Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 5, 2015

Tennis players, even as they advance into their 30s, like to talk about getting better.

At the age of 34, Roger Federer — at least with respect to his serve — is actually walking the walk. According to surprising statistics provided by the ATP World Tour, Federer is serving better than ever.

… So far this summer, Djokovic has looked a little weary from the chase. After winning Wimbledon, he scratched his way into yet another final, in Montreal (he lost to Murray in three sets). In Cincinnati, it was more of the same: Djokovic struggled but reached the final, where he lost to Federer in straight sets. Djokovic said those losses are in the past.

“I did want to win both in Canada and Cincinnati, but it didn’t happen,” Djokovic said. “It only changes in terms of me understanding what I did wrong, what has happened in those matches, analyzing it, talking with my team, with my coach especially.”

… The Cardinals had already made a similar move with Carlos Martinez this week. As the Cardinals view it, innings saved with Martinez and Wacha now are innings the two can pitch in October.

“We have just been keeping our eyes open for an opportunity,” manager Mike Matheny said. “[Wacha] feels good, and he wants to keep going, but there are also reasons we need to take a little pause whenever we get an opportunity. The easy decision is to just keep firing him in there. I explained that to him as well, because he’s not overly excited about it, but once again, this is a conversation we had not just a few days ago but throughout the season.”

The New York Red Bulls have announced the addition of Tony Jouaux as the team’s Strength and Conditioning Coach, effective immediately. Jouaux brings experience in training professional soccer players, including four years as the Strength and Conditioning coach for the Chicago Fire.

Mark Fitzgerald has come an incredibly long way since he was first given a foot — or a Foote, in this case — into the door of the hockey world.

It was 10 years ago that Adam Foote, at the time a star defenceman with the Colorado Avalanche, brought Fitzgerald aboard at his Train Like A Pro facility in Whitby, the hometown of both.

Although he came in with more of a football background, Fitzgerald soon discovered the great opportunities for growth in hockey as an expert in strength, conditioning and nutrition.

… “We had a come-to-Jesus meeting after qualifying round. The good thing is once you have the talk he follows through,” Pfaff said.

A day later Lapierre won the world championship silver medal.

You might not have heard of Dan Pfaff but he has quietly become one of the most important men in Australian athletics. He is the American coach working out of Arizona who took Fab to silver this week (and coached the gold medallist, Greg Rutherford, from Britain). He coached world champions Steve Lewis and Donovan Bailey. He has coached world and Olympic champions across the world, gathering in those with talent but with a flaw they felt couldn’t be fixed, and fixing them. He is working with Australia’s Olympic and silver medallist Mitch Watt and, before that, he worked with Steve Hooker.

A new study led by a UC San Francisco sleep researcher supports what parents have been saying for centuries: to avoid getting sick, be sure to get enough sleep.

The team, which included researchers at Carnegie Mellon University and University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, found that people who sleep six hours a night or less are four times more likely to catch a cold when exposed to the virus, compared to those who spend more than seven hours a night in slumber land.

… The analysis of any difficult situation should focus not so much on the situation we are facing per-se but on how we each experience particular situation. An athletes ability to cope are centered around performance related experiences. We as humans will look upon the nature of past, ongoing or potential relationships with our environment. This may lead to performance related anxiety and a disrupted person-environment relationship, where task demands (e.g. penalty kick, interview questions) are perceived as either too taxing, exceeding the persons resources or reflections of negative past performance. Therefore, our ability to cope involves constantly changing cognitive and behavioral efforts to be aware of and manage our thoughts, beliefs or feelings about tasks that may be challenging physically and/or mentally.

We cannot always change the situations we face. However, it is possible to alter our individual perceptions of the situation at hand.

Washington State University researchers have found that the timing of an animal’s sleep can be just as important as how much sleeps it gets.

Ilia Karatsoreos, an assistant professor in WSU’s Department of Integrative Physiology and Neuroscience, shifted mice from their usual cycle of sleeping and waking and saw that, while they got enough sleep, it was of poorer quality. The animals also had a disrupted immune response, leaving them more open to illness.

