport, researchers have found that athletes adopt one of two kinds of narratives: a performance or a quest. A performance narrative occurs when the athlete prioritizes winning over other aspects of life. Performance comes first and foremost. Whether that is winning games, scoring goals, running faster, or making more money; the outcome is all that matters.

A quest narrative, on the other hand, emphasizes the potential growth from diverse experiences. It involves “individuals confronting their suffering, accepting the consequences, and striving to gain something positive from their experience.” In other words, the emphasis isn’t put on the outcome, but on the journey. Yes, the outcome still matters, but it becomes a signaling mechanism, not the be all end all.

Performance narratives are ingrained in us from a young age but they can lead to maladaptation when we encounter adversity. Because if performance is the sole judge, when failure occurs, people often register this not as failure at a specific task but failure at life. If an athlete has a quest narrative, the outcome becomes information, and the “failure” becomes something to understand and grow from, not a self-defining setback.

In Olympic swimmers, researchers found that as athletes matured in their careers, they tended to shift from a performance to a quest narrative.

… Sigrid Olthof has been working at the University of Groningen for four years now. Together with Wouter Frencken she led a research project with the question of to what extent small parties played in the training, such as 4: 4, 5: 5 and 6: 6, correctly matches the match, so 11:11 on a whole field .

Olthof about that: “On one of our training fields we have had extra lines applied. That is not just that, we have done thorough research beforehand. In many small parties you see that they are played on small fields with relatively many players. As a result, players come to play very close together. There are disadvantages for the football actions that therefore do not match the game, such as short pass distances and that the opponent can intervene quickly. And there is little room for a dribble or freewheeling action. Ultimately, our finding is that a small party on a small field is often too far removed from the final 11:11. ”

Justise Winslow’s size–14 sneaker was no match for the mask. The protective contraption, designed to shield Joel Embiid’s face, allowed the Sixers’ All-Star to return from an orbital bone fracture and make his NBA postseason debut Thursday night. Embiid finished Philadelphia’s Game 3 victory against Miami with 23 points, seven rebounds, four assists and three blocks. He inflicted the majority of his damage after Winslow tried to stomp on the goggles that accompany Embiid’s new headgear. “Fortunately we had a mask in the bullpen,” Sixers coach Brett Brown said. “Little do they know is that I have about 50 of them,” Embiid said. “It’s going to take much more than that to get me out of this series. I’m going to be a nightmare for them, too.”

Portland’s a growing hub for the sportswear industry, and with that comes an increasing number of educational opportunities for current and aspiring industry professionals.

University of Oregon’s Sports Product Management program last week hosted its fourth annual sports apparel creation workshop during Design Week — a two-day crash course on building, sourcing and marketing successful sports apparel companies. The course is taught by industry veterans Krista Martenson and John Notar, Nike’s former vice president of apparel, who have 60 years of combined experience in apparel creation. It’s held in UO’s new innovation lab at its Portland campus, also home of the university’s Sports Product Management Masters Program.

“This workshop is about providing some spark, some inspiration, something that’s going to get industry people where they want to go faster,” Notar said. “It’s great to get people out of their offices and connecting with other people in the industry.”

The enhancement of ubiquitous and pervasive computing brings new perspectives in medical rehabilitation. In that sense, the present study proposes a smart, web-based platform to promote the reeducation of patients after hip replacement surgery. This project focuses on two fundamental aspects in the development of a suitable tele-rehabilitation application, which are: (i) being based on an affordable technology, and (ii) providing the patients with a real-time assessment of the correctness of their movements. A probabilistic approach based on the development and training of ten Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) is used to discriminate in real time the main faults in the execution of the therapeutic exercises. Two experiments are designed to evaluate the precision of the algorithm for classifying movements performed in the laboratory and clinical settings, respectively. A comparative analysis of the data shows that the models are as reliable as the physiotherapists to discriminate and identify the motion errors. The results are discussed in terms of the required setup for a successful application in the field and further implementations to improve the accuracy and usability of the system.

… The process starts behind the scenes, where Washington video coaches Brett Leonhardt and Tim Ohashi are responsible for clipping and flagging footage on the fly from their bunker cave of computer screens. From there Forsythe can queue whatever play he desires onto the iPad, which is loaded with XOS ThunderCloud software—no other apps, unfortunately for any Minecraft enthusiasts—and connected to a dedicated WiFi network that only Washington can access. For extra security, each coach also receives a unique login username and password.

When Forsythe was hired as Washington’s video coach in ‘06-07, technical adjustments had to wait until intermission, which consumed precious time. The Capitals were relatively ahead of the digital curve, hiring an outside company several years ago to set up iPads before they were standardized across the league. Typically, Forsythe and fellow assistants Lane Lambert and Todd Reirden will tap a player on the shoulder and slide the tablet their way, but some are proactive enough to seek feedback upon finishing a shift, removing their gloves and toggling themselves: Alex Ovechkin, for instance, enjoys reviewing how certain goalies defended his sizzling shot attempts. “He’s scored 600 goals,” Forsythe says. “I’m not going to tell him what to do.”

