Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 7, 2015

New Orleans Pelicans point guard Jrue Holiday has made enough progress in his recovery from offseason surgery in his lower right leg that he’s expected to be cleared for training camp later this month.

But Pelicans coach Alvin Gentry said on Friday that Holiday is likely going to be under restrictions involving practicing just once a day when two-a-day practices are scheduled during camp, which is set to open on Sept. 29 at The Greenbrier in West Virginia.

Checking in on Kentucky’s historic draft class — from top pick Karl-Anthony Towns to undrafted Aaron Harrison — during the summer before their first NBA seasons

The Memphis Grizzlies will hold training camp at the Robertson Gymnasium on the campus of the University of California, Santa Barbara from Sept. 29-Oct. 3.

All programs have them and they are often overlooked by the fans. They are the people who transform incoming freshmen into future stars.

These unsung heroes are the strength and conditioning coaches, and they are just as important to the program as each position coach. Without them, no amount of scouting or play calling would help the team win. Fans of Oregon have grown accustomed to seeing players run the offense at breakneck speeds.

However, without the strength and conditioning coaches, Oregon would be just as slow as Stanford. While all sports at Oregon are assigned a specific conditioning coach, the man most responsible for the speed at Oregon is Jim Radcliffe.

Wouldn’t it be great if sports had a formula that you could follow to be successful? Imagine if you had a list of things you simply needed to do (for example: get into shape, hone your technical and tactical skills, get your equipment dialed in,) and, voila, you would have a 100 percent chance of performing your best and getting the results you want.

Don’t you wish that sports were like, say, taking a test in school? There is a formula for that, at least to some degree. You pay attention in class, do your homework, and study diligently for the test. Assuming the test is fair, you have a near 100 percent chance that you will perform up to your capabilities on the test. As a general rule for most students, what you put into school is what you get out of school.

Frustratingly, sports just don’t work that way.

What do people do who are interested in learning? They search for people and experiences that offer different perspectives, sometimes unconventionally so. On June 16, 2015, the Seattle Seahawks opened up the team’s mini-camp with a focus on learning. Finding Mastery guest, Kai Kight, shared his craft and his story of facing fear and developing insight on a performing mindset.

CLUBS are worried players will be exposed to increased injury risk next pre-season following the AFL’s shock switch in GPS providers.

Teams could lose years worth of valuable tracking data after the AFL dumped long-time data supplier Catapult, in favour of a company it owns 49 per cent of, Champion Data.

In this week’s episode, O’Reilly’s Mac Slocum talks to Astrid Atkinson, director of software engineering at Google, about the delicate balance of managing complexity in distributed systems and her experience working on-call rotations at Google. [audio, 14:44]

I read the reports of the firing of University of Illinois head football coach with disappointment. As I say within the text of my newspaper column on the subject below, I don’t know the true nature of the allegations in question. The issue raised here, though, is a very serious one – not just at Illinois but at schools everywhere.

The biomarker creatine kinase (CK) is a useful way to determine general body strain. Anyone who exercises, ranging from light fitness to elite athletes, can benefit from correctly interpreting its data. Unlike vitamin D, ferritin, and magnesium, CK is not a nutrient and thus requires a little extra analysis to take advantage of the information it provides. The average Joe recreational runner all the way to the sports scientist can use CK to improve workouts and unveil some training patterns. In this blog, we will look at CK in detail and offer an outline of how best to use it to gauge body strain so you can plan smarter workouts.

THE TERM ‘WONDERKID’ IS OFTEN USED when referring to a talented young footballer. A player that shows great promise or stands out amongst players older than him. Like a drop of blood falling into piranha-infested waters, saying ‘wonderkid’ to a fan base has the same effect.

It’s very cliché but it’s also hard to ignore – times are changing. Gone are the days if you spent £20 million on a player they’d play week in and week out for you barring injury; this is where the break in reality appears between clubs and fans. Clubs have accepted the inflation of fees. You don’t always get what you pay for but instead you eventually get what you pay for. It’s not always instant success.

However this message hasn’t been passed down to the fans. They still believe if you pay £20 million they’re a guaranteed starter who should have an instant impact and if they don’t it’s because they aren’t good enough. They ignore key factors such as playing time, the age of the player and of course the bedding in period. These three things should be common sense but for varying reasons they are now viewed as luxuries.

Those tricky Patriots always have something up their sleeve. In last January’s playoff win over the Ravens, they used a wide receiver option pass from Julian Edelman and exploited a little-known rule about player eligibility to erase a 14-point deficit and pull off an unbelievable comeback.

The Ravens complained to the NFL about the Patriots’ (legal) tactics, and the competition committee (of which Ravens GM Ozzie Newsome is a member) outlawed the eligible-ineligible tactics.

But Bill Belichick and the Patriots will keep searching for new innovations. What will they come up with this year?

With interest in statistical applications to sports creeping from the blogosphere to the mainstream, more writers than ever are interested in metrics that can more accurately summarize or predict player and team skill.

This is, by and large, a good thing. Smarter writing is better writing. A downside, however, is that writers without a formal training in statistics are forced to discuss concepts that can take more than a semester’s work of undergraduate or graduate training to flesh out. That’s difficult, if not impossible and unfair.

I’ve spent much of the last decade building various products or tools from healthcare billing to finance and now advertising all focused on extracting the valuable information contained in some dataset(s). This is meant to be a quick summary of some lessons learned, hopefully some readers find it useful.

Once you know the problem you want to solve and the customer you want to solve it’s tempting to start building product. Don’t, you’re not ready yet.