Applied Sports Science newsletter – December 27, 2019

Applied Sports Science news articles, blog posts and research papers for December 27, 2019

 

Jalen Hurts has captivated two of college football’s most rabid fan bases

ESPN College Football, Ivan Maisel from

When Jalen Hurts was 6 or 7 years old, he would tag along with his dad and older brother to the summer workouts for athletes at Channelview High School in Texas’ Harris County, where his dad coaches. One of the players nicknamed Hurts “Baby Champ” because he thought Jalen looked like former NFL star Champ Bailey. Jalen ran sprints with the high school players. He completed the agility drills. When they lifted weights, he grabbed two-and-a-half-pound dumbbells and did reps.

The athletes also performed back bridges — lying on their backs, raising their butts 6 inches off the ground and holding it. The competition became who could hold that position the longest. “It ended up being me and the fastest guy in the room,” Hurts says, “kind of like a challenge vs. each other.”

He remembers that this competition took place on a Tuesday because it was two-piece Tuesday, when he could get two pieces of his beloved Popeyes chicken for 99 cents. He remembers his father walking up to him during the drill. “You want some Popeyes today?” Averion Hurts Sr. said. “You beat him.”

 

This star player is inspiring a new generation of athletes through basketball – CNN

CNN, Aisha Salaudeen and Jo Munnik from

Blevie Meyia Lucchesi was only 13 years old when she first held a basketball.

The Gabonese basketball star said the sport made her feel “free,” and she learned to play the game after a childhood friend encouraged her to do so.

“My friend, she was a little girly girl. She told me, ‘Come try basketball, it can be fun because I know you can jump and all that.’ I said, ‘OK, let me try.’ And I never turned back after that,” she told CNN.

Now 25, Lucchesi spends a lot of time in and out of Gabon, coaching and mentoring aspiring young basketball players.

 

Zion Williamson eager to play but says he trusts Pelicans’ recovery plan

ESPN NBA, Andrew Lopez from

… Williamson told Sedano that he “trusts the organization” in its decision-making, and he said his rehab process has been about more than just the recovery from surgery to repair the torn meniscus in his right knee.

Williamson, 19, said the Pelicans are also trying to tweak small matters in how he walks and runs, working on the kinetic chain of his body.

 

The Right to Rest

The Walrus magazine (Canada), Sarah Schul­man from

… Bad sleep af­fects marginal­ized peo­ple dis­pro­por­tion­ately, says Aric Prather, a clin­i­cal health psy­chol­o­gist in Cal­i­for­nia. A 2017 study from France found that peo­ple ex­pe­ri­enc­ing home­less­ness sleep sig­nif­i­cantly less than the gen­eral pop­u­la­tion; 41 per­cent re­port in­som­nia. Shel­ter op­er­a­tors wit­ness first-hand the frus­tra­tion and ag­gres­sion caused by ex­haus­tion. But few shel­ters have the ca­pac­ity to ac­com­mo­date flex­i­ble sleep­ing sched­ules. In pub­lic ar­eas, mu­nic­i­pal­i­ties are prone to in­stalling “hos­tile” ar­chi­tec­tural el­e­ments, such as tilted benches and street spikes, which are in­ten­tion­ally de­signed to pre­vent peo­ple from ly­ing down. So­cial stigma and ag­gres­sion from passersby can worsen the sit­u­a­tion for any­one try­ing to find an hour of rest in a bus shel­ter or at a pub­lic park.

 

Towards a science of the acquisition of expert performance in sports: Clarifying the differences between deliberate practice and other types of practice

Journal of Sports Sciences from

Ericsson, Krampe, and Tesch- Römer published their research on “The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance” over 25 years ago. Since then, hundreds of new articles have been published with findings regarding the effects of practice on performance in sports. The original paper searched for conditions underpinning optimal acquisition of reproducibly superior (expert) performance in domains, where methods for producing such performance had been refined over centuries. At an elite music academy, superior music students were found to have engaged for longer periods in solitary practice guided by their music teachers – an explication of the conditions of this type of practice led to a definition of deliberate practice. When other researchers in sports started searching for optimal practice, they could not find any practice activities meeting all the criteria for “deliberate practice”, yet referred to somewhat similar activities using that same term. This paper shows that the effects of these different types of practice activities on attained performance differ from those of deliberate practice and should be given different distinct names. The paper concludes with recommendations for how future research on purposeful and deliberate practice can inform, not just athletes and their coaches, but all adults about how their achievements can be improved with individualized forms of effective practice.

 

Inside Real Sociedad, a football club shaped by its academy

The Guardian, Alex Clapham from

… The Zubieta academy sits in the countryside five miles south of San Sebastián. As I make the trek to the training facilities through woodland and farms, the unmistakable smells of nature carve into the wintry air. When locals nod hello, I half expect to hear the usual “Ayup” I hear while walking on the Yorkshire Dales, but am instead greeted in Euskara, the language of the Basque Country. Just like Yorkshire, the sun doesn’t come out all that often around these parts.

 

Youth sport specialisation: the need for an evidence-based definition

British Journal of Sports Medicine from

A historical perspective

Sport specialisation, conceptually understood to involve mono-training and repetition for the purpose of skill acquisition and athlete development for a single sport, is increasingly common in youth sports. However, it has not always been this way. Over the past 30 years, research on expertise and skill acquisition has profoundly influenced the focus and structure of youth sport programme. Particularly, Ericsson, Kramp and Tesch-Römer’s (1993) work in music renewed research interests related to the importance of deliberate practice in the development of expertise. Some studies in sport, using retrospective questionnaires, suggested that high volume of intense, sport-specific practice at a young age is necessary to attain expertise in one sport. This body of research has promoted the idea that a large quantity of intense sport-specific practice and early specialisation is a logical pathway towards adult elite sport performance, and has contributed to the popularity of youth sport specialisation.