… “Our main goal is to build collaboration between teams to achieve technology platforms that can further advances in a range of industries because we can connect them to government bodies, universities, technology developers and suppliers,” explained Karen Savala, director of marketing. Among its medtech partners are Jabil, Flex, GE, Lubrizol and Molex. Because of the funding source, when it comes to government contracting, NextFlex serves as an interface vehicle to manage the relationship between government agencies and companies and contractors.

NextFlex is presently working to scale wearables called sweat patches — a project started under a NextFlex predecessor, the Nano-Bio Medical Consortium under the primary leadership of GE Global Research. They were the prime developer of the technology, with support by partners AFRL, Dublin City University, American Semiconductor, UMass Amherst, The University of Connecticut and the University of Arizona.

“This technology originally came from a request from the Air Force,” said Jason Marsh, NextFlex’s director of technology. “AFRL was pursuing non-invasive ways to measure biomarkers such as electrolytes that measure a pilot’s hydration status.”

Objective To estimate the incidence proportion (IP) and incidence rate (IR) of ACL injury in football players.

Design Systematic review with meta-analysis.

Data sources PubMed, CINAHL and SPORTDiscus electronic databases were searched from inception to 20 January 2017.

Eligibility criteria for selecting study Studies that reported the total number of participants/population by sex, total number of ACL injuries by sex and total person-time by sex were included.

Results Twenty-eight studies were included. The IP and IR of ACL injury in female football players were 2.0% (95% CI 1.2% to 3.1%) and 2.0/10 000 athlete exposures (AEs) (95% CI 1.6 to 2.6; I2=91%) over a period of one season to 4 years. The IP and IR of ACL injury in male players were 3.5% (95% CI 0.7% to 8.2%) and 0.9/10 000 AEs (95% CI 0.7 to 1.1; I2=94%). Studies that evaluated matched cohorts of female and male players showed no difference in IP (relative risk=1.2; 95% CI 0.9 to 1.6; P=0.47) over a period of one season to 4 years. Women were at greater risk than men (incidence rate ratio (IRR)=2.2; 95% CI 1.6 to 3.1; I2=83%; P<0.001). When accounting for participation level, the difference in IR between women and men was greatest for intermediate players (IRR=2.9; 95% CI 2.4 to 3.6) compared with amateur (IRR=2.6; 95% CI 1.4 to 4.8) and elite (IRR=2.0; 95% CI 1.1 to 3.4) players. Summary/conclusion Overall, more men sustained ACL injury in football. There was no difference in the relative risk of ACL injury between female and male football players in a window that spanned one season to 4 years. The IR of ACL injury among women was 2.2 times higher than the IR of ACL injury among men. The reported sex disparity in ACL injury was independent of participation level.

“Supervised learning is the ultimate example of ‘garbage in, garbage out’,” computer scientist and former Stanford President John L. Hennessy told the audience in his opening remarks at last Tuesday’s Human Intelligence & Artificial Intelligence (HIAI) in Medicine Symposium, hosted by the Stanford Presence Center. Dr. Hennessy was honored at the symposium for his recent Turing Award, but his talk stayed true to the Presence mission—championing human intelligence in medicine as artificial intelligence (AI)’s role in the clinic grows.

The Stanford Presence Center was founded by Stanford’s Vice Chair for the Theory and Practice of Medicine, Abraham Verghese, a leader at Stanford in advocating for and teaching fully engaged physical exams. HIAI commenced the development of a shared agenda to steer AI toward its most beneficial implementation. Can AI be developed to augment the physician’s intelligence, rather than attempt to replace it? Luminaries from medicine, computer science and policy shared their concerns and aspirations.

In the 1960s, Dr. Hennessy told attendees, scientists imagined that artificially intelligent machines would quickly replace humans in the most demanding and influential work. But while classification by AI has grown, general intelligence in AI remains elusive. In plainer words, an AI model can sort images of cats and dogs, but cannot answer a simple question suited to a 5-year-old child: What makes that animal a cat?

Dr. Hennessy explained that AI is coming of age in medicine because we now have fast computers and big data. Eric Topol, Executive VP and Professor of Molecular Medicine at The Scripps Research Institute (TSRI), gave us a tour of the preponderance of genomic, microbiomic, et ceteromic data now available. Despite this, Dr. Topol noted, published trials or prospective observational studies showing the benefit of AI to diagnose and prognose are lacking. In the near- to mid-term, Dr. Topol believes we’ll see the maturation of helper applications: AI-based virtual medical coaches (he uses DayTwo, which provides personalized nutritional guidance to balance blood sugar), AI-guided home monitoring of stable patients, and computer vision in health care settings.

… It is estimated that 1 in 4 Major League pitchers will need Tommy John Surgery in their career. In 2000, 13 MLB pitchers had UCL reconstructions. Over a decade later, in 2012, that number had increased nearly three-fold to 32 pitchers requiring the season ending surgery.

Unfortunately, the increasing numbers of players falling victim to UCL injuries translate to the younger levels of baseball as well.

