Applied Sports Science newsletter – April 28, 2015

Applied Sports Science news articles, blog posts and research papers for April 28, 2015

 

The Rise and Rise (and Rise) of Stephen Curry: The Wildly Miraculous and Quietly Inevitable Success of Golden State’s Point Guard

Grantland from April 24, 2015

… He went to his dad’s games, of course, hung out on the court during shootarounds — and you can catch the after-echo of those experiences in the preternaturally cool and impassive interviews he was already giving the media as a college kid, grounded in the calm of someone who sees nothing intimidating about the basketball spotlight because he grew up in it. He knew early on that he wanted to play for a living. YouTube has a video from around 2002, when Dell was winding down his career in Toronto, in which an almost shockingly slight and elfin-looking Steph — he’s 14 here, just a kid; still, there are eighth-graders who get recruiting letters — tells the Raptors camera crew profiling his family that he “wanted to practice some more … and hopefully make it to the pros if I have a chance.” He led his middle school team, tiny Queensway Christian, to an undefeated season that year, pouring in 40, 50 points a game. But look at the team photo. He’s maybe the third-smallest player, and that’s on a roster that includes his little brother. He was a million miles from a sure thing. He had a head for the game and the subtle knack of a craftsman born into the trade. But he wasn’t Peyton Manning. He was undersize, not strikingly quick, not strikingly athletic. He had to rebuild his shot from scratch after his sophomore year of high school because his technique, a little flip shot from the chest, stood no chance against taller, faster defenders. The road to the NBA is littered with players’ kids who inherited their parents’ knowledge but not their bodies; his senior year, Steph had gone basically unrecruited. Virginia Tech, where his dad had played, said he could walk on. Instead he signed with Davidson, a tiny, academically elite liberal arts college near Charlotte that hadn’t won an NCAA tournament game in going on 40 years.

 

Stevens getting better feel of NBA after first playoff taste | NBA.com

NBA.com, Ian Thomsen from April 27, 2015

He didn’t want to hear any praise for the improvement of his young team. His players hadn’t played well enough. He expected better.

“I like our progress, but I like to win,” Celtics coach Brad Stevens was saying Sunday after Boston had been swept in the opening round of the NBA playoffs by the Cleveland Cavaliers. “So I’m disappointed right now. We have to get better in every which way, and that’s the challenge ahead. Because winning is a lot more fun.”

 

NBA – How Brad Stevens made something out of nothing for the Boston Celtics

ESPN, NBA, Jeff Goodman from April 27, 2015

… “His ability to understand the game, to predict what they are going to do and be able to set us up for actions,” said Celtics big man Tyler Zeller. “What’s going to work and what’s not going to work — especially down the stretch. About 90 percent of the time he’s spot-on.”

Stevens is a numbers guy who heavily utilizes analytics. However, Zeller said that Stevens and his staff do a good job providing the necessary information to the players without overwhelming them.

“He tells us the pertinent information, but not too much to overload us,” Zeller said.

 

Training When You’re Tired Will Make You a Better Athlete | Outside Online

Outside Online from April 17, 2015

It’s an all-too familiar scene: You’re 19 miles into a marathon, feeling good (ish), loose, physically and mentally strong, and then all of a sudden you hit mile 20, and everything starts to crumble. Your muscles ache, your head hurts, your feet throb, your stomach groans—you’re fatigued, and you’ve hit a giant wall. Now you just need to climb over it. No problem, as long as you’ve taught your body how to do that successfully.

“For many longer events (half-marathons, marathons, Ironmans, etc.), you can’t practice the full distance in training,” says Jeff Gaudette, head coach for RunnersConnect. “You need to train tired in order to simulate what the last 10K or so will feel like and to learn how to handle those specific demands during the race.”

 

Small-Sided Games: A Key to More Technical Players 04/24/2015

SoccerAmerica from April 24, 2015

A colleague of mine recently surveyed U-11 coaches that play 8 v. 8 in a travel league. The league is considering having those teams continue to play 8 v. 8 as U-12s.

 

Many College Athletes Feel Pressure to Play Despite Concussion – The Ticker – Blogs – The Chronicle of Higher Education

The Chronicle of Higher Education from April 24, 2015

More than one-quarter of college athletes responding to a survey said they had felt pressured by coaches, teammates, fans, or parents to keep playing following a head injury. Nearly half continued competing while experiencing symptoms of a possible concussion.

The findings, from a report published on Friday in the journal Social Science & Medicine, suggest that coaches and teammates exerted the most pressure, and that athletes who had been diagnosed with a concussion during the previous season were more likely to have felt pressure to underreport the injury than were those who had not suffered a concussion.

