Applied Sports Science newsletter – May 18, 2015

I first saw Harry Kane play about 2005, early in my development role at Tottenham. There is no sensational story about his early days, it has to be said. While he always had ability, you wouldn’t say he was one of the exceptional or standout players of his age group early on. It was certainly touch and go when he was about 14 whether he’d even be kept on.

What was always evident about Harry was how hard a worker he was. He was always obsessive about the game and that kind of dedication can help to get you to a certain level, coupled with decent ability.

As the next stage in the recently announced changes to the football management at Brentford Football Club, Rasmus Ankersen and Phil Giles have been appointed as Co-Directors of Football.

Rasmus and Phil will oversee the football side of the Club and will be responsible for managing the recruitment of new players and staff, including the ongoing process to appoint a new Head Coach.
They will work with Brentford FC Owner Matthew Benham, the Board and new Head Coach in the quest to ensure football success and a sustainable future for The Bees.

… It has been some season. Swansea are eighth in the Premier League with 56 points on the board, nine more than their previous highest total – a record that Monk told the players on the first day of pre-season that he believed they could surpass – and welcome Manchester City on Sunday with a sixth-placed finish still possible. It has been no fluke.

Monk is a workaholic, a perfectionist with a sharp tactical brain and a man whose attention to detail stretches as far as pointing out that there is a crease on one of the images of the players inside the tunnel at the Liberty Stadium. He demands high standards from everyone and admits what he has asked from his players at training this season is “probably more work than they’ve ever had to think about”.

Swansea start working on their game plan for weekend opponents on a Monday and at times Monk has held four group meetings a week, alongside all the tactical drills on the training ground, to get across exactly what he wants from the players. “On top of that there would be individual meetings, unit meetings, all linked to the match and the game model,” he says.

… The research into “train low” has produced mixed results. An initial study found enhanced performance, but it was a pretty odd design: one-legged kicking with different training protocols for each leg. Subsequent studies have found that training low can produce some apparent metabolic benefits, but in general these benefits haven’t translated into actual increased performance. Meanwhile, others have raised concerns that training low can deplete your immune function and break down muscle protein. So the jury is definitely still out.

A new study from Martin Gibala’s group at McMaster University, published in the International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism, offers some interesting new twists. The protocol involved two weeks of twice-a-day, three-times-a-week interval workouts; each workout was 5 x 4:00 cycling at 60% of peak power with 2:00 rest. The 18 subjects were divided into two groups. During the three hours between the two workouts, one group fully replenished its carb stores (they took in 195 grams of carb), while the other didn’t (they took in only 17 grams of carb). That was the only difference between the two groups: the workouts remained identical.

… A couple months ago in this space, I wrote about the epidemic of injuries in the NBA, and why it’s surprising there aren’t more: Kids play the same sport in multiple leagues from an early age, wearing down their growing bodies before they reach adulthood, without the right kind of training or sufficient recovery time to manage the physical effects. In many cases, by the time they get to the pros, injury is predictable if not inevitable.

Now we’re seeing the same thing in baseball: There are currently more than 40 major league pitchers recovering from Tommy John or other arm surgeries, in addition to more than 50 pitchers on the DL with various strains, tears, and inflammations. You can point to many of the same causes: Too many innings for too many years, kids throwing for power without developing arm strength to support the motion. Even with mandatory pitch counts, rest days, and inning restrictions, you still have kids playing in multiple leagues with conflicting rules that allow for all kinds of loopholes. And contribute to all kinds of injuries.

You can sum up all the explanations in just a few words: Hard work is not always smart work.

At the end of each day we become unconscious and paralysed. Sleep made our ancestors vulnerable to attack from wild animals. So the potential risks of this process, which is universal among mammals and many other groups, must offer some sort of evolutionary advantage.

Research in this area was slow to take off. But recently there has been a series of intriguing results that are giving researchers a new insight into why we sleep and what happens when we do it.

ON APRIL 13, the Dodgers beat the Mariners 6-5. The game was an extra-inning thriller, but 70 percent of Los Angeles couldn’t watch it on TV: Because of a pricing dispute between cable providers, Dodgers games have been blacked out across the city since last season.

On April 14, the team issued a press release. It didn’t mention the blackout. Instead the Dodgers announced, in a statement brimming with enough tech jargon to arouse a roomful of MBAs, that they’re launching an accelerator for startups. “Since purchasing the team three years ago, the Dodgers ownership has shown an unwavering commitment to their fans and the community …”

A community that can’t watch Dodgers baseball.