Soldiers and professional athletes often suffer traumatic brain injuries (TBIs) due to severe impacts. Rapid detection of TBIs can be challenging, since trauma to the head is not visually detectible without the aid of complex medical equipment found in a hospital setting. Timely diagnosis is critical for the effective treatment of TBIs and the prevention of cumulative brain damage. Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania have devised a specialized polymer that changes color in response to different levels of force. Although still in the proof-of-principle stage, this technology is intended for use in helmets as a visual indicator of severe impact and underlying head trauma.

… Leonsis is weighing whether to build a glitzy Wizards basketball practice facility on the site of the former St. Elizabeths Hospital, a mostly vacant campus in Southeast D.C. that is considered one of the District’s largest redevelopment opportunities.

At St. Elizabeths, the Wizards would practice amongst some of the city’s poorest communities and could serve as a central component of a long-promised revival that could also include a Microsoft Innovation Center, offices for technology firms, new shops and affordable housing.

Palaeontologist Stephen Gatesy wants to bring extinct creatures to life — virtually speaking. When he pores over the fossilized skeletons of dinosaurs and other long-dead beasts, he tries to imagine how they walked, ran or flew, and how those movements evolved into the gaits of their modern descendents. “I’m a very visual guy,” he says.

But fossils are lifeless and static, and can only tell Gatesy so much. So instead, he relies on XROMM, a software package that he developed with his colleagues at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. XROMM (X-ray Reconstruction of Moving Morphology) borrows from the technology of motion capture, in which multiple cameras film a moving object from different angles, and markers on the object are rendered into 3D by a computer program. The difference is that XROMM uses not cameras, but X-ray machines that make videos of bones and joints moving inside live creatures such as pigs, ducks and fish. Understanding how the movements relate to the animals’ bone structure can help palaeontologists to determine what movements would have been possible for fossilized creatures. “It’s a completely different approach” to studying evolution, says Gatesy.

… One of the methods that has been traditionally used to diagnose a stress fracture, without the costly MRI or Bone Scan is the tuning fork. In this article, we are going to look into how reliable it is to use a tuning fork to give you some peace of mind, without paying hundreds (or thousands) of dollars for a medical analysis.

The idea for the “recovery day” Tom Coughlin gave the Giants in advance of Saturday’s preseason game against the Jets came from a device about the size of a stopwatch or a kid’s asthma inhaler. The device fits into a cutout on the back of the undershirt a player wears in practice. Its manufacturer is an Australian company called Catapult, which since 2006 has been trying to provide ways of monitoring athletes’ movements and bodily functions during activity in order to minimize injury risk and maximize performance.

Three years ago, the Giants say, they were the world’s largest users of Catapult units with 90 — one for each player in their training camp. They monitor them on a laptop during practice and watch to see whether a player’s unit indicates a change of speed or movement that could indicate an injury is coming.

“There have been unique circumstances in which we have removed players from practice based on the information provided by the wearable technology,” said Ronnie Barnes, the Giants’ senior vice president for medical services.

The logistics of drug testing, and the reliance on the competence and thoroughness of each country’s efforts, makes catching cheaters extra difficult.

… To the notion the Lakers are behind the times, Buss simply disagrees.

“It’s an unfair assessment,” he said. “We don’t announce what we do … if we are ahead of the game why would we tell people what we’re doing, so that they can catch up?”

Obviously the Lakers don’t look like a franchise ahead of the game, given the team’s 48 wins in total over the past two seasons.

“The reason that we’ve hit an extra bottom was because of injuries,” said Buss. “We lost Steve Nash, which is going to go down as a bad trade, but we would have done it again. He was a two-time MVP and we felt he still had some time.”

Under a cloudless July sky, eight of the most significant quarterbacks in college football went head-to-head in a throwing competition. Some were former five- and four-star recruits counted on to start for their colleges from day one. Some were career backups. Some were afterthoughts who have turned into record-holders. One was an FCS player with potential NFL chops. And one couldn’t be sure he’d start for his team in 2015.