Evidence suggests the trend has impacted adolescent athletes with a 50% increase in UCL reconstructions in high school baseball players aged 15 to 19 years old. In New York State alone, the volume of UCL reconstructions increased by 193% over a 10-year period.3 These younger players may feel pressures within the competitive culture in youth baseball. This may lead players to play through pain and more talented players may be told they have to throw more frequently and with greater intensity.

While there are several reasons why there are so many Tommy John injuries, research has described overuse to be the main cause of player injury.

There is a 500% increase in risk for surgery for those players that pitch more than 8 months per year and a 400% increase in risk is observed for those that throw more than 80 pitches per game.

The team that’s closer to winning tends to get more favorable ball and strike calls when the game goes into extras.

One of my favorite books of the dotcom era was Information Rules, by Shapiro and Varian in 1998. At the time, tech boosters were saying that all the old business rules were obsolete, and anyone who disagreed “just doesn’t get it.” But Shapiro and Varian showed in detail how to understand the new internet economy in terms of standard economic concepts. They were mostly right, and Varian went on to become Google’s chief economist.

Today many tout a brave new AI-driven economic revolution, with some touting radical change. For example, a widely cited 2013 paper said:

47% of total US employment is in the high risk category … potentially automatable over … perhaps a decade or two.

Five years later, we haven’t yet seen changes remotely this big. And a new book is now a worthy successor to Information Rules:

In Prediction Machines, three eminent economists recast the rise of AI as a drop in the cost of prediction. With this single, masterful stroke, they lift the curtain on the AI-is-magic hype and show how basic tools from economics provide clarity about the AI revolution and a basis for action by CEOs, managers, policy makers, investors, and entrepreneurs.

… there is one thing this year’s Predators have in common with last year’s: They’re succeeding without a bona fide offensive star. No Predator scored more than 61 points last year, and it’s been more of the same this season. Seven Predator forwards finished with at least 35 points, but none eclipsed 64. Four Predator forwards scored at least 23 goals, but there’s not a 30-goal scorer in the bunch. Nashville has plenty of players who can hurt opposing defenses, but it doesn’t have a Connor McDavid or an Alexander Ovechkin. Which is to say, it doesn’t have a single skater who is capable of changing a game by himself.

Aggregating multiple non-expert opinions into a collective estimate can improve accuracy across many contexts. However, two sources of error can diminish collective wisdom: individual estimation biases and information sharing between individuals. Here, we measure individual biases and social influence rules in multiple experiments involving hundreds of individuals performing a classic numerosity estimation task. We first investigate how existing aggregation methods, such as calculating the arithmetic mean or the median, are influenced by these sources of error. We show that the mean tends to overestimate, and the median underestimate, the true value for a wide range of numerosities. Quantifying estimation bias, and mapping individual bias to collective bias, allows us to develop and validate three new aggregation measures that effectively counter sources of collective estimation error. In addition, we present results from a further experiment that quantifies the social influence rules that individuals employ when incorporating personal estimates with social information. We show that the corrected mean is remarkably robust to social influence, retaining high accuracy in the presence or absence of social influence, across numerosities and across different methods for averaging social information. Using knowledge of estimation biases and social influence rules may therefore be an inexpensive and general strategy to improve the wisdom of crowds.

… “The daily information we receive every day about a game we’re about to play is pretty extensive in comparison to what we’re used to,” Snitker said.

Snitker admits he did not know much about a heavy analytics approach before Braves general manager Alex Anthopoulos joined the organization in November. Anthopoulos hired director of Major League operations Alex Tamin, who oversees an analytics department that has been significantly enhanced since the front-office staff was overhauled this past offseason.

Tamin’s department organizes data which he relays to the coaching staff on a daily basis to devise game plans. First-base coach Eric Young discusses the information with the outfielders and third-base coach Ron Washington handles the infielders.

… All of those eulogies are true, of course. Wenger’s longevity, as Ferguson highlighted, is an achievement in itself. The loyalty between him and the club “of his heart,” as he has always put it, is increasingly an anachronism in soccer’s age of impatience. It is the end of an era not just for Arsenal, but for the sport as a whole, too, in that sense. There will be no more who do what Wenger did, for as long as he did.

He did, as others mentioned, shape some of the finest teams England has seen: the one that won the Premier League and F.A. Cup in his first full season, built on the granite defense he had inherited; the Invincibles of Thierry Henry and Patrick Vieira in 2004; the team that came within 12 minutes of winning the Champions League in 2006.

In doing so, he transformed what Arsenal was, how it was seen, across the globe. That is Wenger’s legacy, just as much as the sleek, space-age stadium the club built on the back of his success and the state-of-the-art training facility he helped design: Arsenal had not always been seen as a bastion of taste and style in England, let alone around the world.

… How America’s college sports system got here – the only country in the world to attach a highly-commercialized, multibillion-dollar industry to higher education, thus resulting in ongoing legal challenges and public criticism – is a long story. Three key events help trace the journey.

1. Why NCAA athletes are called student-athletes

The term “student-athlete” is ingrained in the college sports vernacular. NCAA-organized press conferences involve a moderator seeking questions for any of the “student-athletes,” a term that historically comes to define the NCAA’s perceived moral authority and its justification for existence.