Applied Sports Science newsletter – October 2, 2015

Run down the list. David West, Danny Green, Manu Ginobili, franchise icon Tim Duncan. All either took less money to play in 2015-16 for the San Antonio Spurs than they’ve earned previously or could’ve commanded elsewhere.

Point guard Tony Parker did the same thing last year.

“We all did sacrifices in different moments,” Ginobili said. “It’s not just because we are altruistic. We are having fun here. We like it. The quality of life for me is very important, and I think we are going to do OK financially. It’s all a matter of choosing what you want to do. For me, the day to day, feeling good, is very important for me and my family.”

… [Mandela] Egbo needs an introduction. He is an 18-year-old who grew up in Hackney but was schooled in his football south of the river, the defender nurtured first at Afewee Urban, the club staffed by volunteers in Brixton which counts Nathaniel Clyne as one of its many graduates, then at Crystal Palace’s academy in Beckenham. He is an England youth international, a member of John Peacock’s Under-17 squad who won the European Championships in Malta in 2014 having claimed the Premier League club’s scholar of the year award the previous year. The right-back travelled with Palace’s senior squad for their draw at Swansea last season and had been a regular in their development squad.

He was considered the next prospect likely to progress from junior to senior set-up, following Wilfried Zaha into the first team. Yet, a month before he turned 18 and in the same week England’s Under-21s limped away from the Euros in the Czech Republic, Egbo was confirmed as a Borussia Mönchengladbach player.

… step inside this unassuming complex, and you’ll encounter a bold vision of progressive education and world-beating player development – one whose founders believe holds the key to the future of not only the Philadelphia Union, but all of soccer in North America.

“We believe that the US is a future powerhouse in the sport of soccer,” says YSC founder and Union minority owner Richie Graham. “We have all these ingredients, and we’d like the Philadelphia Union to be a contributor to that process. We are going to be a ‘build’ and not ‘buy’ club.”

“Soccer has come a long way in Canada in the past 15 years”.

This was the thought running through my mind as I watched my good friend and colleague, Paolo Pacione, take the field as Fitness Coach with the Montreal Impact of Major League Soccer on Saturday, June 20th, in their match versus Orlando City FC in front of a packed crowd at Montreal’s Stade Saputo.

If you follow pro sports, you’ve seen sports superstitions—from playoff beards in the National Hockey League to baseball players who never wash their hats or socks. It’s no wonder that young athletes follow the pros’ lead and develop their own superstitions, like always carrying a particular water bottle or wearing the same t-shirt under their uniform jersey.

Responding to a child’s superstition can be tricky.

You want your child to feel confident and relaxed when he competes. If wearing the same socks to every game gives him a mental boost, no harm done, right? But you also want him to be able to believe in his own abilities, and not melt down if, say, those all-important socks accidentally get washed or (oh no!) lost.

… In 2015, this technology has filtered down to the lower budget teams and now the consumer. With Technology evolving and ever becoming lighter, smaller, less complicated and more affordable, SPT released the first sports analytics system designed for these teams in January.

Over the 2015 season in Australia, SPT has learned that there is a huge desire for In- Game GPS analysis for this category. State?league teams and smaller domestic competitions have started adopting SPT’s Technology and are now training and playing ‘like the professionals.’

SPT have designed their software application called ‘GameTraka’ so that it is readable and has value for any athlete.

Investors are intrigued and optimistic, as showcased by the recent announcement of $12 million in additional funding. With Two Sigma Ventures leading the way, Ahmed, who recently spoke with BostInno, seems enthusiastic about the opportunity.

“I like Two Sigma as a partner, because they’ve really built a lot of their success to date on understanding the importance of data and modeling,” Ahmed noted. “And treating data as a product. I think a lot of the expertise that they’ll bring to the table for WHOOP is around taking the maximum amount of data that we’re collecting around athletes and teams and using that as a real product and ultimately driver of the WHOOP value over time.”

Last season, the Los Angeles Lakers paid Kobe Bryant $23.5 million as he sat on the bench indefinitely with a torn rotator cuff. That’s just a fraction of the $500 million that injured players’ salaries cost professional sports teams last year alone.

To keep more of their players in the starting lineup, NFL, MLB and NBA teams are increasingly turning to Kitman Labs. The Menlo Park-based startup is leveraging data analytics to prevent injuries, which, aside from being absurdly costly, can mean the difference between winning and losing the NBA Finals or the World Series.

Kitman Labs was founded by Stephen Smith, a former Irish rugby head trainer who ran into some obstacles while conducting trials for his master’s thesis on the risk factors of athlete injury.

