Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 5, 2019

… Pulisic is different. By joining Chelsea, he is the first American aiming to star for one of the game’s largest clubs. Nearly half the population of the planet watches the Premier League, more than 3 billion people a season. If Pulisic, a young, fresh-faced American, succeeds — if he scores and dazzles and captivates fans in the U.S. and Europe and China and India and all over Africa — it changes the calculus on him. His ceiling isn’t Landon Donovan anymore. It’s Lionel Messi.

Former tennis prodigy Andrea Jaeger approached 15-year-old Cori “Coco” Gauff on the grounds of Wimbledon last month, shortly before the youngest-ever qualifier in the tournament’s history played her first match.

Jaeger, who was playing in the Legends event, introduced herself and flashed her competitor credential. She told Gauff who she once was: a phenom much like Gauff, a pro by age 14, No. 2 in the world rankings at 16, a Wimbledon finalist in 1983.

“Coco’s eyes got kind of big,” Jaeger, who is now 54 and head of the charitable Little Star Foundation, told ESPN.com a few days later. Jaeger said she chatted with Gauff about how exciting it all was. She left Gauff with her business card and said, “If you ever have questions or feel confused about what you are going through, this is where you can find me.”

Of all the places Grant Williams could be at age 20 he is here, running the hardwood, banging bodies, and playing alongside some of the best professional basketball players in the world. Through hard work, physical prowess, and mental fortitude, Williams has ascended to the top of his craft, becoming an NBA first-round pick of the Celtics.

Yet his basketball accomplishments make up only a fraction of who Williams is. Williams is a former chess champion, a math wiz, a savant who downloads hundreds of game applications to his phone to pass the time.

Williams is a brilliant young man who just happens to be 6 feet 7 inches, 240 pounds, with a mean streak on the basketball floor. Despite majoring in something called supply chain management with collateral marketing, Williams graduated from the University of Tennessee in just three years and was named first-team All American in leading the Volunteers to the Sweet 16 of the NCAA Tournament.

 

The message couldn’t have been clearer when the Pittsburgh Steelers called Sutton Smith on the final day of the NFL draft.

Yes, the Steelers liked Smith’s production at defensive end at Northern Illinois. His 15 sacks as a senior were kind of hard to miss, particularly for a 6-foot, 233-pound guy who doesn’t exactly fit the physical profile of an elite pass rusher.

None of it mattered, however, once the Steelers took a flyer on Smith in the sixth round. Asked what he remembers about his first conversation with the coaching staff, Smith laughed.

″‘Time to be an athlete,’” Smith said with a laugh.

Not everyone in the Portland Timbers organization lives and breathes data. Coach Giovanni Savarese, for one, still relies heavily on feel when making decisions for the pitch, but he admits there’s at least some value in analytics for elevating performance. And that’s a good thing, because the Timbers have been building out a robust sports science team in search of gaining a competitive advantage.

As MLS prepares to break for its July 31 All-Star Game, the Timbers are 8-8-4 through Tuesday night and rank ninth out of the 12 teams in the Western Conference—a drop-off after last season’s appearance in the MLS Finals against Atlanta United FC. The change of fortune isn’t surprising when you consider that the first three months of Portland’s schedule was dominated by away games while construction was being done back home at Providence Park. Data compiled via the team’s widespread use of wearables showed additional wear-and-tear on the players’ bodies due to the grueling travel.

The 10,000-hour rule says intense, dedicated practice makes perfect – at that one thing. But what if breadth actually serves us better than depth?

Extending sleep time can improve endurance performance, according to the first study of its kind published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise.

The study found that endurance athletes who extended their sleep time by 90 minutes for three days improved performance by 3 percent in a 60-minute time trial.

The researchers recommend sleeping more than 8 hours a night to optimise endurance performance.

… overconfident people attain higher social status and are viewed as more competent, allowing them to reap the reputational benefits. “Confidence makes individuals appear more competent in the eyes of others, even when that confidence is unjustified and unwarranted,” says Cameron Anderson from the Haas School of Management at the University of California, Berkeley. Overconfidence undeniably wields a great deal of influence.

The question is, Why? According to psychologist and author, Maria Konnikova, “Human beings don’t like to exist in a state of uncertainty and ambiguity.” Confident people give off an air of assurance and certitude and are perceived as being competent which makes us an easy target to influence. In fact, emerging research has identified a particular area in the brain that responds to confidence, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), an area involved in emotional regulation.

