Applied Sports Science newsletter – May 1, 2018

… As if to announce that she’s back, Heath scored the equalizing goal less than 10 minutes after entering Saturday’s 1-1 draw against the Utah Royals.

Reflecting on the year, Heath was clearly frustrated during with her lengthy stay on the sideline.

“It’s the worst thing in the whole entire world,” she said. “For any athlete, everyone will tell you they’d rather be somewhere else, you know, than have to watch something that you love to do so much. It’s almost torturous. It’s like dangling something out in front of you that you can’t have. But that’s the kind of mental fortitude that you have to have and you have to get through. And all athletes do it. You sign up for it when you do this job.”

Sam Darnold has stood in front of a mirror with a football in his hand every day for the past 14 months to perfect his quirkiest trait.

Soon after his epic performance in the 2017 Rose Bowl, the kid asked friend, mentor and quarterback whisperer Jordan Palmer the most important question of his young life that led him on a path to the Jets Thursday night.

“This is really indicative of who Sam is,” Palmer told the Daily News on Saturday. “He had just won the Rose Bowl. He was on top of the world. Everyone was telling him that he’s going to be the top pick in 2018. The Suck for Sam thing started. And his first question to me was so cool: ‘If I’m going to back all this up, what are the areas that I need to get way better at?’”

Darnold’s elongated windup wasn’t ideal, but Palmer didn’t want to make radical changes at a time when the kid was enjoying so much early success on the field. So, the quarterback guru suggested a simple daily drill designed to shorten an exaggerated loop in the young signal caller’s throwing motion.

Mike Trout threw to the wrong base in a game early in his career, and even now, he can recall just about every word Torii Hunter said to him about the play when they got back to the dugout: why he should have thrown homeward instead of to third base, why the runner at third started and then stopped and started again, and the pre-pitch visualization that must become second nature.

Hunter’s explanation was absorbed and embedded and is still utilized because this is how Trout attacks his own weaknesses. This is how he continues to get better. Trout is already generally regarded as baseball’s best player, and he ranks among the very best players all time in adjusted OPS+: Only Babe Ruth, Ted Williams, Barry Bonds, Lou Gehrig and Rogers Hornsby rate better, as Trout is tied for sixth with his doppelganger, Mickey Mantle. But every year, there continue to be signs that he is improving as a player.

… James said team medical personnel suggested an IV during the quarter break, but he turned that down. ESPN’s Doris Burke, on the ABC broadcast, reported that James was experiencing cramping.

James, 33, averaged 41.4 minutes per game in the first round, second among all postseason players behind only Paul George, 27, who averaged 41.8 mpg in the Oklahoma City Thunder’s six-game series loss to the Utah Jazz.

“That’s why you play the minutes throughout the course of the season the way he does: When these types of situations happen, you’re prepared for them,” Cavs coach Tyronn Lue said. “So he’s used to playing 41, 42 minutes and being able to take it with his body and still be able to produce. A lot of guys, they get in the playoffs, they’re not used to playing that many minutes, and then it being a high-intensity atmosphere, it’s kind of hard for those guys to perform. So he does a great job of taking care of his body, a great job of conditioning himself for these types of situations.”

The model for youth sports hasn’t changed much over the past century. It’s a space still largely dominated by community-based organizations, run by volunteers using marketing strategies that are fairly basic. Parents learn about local programs by word of mouth, or maybe a flyer sent home in a child’s school backpack. Children are typically served up with a handful of commonly offered team sports.

Some kids stick with it and advance through the ecosystem. Many others fall away.

Identifying efficiencies in the marketplace, technology companies and even large corporations have begun to enter the space. Among those is SportsEngine, a Minneapolis-based former startup now owned by NBC Sports. You may have seen their ads during the Winter Olympics, driving viewers to a search marketplace that offers a directory of local programs, including those in an array of winter sports.

Tom Farrey, executive director of the Aspen Institute Sports & Society Program, caught up with CEO Justin Kaufenberg recently to understand where tech is taking youth sports and his company’s approach to engaging with Project Play 2020, the multiyear initiative that includes SportsEngine/NBC Sports as a founding member.

Fitbit’s recent acquisition of Twine Health has aligned the wearables company closer to clinicians, particularly for monitoring chronic conditions. In a new collaboration with Google, Fitbit is hoping to enhance its healthcare credibility.

Fitbit will use Google’s Cloud services and engineering support to advance its own products. The wearables business also intends to use Google’s new Cloud Healthcare API to help the company connect user data with electronic medical records. By using the Google Healthcare API, Fitbit hopes to accelerate interoperability with existing and future healthcare partners and provide data exchange that can scale to meet large enterprise partner needs. The idea is to give patients and clinicians a more comprehensive view of patient’s health to support more personalized care, according to a news release.

Founded in 2013, Bodytrak will launch their first wearable in 2018. But what exactly is this new physiological monitoring device and how is different from what’s currently on the market? As the company works through their development cycle, let’s take a look at their unique perspective on this developing platform for high-precision health and safety monitoring.