Simultaneously, biographical studies of elite level athletes suggested that their childhood sport experiences involved sport-specific practice, and play activities and engagement in various sports. In contrast with the early specialisation approach.

 

Meet Hands-Free Labs, A Leader In Hands-Free Sneaker Technology

Forbes, Tim Newcomb from

When HandsFree Labs founder Mike Pratt decided to create a hands-free sneaker technology, it wasn’t about finding just one way to do it. He sought to invent every way. And now HandsFree Labs dominates the market —owning six brands of patents with another 26 pending helps the cause — of hands-free sneaker entry with the likes of Nike now licensing the technologies.

“(Mike) and our team literally invented dozens of ways to enter shoes hands free and chose one solution we call the titanium arc,” says Monte Deere, Handsfree Labs CEO. “We started by commercializing that in our Kizik brand. At the same time, we’ve been patenting other solutions one by one.”

What that creates is a portfolio of what the brand calls Foot Activated Shoe Technologies (FAST), all designed to create opportunities for the wearer to step in and out of shoes without using hands. This allows HandsFree Labs to license technology across the footwear industry, no matter the end user.

 

AP Exclusive: Computer plate umps allowed in new labor deal

Associated Press, Ben Walker and Ronald Blum from

Computer plate umpires could be called up to the major leagues at some point during the next five seasons.

Umpires agreed to cooperate with Major League Baseball in the development and testing of an automated ball-strike system as part of a five-year labor contract announced Saturday, two people familiar with the deal told The Associated Press. The Major League Baseball Umpires Association also agreed to cooperate and assist if Commissioner Rob Manfred decides to utilize the system at the major league level. The people spoke on condition of anonymity because those details of the deal, which is subject to ratification by both sides, had not been announced.

 

Sportlogiq – Pro Highlights

YouTube, Sportlogiq from

In-depth look at the contextual metrics Sportlogiq provides professional teams through broadcast tracking feeds. [video, 1:00]

 

STATSports’ Apex is the only GPS wearable used in the world’s best leagues that meets FIFA standard for data accuracy, reliability, and consistency

STATSports, Cian Carroll from

STATSports’ Apex technology was the only GPS wearable in the world’s top leagues that reached FIFA’s standard for accuracy, reliability, and consistency. During proceedings, in excess of 30 products used throughout world football were tested.

 

Knee injuries in early adulthood may hasten arthritis

Reuters, Lisa Rapaport from

Young adults who have had knee injuries are much more likely than uninjured peers to develop arthritis in the knee by middle age, especially if they have broken bones or torn connective tissue, a recent study suggests.

Researchers followed almost 150,000 adults ages 25 to 34, including about 5,200 with a history of knee injuries, for almost two decades. Compared to people who never had knee injuries, those who did were nearly six times as likely to develop knee osteoarthritis during the first 11 years of follow-up, with more than triple the risk over the next eight years.

 

A new look at steroid injections for knee and hip osteoarthritis

Harvard Health Publishing, Harvard Health Blog, Robert H. Shmerling, MD from

… The findings of this report regarding injections of steroids for knee and hip osteoarthritis are disappointing, especially for those who have not improved with other treatments.

Regarding the benefit of the injections, it’s important to keep in mind that even if the average benefit of a treatment is small, it does not mean that treatment is useless. Though temporary, some people do report significant improvement with steroid injections.

It’s also not entirely clear that the problems described in this study are actually caused by the steroid injections. And, from my own experience, the rates of complications seem high to me. That said, a 2017 study did find that people getting steroid injections had more thinning of joint cartilage than those getting placebo injections.

In my own practice, I’ll still offer a steroid injection for osteoarthritis, but only after carefully reviewing the potential risks and benefits.

 

Complexity in the beautiful game: implications for football research and practice

Science and Medicine in Football journal from

Like many other sports, football is increasingly being described as a complex system. To date, however, there has been little explanation of complexity beyond the team level, and no formal examination of the extent to which the known characteristics of complex systems are present in football. This commentary reviews known characteristics of complex systems and discusses the extent to which football match, club, and league sub-systems exhibit them. It is argued that all three football sub-systems do indeed exhibit the characteristics of complexity, and as such, it is concluded that football can be described as a complex system. The implications for future football research and practice are discussed. Applications of complex systems modelling techniques are encouraged, both to model football systems and to identify how different systemic variables interact to influence performance. A paradigm shift away from reductionism toward holism in football research is advocated. [full text]

 

Want to make good business decisions? Learn causality

Stitch Fix Multithreaded blog; Molly Davies, Eddie Landesberg, and Stephanie Yee from

… For example, it may be the case that you only take ibuprofen when your headache is very severe and conversely, forgo it when the headache seems to be dissipating on its own. A naive comparison might even suggest that ibuprofen has made recovery less likely.

Fortunately, the field of causal inference tells us how to make such estimates along with what data and assumptions are required to do it well. That means that if we’re thoughtful (and lucky), we may not actually need a time machine to produce good estimates of E(Yd)
and put them to good use as estimates for the potential outcomes of the decision we’d like to inform. When we talk about potential outcomes under different decision rules, Yd:deD, we’re talking about the causal relationships between our decisions and outcomes. The better our understanding of those causal relationships, the better decisions we’re likely to make. If our goal is to improve our understanding of causal relationships, more data is not necessarily better. In this context, data is only valuable if it improves our causal understanding.

 

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