Applied Sports Science newsletter – March 27, 2019

Carli Lloyd was the guest of honor at Telemundo’s presentation of its women’s World Cup coverage plans Monday. The Delran native’s appearance came with an admission that she doesn’t speak much Spanish (she didn’t have to at this) and a disclaimer that hosts Ana Jurka and Andrés Cantor didn’t ask about the U.S. women’s soccer team’s lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation. But there was plenty else to talk about.

Cantor did not shy away from asking Lloyd about her declining playing time with the national team as the World Cup approaches. Lloyd didn’t shy away from the questions.

“I know that I still have a lot left to give to this team,” she said. “I know physically I’m in the best shape that I’ve been in. … As I’ve seen throughout my career, you never know when that time may come. It’s important to be ready, and I know I’ll be ready, and I want to do anything I can to help the team win.”

… Jackie Bradley Jr. never appears to be worrying — he could teach a master class in even-keeled countenance and unshakeable demeanor. It’s not easy to get him off his feet, unless it’s by choice (little Emerson can knock him over any day). It’s equally difficult to get a rise out of him, unless it’s by design.

“We had a thing at South Carolina where if you didn’t make a play you should have made in batting practice, if a guy didn’t catch it and we thought he should, we’d blow the whistle at him,” says Chad Holbrook, one of Bradley’s college coaches. “For every outfielder, if you got a whistle, it was like getting chastised. Jackie took that personal if you blew a whistle at him. He would argue you with you, saying ‘You’re not going to blow the whistle on me, I’ll just catch everything.’

“After about the first week, you could put that whistle in your pocket. [Head] coach [Ray] Tanner, he’d whistle at him from time to time, just to poke at him. It got personal and then it would become a competitive thing.

… “I think the last few weeks we all agree that he just looked a little tired,” the Warriors’ coach said before Sunday’s game against the Pistons. “And playing the minutes that he does, and the way he plays, and playing 49 consecutive games, he just looked like a guy who could use a night off.”

The night off was suggested by Rick Celebrini, the team’s director of sports medicine and performance.

“Rick felt very strongly about that,” Kerr said, “so that’s why we did it, and that’s why we have Rick aboard to help us with those decisions, and I think it’ll really serve Steph well here coming up.”

… “We didn’t see the jump he’s had this year coming,” the Murray State assistant coach Casey Long said, “but we knew the work ethic he put in and his ability that allowed him to make the jump.”

Jonathan Stark, who won conference player-of-the-year honors on last year’s Murray State team and is now on an N.B.A. development league roster, said in an interview: “I knew he was going to have the keys to the ignition. I knew he was going to be an N.B.A. player. I knew he was going to go first round.”

“No. 1 and 2?” Stark added, referring to predicted draft position. “I honestly didn’t know about that.”

A sudden rise like Morant’s is not supposed to happen in 2019. The very best high school players are spotted early and gravitate to the top programs, which they treat as the basketball equivalent of a two-hour airport layover on their way to their preferred, even expected destination: the N.B.A.

As fog blankets the pitch on a Monday evening training session a group of Under-12 academy footballers strive to generate sharp passes, quick feet, clever movement. Everybody looks the part. This particular everybody, though, is not your standard issue elite group because in among the boys are Maddy and Laila, the two exceptional prospects from the Arsenal girls’ team who have been parachuted in to join a weekly session with the club’s boys.

Marcel Lucassen stands by the side of the pitch and watches. The Dutchman carries himself with the air of a man who can gladly talk in microscopic detail about football for 24 hours a day. He has been brought into the academy as the head of coach and player development, to oversee the culture of coaching from the five-year-olds all the way to Under-23s, bringing a bigger-picture vision to it all as he did for the German football federation for several years.

What does he think about this concept of inviting the best girls to train alongside the best boys? Lucassen is almost more interested in the notion of why that is a question rather than the question itself.

… Izzo hasn’t rolled out a “junkyard dog” team in East Lansing in years. Not really. Not like the teams he did when he built his program.

Oh, he still appreciates bulldogs and space-eaters and tough guys. But the days of stacking his roster with one-dimensional bruisers are gone.

Versatility is critical now. Skill is essential. Even on the frontline. Just look at Xavier Tillman and Kenny Goins and, yes, Nick Ward.

… All those teams battling for their playoff lives in the East — Brooklyn, Detroit, Miami, Orlando, Charlotte — can’t really afford to give any healthy guys nights off right now. Out West, while the field is basically known — Utah, the Los Angeles Clippers, San Antonio and Oklahoma City are all likely in, barring massive collapses — the jostling for seedings will go to the wire.

There’s analytics for everything. Every possession is charted. Every minute played matters. These are real things and helpful things in a data age, and the numbers show that rest can be an enormous aid to everyone.

