The U.S. culture around innovation and technology is infiltrating sports, something that impacts the practice of sports science everywhere. One big factor in the trend is the research excellence that American universities have long made a priority. More college sport teams have become living laboratories within their schools, a sensible progression that has seen science, engineering and medical schools engage with schools’ athletic departments.
Social science is another research domain that is beginning to engage sports, but it is occurring mostly at the professional level where the economics are more profound than what is seen among competing universities. Advances in computation and data have social science poised for major impacts, and the move toward analytics that is taking place in sports is a platform for meaningful interaction between teams and social scientists.
Still you don’t quite see widespread adoption of sports science methods and technologies because, I think, coaches have created a bottleneck. For whatever reason most coaches have long-term, slow-progress, heavy-dues career progressions that are very different from research or entrepreneurial careers that reward risk-taking innovation and lead to more progress faster.
The U.S. is full of coaches, mostly because the U.S. is full of sports, a point that Los Angeles Galaxy coach Bruce Arena made in an interview with Grant Wahl on SI.com:
Arena: This is the best environment in the world for coaching. And in the near future it’ll be an outstanding environment to develop young soccer players. I don’t have any question about that.
SI.com: What beyond excellent facilities are you talking about when you talk about this being a great country for coaches?
Arena: You have every sport in the world at every level, and all the resources and thinking of those people. And you can take from Mike Krzyzewski, from Joe Torre, from Bill Belichick. It goes on and on. We have hundreds if not thousands of elite coaches in this country. Coaching is coaching. No one in Europe knows anything more about soccer than we do. The drills we use are the same ones they use.
Great coaching might be the thing that the U.S. leverages for universal sports domination, but only if the profession becomes less risk averse and more receptive to innovation. A research center that would be heavy in tech and social science stands to bring all kinds of innovation to coaching, but coaches are not going to create an institution like it for themselves. It is up to some larger body to impose it on coaches.
This would be different from the leadership institute that Coach K has at Duke though it probably comes closest to an interdisciplinary organizational psychology center within a business school but which also interfaces with the data science for sports and athlete analytics, and with the interdisciplinary sports science for athlete performance.
The other point to make is that coaches who have significant responsibility are probably oversubscribed in terms of what they need to do and the time they have to do it. Researchers have observed that coaches don’t put significant time (more than 5 minutes) into reading current research online that affects their work.
The U.S. Soccer Federation announced sweeping changes to the national youth development program it oversees. One program will seek to raise the level of coaching for youth soccer teams by emphasizing credentials and instituting licensing courses for coaches to get those credentials. The plan to create a National Coaching Education Center is an extremely promising step–recognizing that even in a coach-heavy nation like the U.S. that the critical path to raising the level of the entire sport depends on raising the level of the sport’s coaches.
How does social science research get to a place where it becomes something coaches are aware of, and maybe even pay attention to? An ambitious large-scale initiative creates a window of opportunity but to take advantage there will need to be identifiable targets which have benefits worth pursuing. Those targets will inevitably be associated with the broad application of sports science: improving collaborations, advancing performance psychology, creating functional user interfaces for new technologies, and positively changing norms and habits across sports. An increase in the tactical application of sports science is evidence that coaches are learning and, maybe, that the coaching profession is indeed evolving.