Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 29, 2015

Brentford FC have appointed experienced coach Flemming Pedersen as their new Head of Football Philosophy and Player Development.

The 52-year-old will take up his post on 1 July and will work as part of the Club’s First Team coaching staff led by Head Coach Marinus Dijkhuizen.

Flemming will also be responsible for setting out Brentford’s football philosophy and structuring individual development plans for players.

… Johnston is a perfect example of how the youth development system should function: get scouted, earn your stripes in the youth national team system, play NCAA ball, get drafted by the pros in the first round, and prove you can be a starter with the full national team.

And Johnston’s performance this month is yet another reason why the National Women’s Soccer League is such an important cog in that development machine. Johnston played in all 90 minutes in each of the 21 games she started in 2014 with the Chicago Red Stars. That’s almost 2,000 minutes of game time experience leading the back line. That’s also 21 games for U.S. coach Jill Ellis to evaluate Johnston’s performance and determine if and where she fits into the national team picture.

The Utah Jazz are growing their staff yet again. On Thursday, the Jazz announced the hirings of Jeff Watkinson as assistant coach of integrated player development, and Zach Guthrie as manager of basketball strategy and technology.

In this article, I’m going to discuss several more key passive recovery topics. Many of these you will be familiar with, but hopefully I can provide you with some new information as well. I just want to note quickly and be the first to claim that I’m not an expert in nutrition! I follow masterminds like Lyle McDonald, Alan Aragon, Mike Roussell, and so many more who are far more enlightened than me on the matter, and I would advise you to do the same. I just wanted to share some practical and scientific insight in regards to nutrition that I thought was still unique and useful for you.

Home // Training // Basketball
From Workouts to Brain Mapping: A Behind-the-Scenes Look at How NBA Prospects Grind to Raise Their Draft Stock

June 25, 2015
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Coming Up
Meet the Impact Basketball NBA Draft Prospects
Next Video: Rakeem Christmas NBA Draft Preview

“If you miss on the right player, that player is going to hurt you a couple times a year every time you play him. But if you draft the wrong player, he’s going to hurt you 365 days a year.”

That quote, passed on from an NBA general manager to basketball trainer Drew Hanlen, sums up the importance of the NBA Draft. There is immense pressure on NBA front offices, especially those sinking in the swamps of awfulness (e.g., Minnesota Timberwolves, New York Knicks) to take a player who will turn their franchise around. Prior to the draft, teams do everything possible to ensure the guy they’ve targeted won’t end up burning them, including bringing in a select few players for private workouts to poke, prod and observe everything they can.

The Sounders released a video earlier this month featuring manager of performance and sports science David Tenney with a Go Pro camera and an explanation of how the club approach preparation prior to a game.

Matildas striker Michelle Heyman is suffering from badly burnt feet because of the synthetic pitches reaching more than 50C at the FIFA World Cup in Canada.

Muscles and bones won’t be the only things getting crunched when the National Football League kicks off its 2015 season in September. Thanks to a new deal between the NFL and Sportradar US, on-field performance data for each player will also be getting crunched thanks to a new API and RFID chips embedded in each player’s shoulder pads. TV broadcasters and other licensees will ultimately show fans how fast players ran, their acceleration rates, and the distances they traveled during key plays.

… the digital age has drastically altered the way [Todd] McCarthy and other video crews work in college football. Modern film technology has made sharing and studying video easier than ever before: Teams share film instantly via the Internet, while coaches and players can access video minutes after practices and games end. Meanwhile, new digital technology awaits, developments that could continue to shape how college football is played and coached.

Georgia Tech uses video-editing software called DVSport, the same program used by NCAA officiating crews for high-definition instant replay in the Power Five leagues. McCarthy and his staff used to spend three or four hours editing film after every practice, which meant coaches had no choice but to wait. Now, McCarthy has film prepared for coaches a mere five minutes after practice ends.

CVPR is the premier Computer Vision conference, and it’s fair to think of it as the Olympics of Computer Vision Research. This year it was held in my own back yard — less than a mile away from lovely Cambridge, MA! Plenty of my MIT colleagues attended, but I wouldn’t be surprised if Google had the largest showing at CVPR 2015. I have been going to CVPR almost every year since 2004, so let’s take a brief tour at what’s new in the exciting world of computer vision research.

A lot has changed. Nothing has changed. Academics used to be on top, defending their Universities and the awesomeness happening inside their non-industrial research labs. Academics are still on top, but now defending their Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Company X affiliations. And with the hiring budget to acquire the best and a heavy publishing-oriented culture, don’t be surprised if the massive academia exodus continues for years to come. It’s only been two weeks since CVPR, and Google has since then been busy making ConvNet art, showing the world that if you want to do the best Deep Learning research, they are King.

The Bavarians have signed a number of their rival’s players in recent years and have now raided their medical department, with Andreas Schlumberger making the move.

… Our results show that the first 5 min LnRMSSD value (stabilization period) was not different than the criterion segment (mins 5-10). Additionally, we found that each isolated minute from the stabilization period (i.e., min 0-1, 1-2, 2-3, etc.) showed good agree with the criterion. Therefore, when 5 minute measures cannot be obtained due to time constraints or for compliance reasons, 60 s measures appear suitable for valid assessment, in agreement with our previous investigations.

In our next paper (in press) we assess if ultra-short LnRMSSD measures are sensitive to training effects in elite athletes.

… This year we are extending the use of Watson by training a Watson system all about the championships themselves, such that members of the Wimbledon team can use it to ask questions and seek information about the event. We call this the “Wimbledon Digital Assistant” because it assists by finding relevant knowledge to solve a user’s problem. Today that is reserved for members of the events team, but we anticipate providing it to others in the future as Watson learns more about tennis.

… [Ralf] Wessel’s lab at Washington University and Woodrow Shew’s lab at the University of Arkansas collaborated to monitor electrical activity in the visual cortex when a series of moving images played across the retina.

As they report online in the June 22 issue of Nature Physics, the sensory input momentarily pushed the cortex away from criticality but, no matter what the input, the cortex spontaneously returned to the critical regime.