Category: Applied Sports Science

Applied sports science depends on effective collaboration in order have an impact. The work often requires more than one person, and seeing the work through takes effort across a sports organization. None of it is easy but it gets easier if it’s fun. The role of fun is evolving in team sports. It had been […]

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Performance psychology has become a critical facet of sports science. But the field of psychology is far-ranging, something that can lead to psuedo- and junk-science. To avoid the psycho junk it helps to be specific about the material of interest and to connect what you’re interested in to what brain researchers are finding out. Let’s […]

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Medals at the 2016 Rio Olympics are an opportunity to grade national sports science programs, and to compare how nations go about developing and preparing their elite athletes for high stakes competition. The U.S. won more medals than any other nation, and did so without the benefit of a centralized government sports organization. In events […]

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This year’s NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament saw a noticeable increase in the coverage of the analytics teams use and in the role strength coaches play. Davidson Basketball’s Sixth Man: The Math Department   Five Thirty Eight Duke Fans Are About to Unlock the Most Sophisticated Stats in College Sports   Bloomberg Business UA, Opponents Rely on Data […]

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This offseason has been another landmark time in the sports concussion discussion, mostly because the bad news continues to pile up: Football Retirements in National Footbal Post Substandard Hockey Helmets on ESPN, Outside the Lines Baseball Hitters’ Performance Declines in The New York Times Women’s Soccer Concussions in The Daily Tar Heel Rugby Concussion Protocols reported by Reuters Media has […]

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Alex Hutchinson writes great sports science explainers, medium-length articles that take current research and tell why it matters and how things work. His recent Sweat Science blog post talked about Stabilizing Your Foot Core–much like the middle-body core, the foot combines large functional muscles with other, smaller, localized complimentary physiology that promote stability and enable athleticism. Feet are complex, no […]

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Risk management usually means doing something proactively, something that reduces the likelihood of something negative happening to an organization, or conversely, increasing the likelihood of something positive. This the basic modern tradeoff for sports teams and athletes–manage risk to avoid injury or to win games. Golden State consults sleep researchers and rests Stephen Curry and […]

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The opportunity for disruptive innovation in sports has a couple different classes. Technology innovation that affects teams, players and the games are actually pretty limited in scope and impact, given the relatively small number of professional leagues and elite athletes that stand to benefit. And technologies that impact media audiences for sports get to have broader impact […]

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Three comments about last week’s Sloan Sports Analytics conference: Lots athletic performance technology on display by vendors. In fact, there were probably more performance technology vendors than athletic performance coaches at the Sloan conference. When I asked Gary McCoy from Catapult why, he said that it was just one more dimension to the multi-faceted collaboration […]

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The money at stake in sports is big, and growing. I cannot imagine what it is to be a talented athlete like football player Todd Gurley, recovering from serious injury, and compelled to show how healthy (or unhealthy) he is during NFL combine week. His doctor, noted orthopaedist James Andrews, said his recovery is ahead […]

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