The schadenfreude directed at the Philadelphia Eagles offensive line after Week 1 was noticeable. Injury-free and fantastically productive, the five-man group was last season’s crowning sports science achievement, then boom, two get hurt, Pro Bowl left guard Evan Mathis (left knee) and right tackle Allen Barbre (right ankle). While the misfortune cannot be denied, if the Eagles are good at sports science, the team will not experience any misfortune in the long run, regardless of the pain Mathis and Barbre experience.
Sports science applies at least as much to player talent development as it does to injury prevention. The opportunity for Philadelphia is to develop the skills and physical ability of the new faces that will take over those new job vacancies on the offensive line. In a few weeks there is a good chance the Eagles will be a better team as a result of the misfortune, not worse.
The logic to explain the improvement has something to do with the fill-in’s opportunity, but the improvement has more to do with the physical and mental gains a new (often younger) player makes when doing dedicated, science-based training. Those gains set the player up to develop new and/or better skills, and the increase repetitions should cement the skill-building.
It is easy for athletes to fail to improve by not working to make gains in their athleticism, or just as important, in their cognitive awareness. The natural growth that takes place during teenage and early-adult years creates the improvement resource automatically in young athletes, but that improvement resource needs to be manufactured by an athlete as he or she continues to mature. Sports science is a significant tool, maybe the principal tool, for building those reservoirs of player ability that can be tapped to generate player improvements.
Teams that adopt sports science programs and see it impact player development can feel confident that they are doing sports science right. See what Borussia Dortmund is doing in European soccer. Teams also fail to develop talent, and you can see that they do not connect the things they do with sports science to talent development, for example in the Freelap USA interview between Carl Valle and Shawn Windle from the Indiana Pacers, where players come to him looking to make gains during contract years and late in their careers but don’t see the day in, day out connection between training and improvement.
You can also see the Pacers’ coaches missing the chance to become more strategic about sports science, a point that Valle makes in his commentary. But the chance to get creative with strategies or game tactics spawned from sports science depend on making sure the sports science priors — recovery, fitness, physical preparation, injury prevention and rehabilitation, talent development — are clicking. At a basic level, teams improve when players improve, and a team that is confident that players will improve can feel confident that it is headed in the right direction.
Confidence seems like something that the professionals tasked with Applied Sports Science could use. Jason Weber described at length the rundown of intrusive (and time-consuming) tracking and monitoring technologies available to teams. A trial-and-error approach will get sports science practitioners to the Goldilocks just right set of tools to meet their needs, but many lack the know how in user interfaces or in data methods that would allow them to take a more direct path.
The Sounders FC Winter Strength & Conditioning seminar that will focus on Anti-fragility, set for December in Seattle, is another exercise in how practitioners can build their confidence. I think it will show that confidence comes with the physical and mental gains made by players, with their on-field improvement and skill development, and ultimately with teams whose players and coaches become a sum that more and more is greater than its parts. You know, like Chip Kelly and the Eagles.