Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 30, 2015

… don’t forget to take care of your most important weapon: your body. Be aware of what you’re eating. There will be times when you wake up in the middle of the night before a match craving crazy things like hamburgers and pizza. It’s because your body is missing something. If you ignore those cravings and don’t figure out what your body needs (and it’s definitely not burgers or pizza), you’ll get on the court the next day and fall flat.

This will never be more apparent than at the 1996 U.S. Open. You’ll face Alex Corretja in the quarterfinals, and in the fourth set, you’ll run out of gas because you didn’t eat properly before the match.

… Four years ago, trying to comprehend the phenomenon of Federer’s late career, which even then seemed like it had lasted an astonishingly long time, I wrote that the best athletes usually have a “still” phase. First they’re fast. Then they’re slow. In between, there’s a moment when they’re “still” fast — when you can see the end coming but can’t deny that, for now, they remain close to their best. Federer, I wrote, had spent longer in that “still” phase than any great tennis player I could think of.

Again: That was in 2011. Four years later, he’s still there. In fact, he’s ranked higher. His period of epoch-conquering dominance is years in the past, but he’s still a reliable top-five player, one who can compete for majors if the circumstances are right — especially at Wimbledon, where he’s won one title (2012) and reached another final (2014)1 since I wrote that piece. The slow-motion euthanasia that time inflicts on athletic talent is, for me, the hardest thing to watch in sports. But time is treating Federer with a tenderness that almost defies reason.2 He never hit the sea floor. He started to sink and discovered a whole other universe.

During his 11 years in the NBA, Golden State Warriors small forward Andre Iguodala has been an All-Star, an Olympic gold medalist, and an NBA All-Defensive team performer. Last week, he added two new lines to his resume: NBA Champion, and NBA Finals MVP. After a whirlwind week of parades and celebrations, Andre stopped by WIRED to talk about the technology and sports science that helped fuel the Warriors’ historic season, the gadgets he can’t live without, and the card game app he and his teammates were obsessed with during the playoffs. [video, pre-roll + 2:27]

The concept of anaerobic speed reserve, or ASR, is a relatively new concept to the sport of running. ASR is defined as the difference between an athlete’s absolute maximum speed and his or her maximum aerobic speed. As we know the energy systems used for a sprint event 400m or less is much different from an endurance event longer than 400m. The difference largely determines the success a specialized athlete may have at various events above or below the anaerobic threshold. The importance behind the ASR is simply that faster top-end speeds precede faster sub-maximal aerobic speed. Interestingly, elite sprinters achieve racing speeds that are twice as fast as elite milers, but marathoners race only moderately slower than milers (Bundle, Hoyt, & Weyland, 2003). The disparity lies in the metabolic power available from an anaerobic source in these faster athletes (Bundle et al., 2003). Knowledge of the top-end speed and the maximum aerobic speed can thus aid in predicting performance at any event duration between 3 and 240s with the use of the following ASR model (Bundle et al., 2003).

… USA Hockey: Why is it important for coaches to build an offseason training program and put it in place for their players?

Scott Caulfield: I think the biggest thing for the offseason is that it’s the best time that they can shift their focus from hockey skills to strength and conditioning. The fitness level and the strength that they’re going to be able to gain in the offseason is going to be a lot more beneficial and they’ll have a chance to really focus on that and have a lesser focus on the actual game of hockey, so that they can really build that strength and then maintain it during the season.

… What made Hargreaves different was that he had not been created by the English system. He had avoided the experience of being cosseted from childhood, surrounded by agents and other sycophants, and showered with absurd amounts of money at an age when he might still have been doing a paper round. Everything he was, he made of himself. Everything he achieved he fought for against the odds, going to a foreign country at 16 and learning a new language, developing his self-reliance in a ferociously competitive environment.

Quite a contrast there with the young men who lost two of their three matches in the Czech Republic this month, and were lucky to win the other. Every one of Gareth Southgate’s players had come through English academies, and none of them – even the generally estimable Harry Kane, who did not manage a single goal in 270 minutes of play – produced anything decisive when it really counted.