But at this point in the season, luck might matter more than anything else.

Bad breaks will happen, literally in Nurkic’s case. Bad luck, if it wants to find a team, will find a team.

Biomarkers are physiologic, pathologic, or anatomic characteristics that are objectively measured and evaluated as an indicator of normal biologic processes, pathologic processes, or biological responses to therapeutic interventions. Recent advances in the development of mobile digitally connected technologies have led to the emergence of a new class of biomarkers measured across multiple layers of hardware and software. Quantified in ones and zeros, these “digital” biomarkers can support continuous measurements outside the physical confines of the clinical environment. The modular software–hardware combination of these products has created new opportunities for patient care and biomedical research, enabling remote monitoring and decentralized clinical trial designs. However, a systematic approach to assessing the quality and utility of digital biomarkers to ensure an appropriate balance between their safety and effectiveness is needed. This paper outlines key considerations for the development and evaluation of digital biomarkers, examining their role in clinical research and routine patient care. [full text]

When we think about clothes, they are usually formed with textiles and have to be both wearable and washable for daily use; however, smart clothing has had a problem with its power sources and moisture permeability, which causes the devices to malfunction. This problem has now been overcome by a KAIST research team, who developed a textile-based wearable display module technology that is washable and does not require an external power source.

To ease out the problem of external power sources and enhance the practicability of wearable displays, Professor Kyung Cheol Choi from the School of Electrical Engineering and his team fabricated their wearing display modules on real textiles that integrated polymer solar cells (PSCs) with organic light emitting diodes (OLEDs).

The end-product of a championship season is done in public: hoisting the trophy and cutting down the nets. Beyond the scenes, however, the hours of work on the court and in the film room fuels success. There’s planning, effort and sweat.

What may not be seen, but is felt by the athletes, is something that’s vital to a team’s triumph: support.

Head men’s basketball coach John Beilein has proven that supporting a student-athletes’ mental wellbeing enhances a winning culture.

“I would like to be known as a teacher and mentor much more than as their coach,” Beilein said of his role in his athletes’ lives. “I believe mental health affects everyone. Athletes are more in public view than ever before so they have a few extra things to think about.”

… Shortly after the game, every player undergoes another evaluation involving a check of their systems and a comparison of their memory and balance against their baseline measurements. If this reveals signs of concussion that were previously not observed, they enter a third stage of assessment that takes place following two nights of sleep.

This system was tested during the 2015 Rugby World Cup 2015 in Japan, using cloud-based technology developed by CSx, which collects neurocognitive information that medical staff can review to determine if a player has had a concussion. They then transferred the data on the players, incidents and assessments to the data analytics platform Domo via an API, where the various datasets can be joined up for analysis.

Across sport and industry all the evidence suggests foreigners do not damage national teams. If anything, they improve them

… After Sancho, a flood of young British players have landed in the Bundesliga: Arsenal’s Emile Smith Rowe — another veteran of that Croatian trip — and Reiss Nelson, on loan at RB Leipzig and TSG Hoffenheim; representatives at Augsburg and Borussia Mönchengladbach and Schalke.

In January, Bayern Munich was so determined to sign Chelsea’s Callum Hudson-Odoi — another who featured in Croatia — that it offered 40 million euros (about $45 million) for a teenager who had made only a handful of senior appearances. Sancho’s effect, the legacy of that day in Pula, has been powerful.

It is a compelling story, but not necessarily an accurate one. Sancho has been presented as the trigger for German clubs’ fascination with young English talent, but, in reality, he was the end result: a consequence, rather than a cause, of a trend that dates way beyond 2016, one that explains why, exactly, all of those Bundesliga scouts were watching that under-17 game in Pula.

… One of the headline statistics relating to Tuesday under-21 friendly at Bournemouth is that the 24 players named in the original Germany squad have started 668 Bundesliga games, which is more than twice as many as their 26 English counterparts have racked up in the Premier League.

At a time when England’s national teams are in rude health, the issue is not so much whether there is the ability within the country’s younger age groups but more where is the best place for them to develop at club level. Jadon Sancho, Borussia Dortmund’s teenage winger, has been portrayed as a trailblazer in that sense and it is easy to see why.

The former Manchester City youngster has played 2,316 minutes for Dortmund this season as an 18-year-old. To put that figure in perspective, it is more than City’s Phil Foden, Chelsea’s Callum Hudson-Odoi and Tottenham Hotspur’s Kyle Walker-Peters have managed put together.

Germany’s youth system has long been considered one of the football world’s best. Despite an under-21 loss on Tuesday, England appear to have caught up. But do the opportunities in the Bundesliga offer some compensation?