Applied Sports Science has its most obvious application in the training athletes do to improve performance. It is straightforward enough to see how that extends to athletes’ injury prevention and rehabilitation. A bit further out, but still pretty obvious, is how sports science impacts talent development. Those are three of, what I think are, four main applications of Applied Sports Science. The fourth application: Coaching strategy and tactics.
Let’s leave the Chip Kelly/Philadelphia Eagles situation out of this discussion, as well as everything that is going on in professional tennis. Football and tennis have become competitions where fitness has become tactically critical. But let me point out the recent Grantland article on Arkansas football where coach Bret Bielema has been manufacturing human road graders to play offensive line, a heavy-heavy counter-strategy to popular high-tempo gameplans.
In European soccer the high press and adaptive formations have changed the game to the point where Omar Saleem (at The Original Coach) writes there is no place for a classic playmaking Number 10, “At the very top of the game, the relationship between space and time has become tighter and the integral use of anchor men and holding midfielders has been influential in denying the opportunity to play between the lines.”
Meantime, according to Eddie Sefko/Dallas Morning News, Mavericks’ coach Rick Carlisle has enlisted the team’s performance director, Jeremy Holsopple, to focus players’ training on the movements they need to make to excel on defense (you know, defensive slides).
The exciting, interesting thing with sports science and football, soccer and basketball is watching how the experiments will play out as each season progresses, four, six or eight months into the future. It is certain that teams will be different in their makeup and their playing style. Teams that can take advantage of gains from sports science to evolve and adapt their strategies and tactics will be the interesting late-season stories because those teams will be the ones playing meaningful games late into their seasons.