Sports technology companies have been providing fans, athletes, and sports organizations more innovative ways of processing information. The landscape of sports analytics products and services has changed with the recent collaboration announcement between performance software giant Kinduct Technologies and sports analytic titan STATS.

If you are not familiar with Kinduct Technologies think of the technology used in “the sick bay” in Star Trek – yes I went there. Imagine all your medical information on a tablet, smart phone or handheld device. Now picture you and your doctor being able to track your recovery progress and any other medical related issues and procedures in real time. Imagine you and your personal trainer being able to update your diet and training regime in real-time. Imagine you as a professional athlete being able to know exactly how your body is reacting to a particular new work-out, a new diet, the off season, etc. Kinduct Technologies’ suite of health and performance management software allows for all of that.

Pushy parents are making their children as young as 10 wear GPS devices so they can monitor their on-field sporting performances.

A patch of gold, just a few centimeters wide and light as a feather, could reveal your innermost thoughts and feelings.

This is the premise of Professor John Rogers’ Biostamp. By attaching flexible, miniature sensors to the user’s temple, he has been able to track brain waves in real time and transmit them as messages.

“Our prototypes can provide a variety of monitoring and stimulation functions,” says materials scientist Rogers of the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. “We can pick up coordinated firing of neurons, and run that activity through a computer spelling interface, so that brainwaves pick letters out of a virtual keyboard display and type messages.”

Since our last update, the Eagles have finished their draft and signed a bunch of free agents to complete their roster. They also made some key staffing changes, which helps us understand some of those roster additions.

I’m talking about the revamp of the Eagles’ pioneering Sports Science department. Shaun Huls, a very low profile former Navy Seals trainer, got a new job title last week: “Director of Sports Science and Reconditioning” (instead of the previous “Sports Science Coordinator”).

The Birds also hired two sports science guys out of Oregon: James Hanisch, who ran the Ducks’ Sports Science program, as High Performance Analyst, and J.P. Crowley Hanlon, a recent graduate who majored in advertising, as Logistics Coordinator.

What does this all mean?

An international study published in the journal Nature Communications points the way toward wider, more effective use of biocompatible materials in repairing human tissues. Focusing on the difficult case of restoring cartilage, which requires both flexibility and mechanical strength, the researchers investigated a new combination of 3-D printed microfiber scaffolding and hydrogels. The composites they tested showed elasticity and stiffness comparable to knee-joint tissue, as well as the ability to support the growth and cross-linking of human cartilage cells. Researchers at the Technische Universität München (TUM) expect the new approach to have an impact on other areas of soft-tissue engineering research, including breast reconstruction and heart tissue engineering.

… One source of problems in group decisions is that many deliberating groups end up adopting a more extreme version of the position toward which they tended before deliberation began.1 The problem is especially severe for groups of like-minded people, who typically get more extreme as a result of deliberation.

At lunchtime on the day of the Champions League final in 2012, Chelsea’s manager Roberto Di Matteo had selected 10 of his 11 players. He just didn’t know who to play in left midfield. The player would have to combat Bayern Munich’s brilliant Arjen Robben and Philipp Lahm. Going into the last team meeting, Di Matteo had a private chat with his left-back, Ashley Cole. He outlined the situation, then asked Cole who he would play at left-midfield. Instead of naming a seasoned star, Cole said: “Ryan Bertrand.” The 22-year-old reserve Bertrand had never played in the Champions League, let alone in club football’s biggest game. “Why?” asked Di Matteo, surprised. “I trust him,” replied Cole. Bertrand played well, and Chelsea beat Bayern on penalties. In part, this was a victory for talent management. Di Matteo had put aside his ego, and let trust between two players drive the decision.

Talent management has been a business obsession at least since 1997, when the consultancy McKinsey identified a “war for talent”. The most visible battleground of this “war” is team sport. Football, in particular, is “the quintessential model for modern-day talent-dependent business”, writes Chris Brady, professor at Salford Business School. Big football clubs pay more than half their revenues to between 3 and 7 per cent of their workforce: the players. These young men are rich, multinational, mobile, often equipped with large egos and therefore hard to manage. Football managers are, above all, talent managers.

One of the writers of this article, Mike Forde, has watched football’s “war for talent” from up close. From 2007 to 2013, he was Chelsea’s director of football operations, dealing with all areas of performance and team operations. Now he consults sports teams, including the San Antonio Spurs, the American basketball champions. He has identified some sporting lessons for talent management.