Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 25, 2015

… “Dell performed surgery on that shot,” McKillop says. “I don’t know any other way to say it. Dell had Stephen lift the ball, lift his release point so that it was much higher. It was a painstaking process. They worked on it day after day, shot after shot after shot.”

In other words, there is nothing “natural” about Steph Curry’s shot, even if he looks like he was born shooting it. That shot was built meticulously, shot by shot, now off the pick, now stop-and-pop, now fadeaway, now off-the-dribble. When Mark Jackson was coaching Golden State, he made the point that Steph Curry is the greatest shooter in NBA history because, in his words, “We’ve never seen anybody with his ability to to be a great shooter across the board.” It was the variety that amazed Jackson, and when I mentioned this to Steph Curry, he smiled a little bit and said, “Yeah, I took a lot of shots.”

After Marcus Smart was selected by the Celtics with the sixth overall pick of last June’s NBA draft, the guard had dinner at a posh Italian restaurant in Manhattan with fellow draft picks such as Jabari Parker and Joel Embiid. Then Smart and his family continued the fete at a quiet rooftop lounge.

It was, on the surface, a simple and happy end to a simple and happy time. Smart had been one of the draft’s top options, and the Celtics’ decision seemed logical, if not obvious.

In reality, though, the choice was the result of an exhaustive evaluation process. Smart did not know it on that warm June night, but the Celtics had been working toward the moment for several years.

… Richards allowed himself a few hours to process the pain he was experiencing and what it signified. Later that night, though, as his teammates—including Pujols and Trout—filed into his hotel room to check in on him, he had already vowed that his first taste of success would not be his last. “It was kind of instant rehab mode,” he says. “Started getting myself mentally prepared for what I was about to embark on.”

The Aug. 22 surgery, which left him with a six-inch vertical scar on the center of his left knee, was the easy part. During a 90-minute procedure, Richards’s surgeons drilled three holes in his kneecap, manually pulled it back down to its proper position and used wire to reattach it to the ruptured tendon.

?After eight weeks of healing, Richards moved to Tempe, Ariz., to begin the grueling rehabilitation process under the supervision of Keith Kocher.

… My Australian housemate Alex at the time wanted to tame sleep too and decided to join in. We set about imitating [Buckminster] Fuller and decided to take 30-minute naps every six hours.

Problems began after 36 hours. I was finding it hard staying awake at night, and Alex wasn’t able to wake up in time after naps despite many alarms.

We were aware that difficulties were bound to arise, but we didn’t realize how bad sleep deprivation truly feels.

Countermovement jump (CMJ) has been extensively used in training; yet, limited and contradictory kinematic data are available for trained subjects. To our best knowledge, no other studies have evaluated the associations between force-time curve characteristics and CMJ in a large sample of trained athletes using a linear transducer. Thus, the aim of this study was to determine the association between force-time measures and CMJ performance collected with a linear transducer. Thirty-five trained athletes were asked to perform 3 maximal weighted CMJ using a linear transducer attached to a barbell (17 kg). The data indicated that the maximal rate of force development (RFDmax) was strongly related to CMJ displacement (r = 0.809/0.807, p < 0.001) and also to the percentage of peak force (r = -0.823/-0.809, p < 0.001) at RFDmax. Velocity and displacement at RFDmax were not correlated to CMJ height. It was therefore concluded that the percentage of PF applied at RFDmax and RFDmax were the best predictive variables for CMJ performance in this study.

… be very wary of using rewards to master habits!

Why? It sounds so sensible to reward yourself for sticking to a good habit. But it turns out that rewards are very, very tricky to use well.

… In 2010, Microsoft released a new technology that paired with the XBOX 360 called Kinect. The technology was basically a motion-capture system that allowed you and your friends to control the video game based on your movements. Eckstein had been in business with Microsoft for years, so he asked some of his colleagues at Microsoft if it would be possible to use a markerless motion-capture technology like the Kinect in an MLB setting.