A team of researchers in the Cockrell School of Engineering at The University of Texas at Austin has invented a method for producing inexpensive and high-performing wearable patches that can continuously monitor the body’s vital signs for human health and performance tracking, potentially outperforming traditional monitoring tools such as cardiac event monitors.

The researchers published a paper on their patent-pending process in Advanced Materials on Sept. 23.

Led by Assistant Professor Nanshu Lu, the team’s manufacturing method aims to construct disposable tattoo-like health monitoring patches for the mass production of epidermal electronics, a popular technology that Lu helped develop in 2011.

Background

The FIFA Medical and Research Centre (F-MARC) has designed a comprehensive warm-up program targeting muscular strength, body kinaesthetic awareness, and neuromuscular control during static and dynamic movements to decrease injury risk for soccer players. Prior studies have investigated the effectiveness of the F-MARC programs, but have not consistently reported a statistically significant reduction in injury and reduction in time loss due to injury from utilizing the program.
Objective

The purpose of this study was to conduct a systematic review and meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials and interventional studies that evaluated the efficacy of the F-MARC injury prevention programs in soccer.
Methods

Two independent researchers searched the relevant article databases. The keyword domains used during the search were ‘F-MARC’, ‘FIFA 11+’, ‘the 11+’, ‘injury prevention programs’, ‘soccer’, and variations of these keywords. The initial search resulted in 4299 articles which were filtered to nine articles that met the inclusion criteria. Main inclusion criteria were randomized controlled trials or interventional studies, use of F-MARC injury prevention programs, and the primary outcome measuring overall and lower extremity injuries. Extracted data were entered and analyzed using Comprehensive Meta-Analysis software, version 2 (CMA.V2).
Results

The pooled results based on total injuries per 1000 h of exposure showed that F-MARC injury prevention programs had a statistically significant reduction in the overall injury risk ratio of 0.771 (95 % CI 0.647–0.918, p = 0.003) and the lower extremity injury risk ratio of 0.762 (95 % CI 0.621–0.935, p = 0.009). Moreover, FIFA ‘11+’ had a statistically significant reduction in the overall injury risk ratio to 0.654 (95 % CI 0.537–0.798, p < 0.001) and the lower extremity injury risk ratio of 0.612 (95 % CI 0.475–0.788, p < 0.001). However, FIFA ‘11’ did not reach significance for the lower extremity and overall injury reduction. It can be suggested that teams involved in the FIFA ‘11+’ warm-up program will reduce injury rates by between 20 and 50 % in the long term compared with the teams that do not engage in F-MARC programs.
Conclusions

This systematic review and meta-analysis indicated that use of F-MARC injury prevention programs, particularly the ‘11+’ program, decreases the risk of injuries among soccer players. These data also support the case for the development and introduction of sport-specific programs.

Data is growing at an exponential rate worldwide, with huge business opportunities and challenges for every industry. In 2016, global Internet traffic will reach 90 exabytes per month, according to a recent Cisco report. The ability to manage and analyze an unprecedented amount of data will be the key to success for every industry.

The research: Luis F. Martinez of the Nova School of Business and Economics and his research partner, Marcel Zeelenberg of Tilburg University, asked people to play a classic economic game in which two partners transfer money back and forth. The amount exchanged indicates their level of trust. Before playing, some subjects were primed to feel regret; others were primed to feel disappointment. A third group wasn’t primed and served as a control. Across three experiments, regretful subjects transferred less money and therefore showed less trust than the other groups. Disappointed subjects sent the largest sums, displaying significantly more trust.

The challenge: Does being let down really cause you to have a more positive attitude toward others? Is disappointment the key to collaboration?

… we set out to analyze 10 years of NBA performance with Roderick Swaab of the business school INSEAD. Our analysis revealed exactly what we saw with the Miami Heat: At a certain point, adding more top talent caused teams’ winning percentages to go down rather than up. These teams simply had too much talent.

It turns out that for basketball teams, steeper hierarchies lead to better performance. Why? Teams with a clear pecking order passed the ball more effectively. They had more assists, and as a result, players made more of their shots.

… With the first team utilizing large samples of data and advanced metrics, the next step is to replicate this success with the youth teams. While this is no simple task, Matthew Hawkey joined Tenney’s team last year ready for the challenge.

Hawkey started working for the organization towards the tail end of the Academy season in March. This allowed him to have a better understanding of the players and coaches in the system, as well as their day-to-day routines. After spending several months learning the club’s culture, he formulated a plan for the current season.