Companies were busy announcing fitness tracking products, attempting to gain a sliver of attention before Apple announces iWatch (expected for Tue) and consumes 100% of the oxygen available for these technologies. The recent reports on new products, and on Apple rumors, is long: Sony and Asus Jump Into Smartwatch Fray (The New York Times, Bits blog) First […]
Read More →Category: Applied Sports Science
Skill Endurance
I’m enjoying this year’s US Open tennis. The athletes making it through the tournament are winning with skill, and winning with endurance. The men’s matches take a different shape when it goes to the fourth and fifth sets. The women’s matches don’t have the same in-game pattern as the men, but you see the endurance plus […]
Read More →Lean Startups as Pro Sports Business Models
In sports the product shows on the field, the pitch and the court. The business model is what connects the risk-reward product in development calculation to the profit-loss calculation that makes business what it is. And early-September is the time of year when the business models for team sports is on display. The soccer transfer […]
Read More →Last Week in Applied Sports Science, 8/24-8/30
ESPN ran a set of feature articles on the art of talent evaluation in the College Basketball vertical, with a long piece by Eamonn Brennan anchoring the set. Brennan’s article goes past the art and looks for the science in the talent assessment process. What Brennan found is that more information is not necessarily leading […]
Read More →Team Culture Economics
The home stretch of college football pre-season and all that is left to discuss for heavyweight programs is team culture and chemistry. At Alabama, chemistry is better than it was the end of last season. The reasons are vague, according to a Montgomery newspaper report: less complaining, more leadership, players making an effort to know […]
Read More →Last Week in Applied Sports Science, 8/17-8/23
The upcoming World Cup schedule for USA Basketball in Spain is severe. Five preliminary round games will take place in six days, including a short rest, early-after-late game on September 4 against Ukraine. If the U.S. needs to improve player fitness in the time leading up to the games that count, that stress will be […]
Read More →APIs and what they mean for sports science
Moneyball, in all its forms of data analysis and in all the different sports, is, I believe, a subset of Applied Sports Science. My feeling is that context matters, and every game or season statistic is attached to a player, a player who also happens to be a hard working human being with psychological and social makeup […]
Read More →A better USMNT might depend on CMNT
Since the World Cup a lot of the conversation about USA national soccer has been about the future of the Men’s National Team, and about player development. Summarizing the discussion takes three words: Be like Germany. Grantland and Noah Davis bring the latest, possibly the smartest, essay on USMNT’s future. It’s smart because it makes a point that […]
Read More →Last Week in Applied Sports Science, 8/10-8/16
Even if the Philadelphia Eagles don’t do anything this season the team’s coach, Chip Kelly, has owned the preseason. A steady stream of profiles documented his sports science approach to American football over the past few weeks (Grantland, Philadelphia Inquirer, ESPN The Magazine, CoachingSearch blog, The MMQB). There was also a useful essay by Kenneth […]
Read More →The Right Amount of Science in Sports Science
All of the converging disciplines in sports science, and so many of them are technical and/or data-heavy, they make it easy to lean heavily on the science part of sports science. Science is a useful, effective model for doing things that haven’t been done before. Scientists make progress using the scientific method (hypothesis, experiment, results, […]
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