Making sense out of something that’s new is a test for anyone, and some people are better at it than others. Fergus Connolly, Seattle Sounders and Hudl rank among the best at making sense of what’s new in sports science and technology:
The Law of Space & Time (LinkedIn, Fergus Connolly)
How sports scientists are trying to change college football (ESPN College Football, Dan Murphy)
How the Seattle Sounders use data and analytics to create an ‘evidence-based’ soccer culture (GeekWire, Taylor Soper)
How Real Madrid Won the UEFA Champions League (Hudl Blog, Trevor Hellman)
Sensemaking is helped by understanding fundamentals that are central to what’s going on. Basic human physiology ranks at the top of what’s important to understand about athletes and sports. In the daily news stream of scientific research there is always new material from medical, biotech and life science research, but only some of it matters in terms of how athletes function. Separating what matters from what doesn’t matter comes down to what you understand about how athletes’ work in their chemical, biological and mechanical contexts.
New Science Has Revealed That Our Gut May Be The MotherBoard For Our Entire Body (The Red Bulletin, Will Cockrell)
Movement-Based Insights for Creating More Durable Soccer Players (Functional Movement Systems)
Multisport athletes rank high among recruiters (The Gazette (Cedar Rapids IA), Nancy Justis)
Competitive football players have superior vision, study suggests (Taylor & Francis Group, Science and Medicine in Football)
How Training Helps You Handle Pain (Runner’s World, Sweat Science blog, Alex Hutchinson)
Why Athletes Should Eat Local (Outside Online, Colette Harris)
Eat, sleep and work out like the athlete of the future (CNN.com, Motez Bishara and John Sinnott)
Pro athletes make fixing back pain look easy. It isn’t (STAT, Cathryn Jakobson Ramin)
CommonHealth: More Sleep, Better Baseball Players (WBUR, CommonHealth, Meghna Charkrabarti, Carey Goldberg, Zoë Mitchell)
Highlights from the 2017 future of football medicine conference (BMJ Blogs: BJSM blog, Dr. Chris Garnett)
British Cycling overhauls medical procedures after independent review (road.cc, Simon MacMichael)
The social reality of athletes on teams, teams in leagues, and leagues with fans has its set of fundamental rules. Economic incentives and social dynamics are important social science fundamentals for understanding what’s new and what’s important in sports.
How The NBA Became The World’s Most Tech-Savvy Sports League (Fast Company, Daniel Terdiman)
Did Moneyball teach us nothing? MLB is still selling jeans (ESPN MLB, Sam Miller)
6 things to know about Ohio State’s $170M athletics budget (Dayton Daily News, Chris Stewart)
How reliable are the effects of self-control training?: A re-examination using self-report and physical measures (PLOS One; Brian M. Lee and Markus Kemmelmeier)
Why underdogs do better in hockey than basketball (YouTube, Vox)
NCAA to study how size matters in college football coaching (Greenville Online, The State, Josh Kendall)
Thoughts on the wearables studies (including The Stanford Wearables study) (Ray Maker, DC Rainmaker blog)
Last, the new technologies that pervade modern sports have engineering fundamentals that figure into how those devices work, and whether or not adoption is likely to occur.
GPU-Powered Hockey Analytics Gives Teams an Edge (NVIDIA Blog, Tony Kontzer)
How Statcast has changed MLB and why not everybody seems all that happy about it (CBSSports.com, R.J. Anderson)
6 Nutrition Apps Triathletes Will Love (USA Triathlon, Michelle Meinking)
USMNT Insider: Exclusive look at altitude tents (SI.com, Grant Wahl)
Tracking humans in 3-D with off-the-shelf webcams (EurekAlert! Science News, Saarland University)
CMU researchers are teaching a computer to understand body language ( TribLIVE, Aaron Aupperlee)
Power Play: How Big Data is Revolutionizing Hockey (Medium, Cloud Computing Management, David W. Lucky)
More things that I read and liked last week:
Meet the Future of Triathlon (June 09, Triathlete.com, Susan Lacke)
How should Patriots handle Rob Gronkowski’s playing time in 2017? (June 10, ESPN NFL, Mike Reiss )
Thad Matta’s downfall began with a top-five recruiting class that didn’t deliver (June 05, Yahoo Sports, Jeff Eisenberg)
Tinker, Tailor, Mould a Side: Squad Rotation in the EPL (June 06, StatsBomb, Laurie Shaw)
The Christian Pulisic Blueprint (June 07, Bleacher Report, George Dohrmann)
Combine Kicks Off A Busy – And Unusual – Summer (June 05, NHL.com , Boston Bruins, Eric Russo)