Techstars, the worldwide network that helps entrepreneurs succeed, today announced the launch of the Techstars SportsTech Melbourne Accelerator. In partnership with government-backed Victoria startup agency, LaunchVic, Australia’s governing body for tennis, Tennis Australia and leading sports science Australian University, Victoria University, the mentorship-driven accelerator will run for 13 weeks and accept 10 startups on an annual basis. The program geared toward startups focused on innovations in SportsTech is the second Techstars accelerator focused on SportsTech, having launched the Techstars Sports Accelerator Powered by Indy in 2018.

The Techstars SportsTech Melbourne Accelerator will be based at Tennis Australia’s headquarters at Melbourne Park, the home of the Australian Open, in the venue’s media center. The accelerator will support startups across different sectors, businesses, and at different stages, addressing issues in the SportsTech space.

Performance analysis firm Hudl has bought scouting platform Wyscout, creating “the most comprehensive football video analysis, data and recruitment platform in the industry”.

The acquisition of the global leader in scouting and talent identification, which was founded in Italy in 2004, marks Hudl’s ninth takeover since 2011.

More than 1,000 professional clubs, 1,000 player agencies and 60 national teams and federations use Wyscout’s video and data library, which will now be connected to Hudl’s suite of solutions.

Hudl’s Chief Product Officer, John Wirtz, said: “Without having an army of data scientists, clubs of all sizes will be able to make impactful, sophisticated, data-driven decisions every day.

… As soon as wearables became more functional, they evolved from the “sports-only” category to personal smart gear. Such democratization surged the adoption and attracted multiple user groups with goals beyond explicit association with sports and fitness.

Now, wearables are rather trivial, marketed as personal devices for anybody who is interested to make more informed choices about their health and lifestyle. They stand in one row with other essential things some people can’t leave their homes without, such as a wallet, a smartphone, headphones or keys.

This trend of personalized health tracking and wellness awareness fell in line with the value-based care paradigm and its focus on precision medicine. The current healthcare industry aspires to use wearables as a primary data source to create highly personal and flexible patient treatment plans, allowing the introduction of timely therapy modifications based on slight changes in health patterns.

Check out how competitive sailing is utilizing SAP’s solutions to gather instant, real-time data through the insights of two award-winning sailors.

… Dr. Aaron Gray, a physician on the integrated health care team in the Missouri Athletic Department, a sports medicine physician at MU Health Care’s Orthopaedic Institute and a former team physician for the MU baseball and volleyball teams, first had the idea to use the Kinect for screening about eight years ago, when he was doing his sports fellowship medicine training at UCLA. He bought an XBOX 360 with the original Kinect and realized how well it was tracking his body.

“The thought was, ‘Huh. I wonder if we could develop software that could use this technology on the cheap,’” Gray said.

Gray began working with a professor in the computer science and computer engineering department, Marjorie Skubic, on developing software to use the Kinect to analyze patients’ movements at MU Health Care. Eventually, they added a physical therapist, sports orthopedic surgeon, biomechanical engineer and a strength and conditioning coach to their team, birthing the Missouri Functional Assessment Screening Team, or MFAST.

… [Dean] Oliver, widely known as a pioneer in sports analytics, will bring his skillset to the coaching staff. Prior to coming to the Wizards, Oliver served as the Vice President of Data Science for TruMedia Networks. In this role, he worked with NBA, NFL and MLB teams to identify appropriate analytical projects from various data sources, including player tracking, ball tracking and traditional statistical sources. He most recently worked in the NBA as the Sacramento Kings’ director of analytics/player personnel in 2015. Oliver’s book, Basketball on Paper, was written at the same time as Moneyball and helped him to enter the NBA in 2004, working for the then-Seattle SuperSonics. He soon joined the Denver Nuggets as director of quantitative analysis and was part of several very successful teams during his tenure. Oliver went to ESPN during the NBA lockout of the 2011 season, where he headed up the construction of their sports analytics group, working on both basketball and football with talent, producers, technology, and executives at the company. He earned a bachelor’s degree in engineering at Caltech and was a member of the basketball team.

This area of inquiry has become dangerously pervasive and it damages sport science’s reputation. Much misinformation & misinterpretation exists.

Below I’ve started a list of the many problems with the area – please feel free to add to it.