Applied Sports Science newsletter – July 1, 2015

French Open champion Stan Wawrinka has taught the tennis world a few lessons. The world’s most dominant players can be beaten in big matches. A one-handed backhand holds up just fine against a two-handed backhand. A pro can reach his prime at 30, rather than in his mid 20s.

And then there is the most refreshing Wawrinka lesson of all: It is OK to start tennis a little late and play it infrequently.

In a fast-moving field like education technology, it’s worth taking a moment to take stock of new developments, persistent trends and the challenges to effective tech implementation in real classrooms. The NMC Horizon 2015 K-12 report offers a snapshot of where ed tech stands now and where it is likely to go in the next five years, according to 56 education and technology experts from 22 countries.

FIFA’s latest rankings, released at the beginning of June, list Germany and Belgium respectively as the world’s top two men’s teams. Both nations are in the midst of so-called “golden generations,” with players at every position who are among the best their countries have ever produced. This may seem like a coincidence. But what if it isn’t?

On the long list of things Germany and Belgium have in common—relative wealth, geographic proximity—is this obscure entry: for the last decade, both countries have worked with a tiny Belgian firm called Double Pass, which regularly audits and evaluates the youth academies in both nations and presides over a system of incentives and rewards that drives investment into the academy systems. Just the word “audit” is enough to put most people to sleep, but the organizational work done by Double Pass plays a key (and fascinating) role in the success shared by the two nations.

The worlds of sales and marketing are undergoing a significant paradigm shift. The days of ‘pitching, closing, and presenting have come to an end.’ As buyers become more empowered—and knowledge oriented—in their decision-making processes, businesses are taking on new roles as educators.

From sales to engineering, marketing, product development—and every function in between—the most successful organizations are invested in helping their customer bases learn. Success boils down to the field of psychology. Here are 5 principles that illuminate how human beings learn.

… Despite the astonishing 2014 performance, there are still growth opportunities Under Armour has only begun to target. Below we take a look at those opportunities and analyze what they represent for the company’s future prospects.

The explosive growth of mHealth wearables, illustrated by Fitbit’s recent IPO and the debut of Apple’s Watch earlier this year, isn’t happening without serious worries about user security. To that end, providers and payers must put security front-and-center before allowing data exchange from patient and consumer devices, according to a security expert.

“What we’re seeing is that security is not being built into these devices–not just the wearables, but [also] anything that can be implanted” Suzanne Widup, a senior analyst with Verizon, tells HealthcareInfoSecurity.com. “So, until we see device manufacturers really getting on-board, putting security

Alarms went off when The New York Times recently reported that the St. Louis Cardinals were being investigated by the FBI and Justice Department for allegedly infiltrating the Houston Astros’ internal network to steal information about players and trades.

“Sports teams are always trying to get intelligence on their rivals. And when players or coaches switch teams, there’s always the threat that some sensitive data will make the move too,” said James Carder, chief information security officer at Boulder’s LogRhythm, which has some pro sports teams as clients. “The move could be merely sharing secrets vocally, or actually stashing the data on a storage drive before leaving the organization. That level of theft happens all the time. But cyberattacks between major sports teams are nearly unheard of.”

With the smartphone revolution comes an increasingly powerful new set of tools to reduce our use of doctors, cut costs, speed up the pace of care, and empower patients. Soon, we will be wearing attachments to diagnose ear infections or track heart rhythms and using apps to monitor our mental health. Digital avatars won’t replace physicians, but the relationship will be radically altered. We’ll be able to do routine diagnoses and monitoring (lab tests, physical exams, sensors, and some imaging) on demand. Wherever a mobile signal is available so, too, is the promise of marked health improvements. What are the benefits and risks of this bottom-up inversion of healthcare? Is it really the most profound shakeup in the history of medicine?

The Philadelphia 76ers today announced that following a lengthy search, the team has hired Dr. David T. Martin as the team’s Director of Performance Research and Development. Martin has been a pioneer in revolutionizing the way world-class athletes train for two decades. In this newly created role, Martin will oversee all aspects of the Sixers sport science, performance, training, rehabilitation and medical initiatives.