Immediately afterward, following a final throw-off that saw career backup turned Arizona State starter Mike Bercovici edge former three-star turned Tennessee starter Josh Dobbs, the person who invited all of them to this tree-lined field on the Nike World Campus attempted to identify the one tie that bound the group. That tie, Trent Dilfer said, also is what Ohio State coach Urban Meyer and Dilfer’s former position coach at Fresno State, Jeff Tedford, have told him is the best predictor of quarterback success.

“The No. 1 trait is competitive temperament,” said Dilfer, who runs the Elite 11 organization. “It might be articulated as toughness mentally, it might be articulated as grit, or persistence, or whatever you want; there’s a lot of different ways to explain it, but competitive temperament is the essence of who you are as a competitor.”

… Hindsight bias, also known as the “knew-it-all-along effect”, is the inclination to see events that have already occurred as being more predictable than they were before they took place. Hindsight bias causes you to view events as more predictable than they really are. After an event, people often believe that they knew the outcome of the event before it actually happened.

Bob Nightengale of USA Today recently wrote about the importance of clubhouse chemistry, but his article wasn’t very illuminating on how exactly it is that clubhouse chemistry leads to more wins. From his piece it almost seems like clubhouse chemistry is emitted from veteran players to transform mediocre players into All-Stars. The players seem to think it has an impact, but they also think those stupid necklaces and compression sleeves have healing powers.

I wanted to really examine how it is that clubhouse chemistry might translate into improved performance on the field. Here are some of the theories.

… Kelly’s approach this offseason — wheeling and dealing like few personnel people ever have — has looked insane at times. Plenty of coaches with 20 wins in two years would feel comfortable moving forward with a familiar quantity at quarterback. But the thinking behind the move for Bradford was a bold and commendable one — it seems that Kelly was projecting that both Bradford and his offense could be better than anyone imagined. It’s still (extremely) early, but the factors that could have led an optimistic person to feel good about how Bradford might translate to Kelly’s style have been on display all preseason. The inhuman accuracy from his first two college seasons — when he completed a combined 68.5 percent of his passes — has been there in both of his preseason starts. Bradford’s 10-for-10 line on Saturday was impressive, but seeing him perfectly locate throws to receivers in reasonably tight coverage was even more encouraging. If his ball placement is on, the simple decisions and quick tempo in Kelly’s offense could help turn Bradford into the point guard/distributor he was allowed to be in Norman; it’s his best chance to become what St. Louis envisioned when it selected him with the no. 1 pick five years ago.

Since Chip Kelly took the reins of the Philadelphia Eagles in 2013, NFL fans and analysts have been quick to point out how unorthodox Kelly’s quick-strike, college-style offense is when compared with the other 31 teams. But given the Eagles’ results on offense—a unit that’s averaging nearly 40 points a game this preseason—the more interesting question is this: Why don’t those other 31 teams play more like Kelly?

No team deploys the no-huddle offense—a tactic that’s ubiquitous in the college game—more than Philadelphia. And after a close look at the numbers, there’s evidence that even Kelly doesn’t use it enough. To fully gauge the no-huddle’s effectiveness, we eliminated situations where teams are forced into the tactic because of the score or the clock. After you take out all the drives in the last four minutes of the half and when the score is separated be more than a touchdown, teams that used the no-huddle averaged 25% more points per drive and 6% more yards per drive in 2014.

From one of the world’s most highly regarded social scientists, a transformative book on the habits of mind that lead to the best predictions

Everyone would benefit from seeing further into the future, whether buying stocks, crafting policy, launching a new product, or simply planning the week’s meals. Unfortunately, people tend to be terrible forecasters. As Wharton professor Philip Tetlock showed in a landmark 2005 study, even experts’ predictions are only slightly better than chance. However, an important and underreported conclusion of that study was that some experts do have real foresight, and Tetlock has spent the past decade trying to figure out why. What makes some people so good? And can this talent be taught?