Background Cognitive training (CT) aims to develop a range of skills, like attention and decision-making, through targeted training of core cognitive functions. While CT can target context specific skills, like movement anticipation, much CT is domain general, focusing on core abilities (e.g. selective attention) for transfer to a range of real-world tasks, such as spotting opponents. Commercial CT (CCT) devices are highly appealing for athletes and coaches due to their ease of use and eye-catching marketing claims. The extent to which this training transfers to performance in the sporting arena is, however, unclear. Therefore this paper sought to provide a systematic review of evidence for beneficial training effects of CCT devices and evaluate their application to sport.
Methods An extensive search of electronic databases (PubMed, PsychInfo, GoogleScholar and SportDiscus) was conducted to identify peer-reviewed evidence of training interventions with commercially available CT devices. 43 studies met the inclusion criteria and were retained for quality assessment and synthesis of results. 17 studies assessed transfer effects beyond laboratory cognitive tests, but only 1 directly assessed transfer to a sporting task.
Results The review of evidence showed limited support for far transfer benefits from CCT devices to sporting tasks, mainly because studies did not target the sporting environment. Additionally, a number of methodological issues with the CCT literature were identified, including small sample sizes, lack of retention tests and limited replication of findings by researchers independent of the commercial product. Therefore, evidence for sporting benefits is currently limited by the paucity of representative transfer tests and a focus on populations with health conditions.
Conclusions Currently there is little direct evidence that the use of CCT devices can transfer to benefits for sporting performance. This conclusion, however, stems more from a lack of experimental studies in the sporting field and a lack of experimental rigor, rather than convincing null effects. Subsequently, there is an opportunity for researchers to develop more reliable findings in this area through systematic assessment in athletic populations and major methodological improvements.

… At St. Johns County’s six public high schools, 103 athletes from all their sports teams were treated for concussions during the 2016-17 school year, according to county Athletic Director Paul Abbatinozzi. His data did not indicate how many were attributed to football.

According to a 2015 study by the Indianapolis-based Datalys Center, high school football has a higher concussion rate than college or youth football. The study also said 58 percent of concussions in high school football occur during practice.

… The majority of the bacteria located on you or in you, are found in the gut. More specifically, most bacteria (10-100 trillion) are found in the large intestine (1). Not too long ago, we used to think all the valuable digestion and absorption of nutrients had already occurred by the time food reached your large intestine. Now we know that’s only partly true. In the large intestine, some of the food that you weren’t able to digest actually gets digested by bacteria.

In this process of breaking down food, bacteria produce various products that can actually be beneficial to human health. For example, gut bacteria produce short chain fatty acids which the cells of our large intestine can use as energy (2).

Researchers are also looking at how the byproducts from gut bacteria may help exercise performance.

… “There’s a lot of really, really good people working extremely hard who care about this club in a deep way, and also believe that there’s brighter days ahead,” Olsen told MLSsoccer.com in a long, in-depth conversation this week. “With that comes new expectations. The people that have been here a long time will welcome that – when things do change and we get a new stadium and the infrastructure’s a little bit more sound, and we’re able to focus not on making the playoffs, but winning an MLS Cup. That hasn’t necessarily been the priority over the past four, five years.

“There’s going to be a push here … the stadium’s coming, that’s the first domino. Things will move, and they’ll move pretty quickly after that.”

Forced to make the most of limited resources while stuck at RFK, in recent years D.C.’s owners asked Olsen and general manager Dave Kasper to keep the team competitive in “Moneyball” fashion, picking up bargains and castoffs and playing direct soccer when needed. The pragmatic approach worked reasonably well, the Black-and-Red qualifying for the MLS Cup Playoffs in four of his seven full seasons in charge, albeit sandwiched around a couple of basement finishes.

… They have not been utterly dominant from a statistical standpoint this season – they rank second for pass accuracy, fifth for possession and eighth for shots – but, like the top sides in any league, they bide their time before creating the best chances possible. Nuno doesn’t encourage a shoot-on-site policy – even if Rúben Neves’ stunning collection of goals have all come from outside the box. The champions have created 89 “big chances” as defined by Opta, which is 24 more than their closest challengers, Aston Villa, who have created 65. To put that figure in context, it’s worth considering that the gap from first to second is the same as the gap from second to 20th (QPR on 41), which highlights just how often Wolves have carved through their opponents.

Their style of play may be the worst kept secret in the Championship but, like Manchester City in their Premier League, they carry it out so effectively that they remain incredibly hard to stop. Wolves impose themselves on matches in a way that instantly puts their challengers on the back foot and eases the pressure on their own defence. Their wing-backs, Matt Doherty and Barry Douglas, play so high up field when they have the ball that opposition wingers are pinned back and cannot pose a threat on the counter. As a result, Nuno’s side have conceded the fewest shots in the league (9.8 per game) even though they boast more possession from deep than any other team.

Charlie Young is no typical college sophomore.

The Illinois computer science and astronomy major, who will embark on his second analytics internship with an MLB team this summer, is working with graduate student Kameron Wells and professor emeritus Alan Nathan to try to revolutionize the way the Illini baseball team captures and analyzes data.

… One limitation of the draft curve above is that it focuses on the average player performance. For the Jets, pick. No. 3 is worth an average value of 52.5 points over the course of a career (for those scoring at home, this is reflects a player’s career Approximate Value). But a team may not be drafting for average player performance, and instead, may prefer a shot at a superstar. How can we tweak our draft curve to account for this team preference?

Instead of focusing on a smoothed average at each line, we can instead set a cutoff for what it means to be a superstar, and adjust our valuation of each pick to estimate the likelihood of landing a player above that cutoff. There are several reasons to do this, and I generally dislike setting arbitrary cutoffs. However, there are two benefits of thinking this way. First, the valuations of each pick – the likelihood of landing a superstar – are easy to interpret, which may help in the communication of results. Second, only 11 players are allowed on the field at a given time, and so even if you nail a bunch of 7th round picks, you can’t play them all at once.

During my time working in American football I have been fascinated with collegiate athletes’ pathway to the NFL, and the amount of emphasis that is placed upon performance in a few relatively non-specific physical tests. For those of you unfamiliar with the system, graduating collegiate players who are earmarked as a chance to go the NFL are invited to compete in the NFL scouting combine, a week-long series of physical, psychological and technical assessments. NFL coaches, general managers and scouts are all in attendance, as players attempt to put their best foot forward in the hope of getting drafted to the league at the official NFL draft, which will happen later this week.