“Building up our sport science capabilities has been an important focus of the Sixers under Josh Harris and David Blitzer,” said Sixers President of Basketball Operations and General Manager Sam Hinkie. “To give our players every opportunity to be healthy and remain healthy, while also allowing them to perform at their best, we have made many investments – adding staff and integrating outside experts, partnering with pioneers in sports science and technology, and adjusting our day-to-day training, practice and recovery plans.”

… “I think that everybody is going to understand, especially with the hiring. In the next few weeks, you’re going to read about two hires the Philadelphia 76ers have made that are world class, cutting-edge stuff, global stuff. It will reflect this conversation.”

Brown was then asked what kind of hires these would be.

“Sports science and an assistant. It’s a double-edged powerful asset that we’re going to deliver to the market place soon. It’s all pointed to the health of our players, bottom line. Next year we’re going into a $75 million practice facility. I think we’re last in pro sports. We always said, ‘if we’re going to be last, we better be best.’ And best we will be. You’ve got to fill the chairs, fill the people in the offices who can mirror the values of the club. Wellness and sports science is number one with development of the players a close second. These hires will make a real statement confirming those goals.”

From 2010 through 2013, the Green Bay Packers endured a rough four-year stretch as far as injuries were concerned. We broke this down in detail last offseason – to summarize, Green Bay had the third-most Adjusted Games Lost due to injury over that stretch. Furthermore, they finished 30th or worse in three of the four years individually.

Now, fast-forward to the 2015 offseason. We are coming off a year in which the Packers’ injury rate completely has turned on its head. If we look at Football Outsiders’ AGL metric once again for 2014, we find instead that the Packers lost the third-fewest games to injury of any NFL team that season. They dropped from 101 games lost in 2013, second-most in the league, to just 41.9.

Sure, it’s possible that the Packers got lucky, but it’s also very likely that Mike McCarthy’s increased focus on modern sports medicine and his new practice schedule (both of which were implemented in the spring of 2014) had a significant impact.

As you may recall, we published a post earlier in the spring about eliminating added sugar from our diets for 90 days. That post was written 45 days into the experiment and largely focused on the question of whether eliminating sugar as a dietary change could result in improved fat burning for endurance sports.

As bookends for the test, we consulted with Carson Christen of Fascat Coaching who performed VO2 max tests on Michael and I before and after the 90 day period. We also worked with Dr. Kevin Sprouse of Provision Sports Medicine to analyze our blood work before and after.

Networks of all kinds drive the modern world. You can build a network from nearly any kind of data set, which is probably why network structures characterize some aspects of most phenomenon. And yet, many people can’t see the networks underlying different systems. In this post, we’re going to survey a series of networks that model different systems in order to understand different ways networks help us understand the world around us.

We’ll explore how to see, extract, and create value with networks. We’ll look at four examples where I used networks to model different phenomenon, starting with startup ecosystems and ending in network-driven marketing.

Different countries have different methods for assessing movement competence in children; however, it is unclear whether the test batteries that are used measure the same aspects of movement competence. The aim of this paper was to (1) investigate whether the Test of Gross Motor Development (TGMD-2) and Körperkoordinations Test für Kinder (KTK) measure the same aspects of children’s movement competence and (2) examine the factorial structure of the TGMD-2 and KTK in a sample of Australian children. A total of 158 children participated (M age = 9.5; SD = 2.2). First, confirmatory factor analysis examined the independent factorial structure of the KTK and TGMD-2. Second, it was investigated whether locomotor, object control and body coordination loaded on the latent variable Movement Competency. Confirmatory factor analysis indicated an adequate fit for both the KTK and TGMD-2. An adequate fit was also achieved for the final model. In this model, locomotor (r = .86), object control (r = .71) and body coordination (r = .52) loaded on movement competence. Findings support our hypothesis that the TGMD-2 and KTK measure discrete aspects of movement competence. Future researchers and practitioners should consider using a wider range of test batteries to assess movement competence.