 

Brain Builders: Ex-Cougar football star Austin Collie using cutting-edge tech at Cognitive FX to improve after concussions : CougarBlue.com

Provo Daily Herald, CougarBlue blog from April 27, 2015

… [Collie] has worked through the impact of the concussions he experienced as a football player and is now focused on improving the strength of his brain.

“The brain is just like any other muscle,” he said. “It’s a more complex muscle and I don’t think we understand it in its entirety, but we understand that we have to rehab it just like you would a knee injury or an ankle injury. That’s what I’m doing here, is making sure that I rehab my brain so that I won’t have issues. I feel great. My head feels great, thanks to Cognitive FX.”

 

NCAA schools put money where athletes’ mouths are

USA Today from April 26, 2015

When it comes to dinner, Wisconsin student-athletes won’t know what’s on the menu until they enter the dining hall below Camp Randall Stadium and find the chalkboard: steak, it might read, or prime rib, or even crab legs, the latter a post-victory reward during the football program’s run under former coach Gary Andersen.

Breakfast, with its static daily fare, is different. Eggs and potatoes, oatmeal and cereal, granola and fruit, and enough to feed the Badgers’ entire starting offensive line, not to mention their backups. It’s all you can eat, by the way — though nutritionists in the university’s sports medicine department would prefer a more balanced approach.

 

EXOS Earns NSF Certification — Important For Athletes Subject To Drug Testing

Forbes, Darren Heitner from April 20, 2015

Professional athletes need to be more careful than ever concerning the products they ingest. That is why EXOS, a leader in preparing football players for the National Football League Draft and well into their professional careers, has become NSF Certified for Sport for its new line of nutritional supplements. The players that train at any one of EXOS’ six preparation facilities across the United States, as well as all other individuals intending to ingest EXOS performance nutrition products now know that those products are free of over 200 banned or prohibited substances per professional sports leagues’ drug policies.

The NSF certifications apply for EXOS’ aminos (berry and lemon flavored) and whey protein isolate (chocolate and vanilla flavored) products. The NFL, Major League Baseball, PGA, LPGA and Candian Centre for Ethics recognize the NSF standards that now govern EXOS’ growing line of supplements, which already includes a multi-vitamin that is also certified by the NSF.

 

Leaders as Decision Architects

Harvard Business Review, John Beshears and Francesca Gino from April 26, 2015

All employees, from CEOs to frontline workers, commit preventable mistakes: We underestimate how long it will take to finish a task, overlook or ignore information that reveals a flaw in our planning, or fail to take advantage of company benefits that are in our best interests. It’s extraordinarily difficult to rewire the human brain to undo the patterns that lead to such mistakes. But there is another approach: Alter the environment in which decisions are made so that people are more likely to make choices that lead to good outcomes.

 

Why the NFL Draft Is More Awkward Than Ever – WSJ

Wall Street Journal from April 27, 2015

In an era of unprecedented information and technology, you might think that it would be easier than ever for NFL teams to pick the right players in the league’s annual draft, which kicks off Thursday night.

Instead, coaches and team executives say it has never been more challenging.

 

The Impact of Multi-Player Trades on Performance in the NBA

Sports Reference from April 27, 2015

… Although NBA GMs make mid-season trades for multiple reasons, one frequent objective is to improve the short-term performance of the team. Since the rim is 10 feet from the floor everywhere from Hinkle Fieldhouse to the Staples Center and the rules are the same everywhere, this seems to be a good strategy. However, given the interdependent nature of basketball, trades present a challenge to short- term performance because they disrupt the ability of players to productively play together. It is through experience and time together that players can learn how to best play together, thus there is a learning curve whenever a trade occurs. This learning curve impacts both the players joining a new team and the incumbent players on that team that now have to learn to play with new players.

 

Women’s College Basketball Is Better Than Men’

FiveThirtyEight from April 27, 2015

Last month, when my editor tasked me with looking into the stats surrounding the notorious Harvard-Stanford 16 vs. 1 upset from 1998 for ESPNW, I didn’t know much about women’s basketball. When I found that upsets are much less common in the NCAA women’s tournament than in the men’s, my mind jumped to what seemed like a logical explanation: Perhaps the lack of upsets is caused by a lack of depth in the women’s game. … But it isn’t. As it turns out, not only is women’s college basketball as strong and deep in college-age talent as the men’s game, but for the rarest talent, it is significantly more so.

 

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