“They said to me, you know that’s a great idea. The problem is the focal length for the Kinect is only about 8-14 feet,” said Eckstein. “So the problem was how do we increase that focal length out to 300+ feet so it could be used in a ballpark.”

… Recently, some doctors have been prescribing a special machine called a bone growth stimulator which uses pulsed waves of ultrasound in an effort to get stress fractures to heal more rapidly.

Today we’ll take a look at whether this technology can help you get back running faster following a stress fracture. Then we will discuss new research on how to return to running as quickly as possible once your fracture has healed.

Despite increased knowledge of hamstring muscle injuries, the incidence has not diminished. We now know that not all hamstring injuries are the same and that certain types of injuries require prolonged rehabilitation and return to play. The slow stretch type of injury and injuries involving the central tendon both require longer times to return to play. A number of factors have been proposed as being indicators of time taken to return to play, but the evidence for these is conflicting. Recurrence rates remain high and it is now thought that strength deficits may be an important factor. Strengthening exercise should be performed with the hamstrings in a lengthened position. There is conflicting evidence regarding the efficacy of platelet-rich plasma injection in the treatment of hamstring injuries so at this stage we cannot advise their use. Various tests have been proposed as predictors of hamstring injury and the use of the Nordboard is an interesting addition to the testing process. Prevention of these injuries is the ultimate aim and there is increasing evidence that Nordic hamstring exercises are effective in reducing the incidence.

… The school is expanding and renovating the 10-year-old facility on Skip Bertman Drive. The Tiger Athletics Nutrition Center, meanwhile, is back on schedule and could break ground as early as this fall.

The university is in the design and fundraising phase of the football operations project, so specifics — such as exact cost and start date — are unclear, said Eddie Nunez, LSU’s senior associate athletic director.

… As far back as 1991, Michael Joyner pointed out that you should be able to make a good prediction for how fast someone can run a marathon based on knowing only their VO2 max, running economy, and lactate threshold. By some estimates, in fact, knowing just the VO2 max and running economy accounts for 94 percent of the variation in 10-mile run performance. The puzzle is that if you take “elite” values of VO2 max and running economy and plug them into the models, they predict that people should already be running sub-2 marathons.

So why aren’t they? Because, for the most part, the people who have exceptional VO2 max have only middling to good running economy, while the people with exceptional running economy have only middling to good VO2 max.

What makes a good [soccer] manager? The answer depends in part on his job description. Some managers are in charge of recruitment, while others must leave it to a director of football or a transfer committee. Most managers take charge of tactics on the field, but a few give their coaches minute-to-minute control. All managers, however, try to make the whole greater than the sum of the parts, bringing players together in a lineup that works. And that’s what I’ve tried to measure with these new ratings.

Football leagues around the world tend to be dominated by a tiny number of teams. This column applies Sutton’s theory of endogenous sunk costs to show that it’s all down to success begetting success, and success attracting more fans. Like big companies who dominate markets and still spend billions on advertising to maintain their market position, dominant teams remain dominant because they consistently win.

The relative age effect (RAE) is a well-established phenomenon in education and sports. Coaches have been assumed to be important social agents of RAE via biased selection decisions in favour of children with maturation advantages. In the present research, we used the Implicit Association Test to investigate automatic associations between body size and a player’s domain-specific giftedness amongst youth baseball (N = 18) and youth soccer coaches (N = 34). We found medium to strong automatic associations between body size and player giftedness (baseball: MD = 0.62; soccer: MD = 0.51). Specifically, taller players were associated with positive performance-related attributes, whereas smaller players were associated with negative attributes. The results are in line with theories of grounded cognition by showing that the abstract concept of “sport giftedness” is partly grounded in the perception of physical height amongst youth sports coaches. We argue that this grounded cognition has the potential to influence coaches’ selection decisions and in turn account for RAE as coaches are biased towards physically more matured players, even when no apparent performance advantage is evident.