Examining a countermovement jump (CMJ) force-time curve related to net impulse might be useful in monitoring athletes’ performance. This study aimed to investigate the reliability of alternative net impulse calculation and net impulse characteristics (height, width, rate of force development, shape factor, and proportion) and validate against the traditional calculation in the CMJ. Twelve participants performed the CMJ in two sessions (48 hours apart) for test-retest reliability. Twenty participants were involved for the validity assessment. Results indicated intra-class correlation coefficient (ICC) of ? 0.89 and coefficient of variation (CV) of ? 5.1% for all of the variables except for rate of force development (ICC = 0.78 and CV = 22.3%). The relationship between the criterion and alternative calculations was r = 1.00. While the difference between them was statistically significant (245.96 ± 63.83 vs. 247.14 ± 64.08 N s, p < 0.0001), the effect size was trivial and deemed practically minimal (d = 0.02). In conclusion, variability of rate of force development will pose a greater challenge in detecting performance changes. Also, the alternative calculation can be used practically in place of the traditional calculation to identify net impulse characteristics and monitor and study athletes' performance in greater depth.

National Football League teams have taken to the skies in their search for a competitive edge, launching drones to film their practices.

“You can coach better. You see hand placement, you see where they have their feet and where they have their eyes,” said Jason Garrett, coach of the Dallas Cowboys.

The problem is, it’s illegal to fly the unmanned aircraft for any commercial purpose without first getting a Federal Aviation Administration waiver.

SMT – the US-based specialist in providing seamless real-time data integration, graphics presentation and video enhancement solutions to high-end live sports telecasts and venue productions – has announced that it is establishing a United Kingdom office from which to address its growing UK and European client base.

The firm’s broad suite of well-established products and services will soon be available directly to clients in the UK and Europe from SMT’s UK base. SMT has built a reputation in the US as a pioneer in the field of live sports graphics enhancements and is at the forefront of the real-time application of object tracking technology in live sports. In addition, SMT designed, developed and supports the official scoring systems, the official statistics systems, and the official on-site live presentation systems for the NBA, the NHL, The PGA TOUR, NASCAR, the Crossfit Games, and all four majors in tennis and golf: The US Open, The Masters, the US Open, The Open Championship, Wimbledon, Roland Garros, the US Open, and the Australian Open.

… Speaking with one NBA personnel guy, he gave me a nugget of info that colored later conversations, but I think will change how you look at many of the players. Over the past few years, the NBA draft has gotten bigger and bigger, leading to more pre-draft attention and a near NFL-like focus on “measureables.” One of the numbers you’ll hear over and over is wingspan.

“It’s worthless,” said the personnel guy. “We’ve done study after study on this and now that we’re getting hard data on movement, we know it’s worthless.” He detailed for me how the use of motion trackers and wearables are giving scouting departments information beyond this.

Traditionally, most of football statistical and media coverage has been focused almost exclusively on goals and (ocassionally) shots. However, most of the duration of a football game is spent away from the boxes, passing the ball around. The way teams pass the ball around is the most characteristic measurement of what a team’s “unique style” is.

In the present work we analyse passing sequences at the player level, using the different passing frequencies as a “digital fingerprint” of a player’s style. The resulting numbers provide an adequate feature set which can be used in order to construct a measure of similarity between players. Armed with such a similarity tool, one can try to answer the question: Who might possibly replace Xavi at FC Barcelona?

To contend for a title on the fast, slick grass courts of Wimbledon, there is one kind of man you don’t want to be: a giant with a monstrous serve.

Wimbledon was once a haven for big servers, men like Goran Ivanisevic, who won the 2001 title and lost in three finals; Michael Stich, who won once; and Roscoe Tanner and Kevin Curren, who each reached a final. But as the lawns at the All England Club have gotten firmer and the bounces more consistent, being a big man with a booming serve hasn’t been much of an advantage.

… Most organs are adversely affected by chronic stress. Your brain is no exception. Dr. Cheryl Conrad, Professor of Psychology at Arizona State University (link is external), studies the effects of stress on the brain. Specifically, she is interested in how stress influences brain plasticity—the brain’s ability to morph. Dr. Conrad (link is external)believes that while “the stress response is key to organism survival,” chronic activation has significant negative consequences on brain plasticity and resilience. Reduced brain plasticity may be a factor in depression, anxiety, PTSD and even Alzheimer’s disease. By studying stress and neuroplasticity, Dr. Conrad (link is external)hopes to uncover how we become resilient. She is also interested in elucidating the mechanisms by which chronic stress alters neuronal morphology and function, and the factors that influence recovery and resilience.

… I have been on the search for draft contemporary scouting and character evaluations for a while, with no luck so far. Absent that data, I decided to do some broader research on the topic looking at what prior academic work had to say about character and performance projections.

The main work horse model for this type of thing in psychology is the five personality factor model. With the five factors being Openness, Neuroticism, Extroversion, Conscientiousness, and Agreeableness. There has been extensive research into the relationship between the five personality traits and academic achievement, a fair amount of study on professional achievement, but less research directly on sports.