Applied Sports Science newsletter – October 19, 2015

In each of the last two seasons, the Giants truly believed they had built a contender, only to watch in shock as their foundation crumbled. And they don’t think it was because they misjudged their talent. They’re sure it was because too much of that talent was hurt.

Now here they are, more than a quarter of the way through a “win or else” season, facing the frightening reality that it could happen again. Too many key pieces are missing. Too many important bodies are banged up.

As the salaries of Major League Baseball players have increased, so has the cost of players on the disabled list due to injuries. Giancarlo Stanton, Matt Kemp and Yu Darvish were some of the leading names among the 198 players who spent time on the disabled list during the 2015 season, accounting for $700 million in player salaries, according to an analysis by Kitman Labs.

With just three preseason games remaining, the Houston Rockets have lost nearly 40 games due to injuries, rest or coach’s decision.

Sounds similar to what happened to this team last season. The good thing for the Rockets is that it’s the preseason, and with the regular season roughly two weeks away, the health of this team is improving.

Slightly.

… The friction may come to a head, though, over Hinkie’s decision to select Kansas center Joel Embiid at No. 3 overall in the 2014 draft. Embiid was considered to have can’t-miss talent and upside, but was red-flagged by multiple teams that season because of back and foot issues that surfaced during and after his only, injured-shortened season as a Jayhawk.

Embiid was selected with the hope that he would follow the same pattern as Noel, who was coming off an ACL tear when he was picked in 2013, and missed his rookie season (which helped the Sixers be bad enough again to land the Embiid pick). Noel was excellent as a rookie in 2014–15, especially as the anchor of a surprisingly decent Philadelphia defense. Hinkie certainly was aware of Embiid’s physical issues when he took a calculated risk to select him, but it’s unclear whether he understood the depth of Embiid’s attitude concerns, which have only worsened as a pro.

Dr Darren Burgess is currently Head of Performance at Port Adelaide FC and formerly with Liverpool FC and the Australian Soccer team. Below are some of the key points from his discussion on the uses and challenges of monitoring load in team sports.

Evidence Based Practice vs Common Sense

Darren emphasised the importance of knowing all the various considerations for your specific programme in the applied High Performance environment. While it is important to try to use evidence based practice, at times there is no evidence base for your situations, for example how you train a team playing three games in a week including a mid-week away match in the Europa League.

Researchers have demonstrated that increases in strength result in increases in athletic performance, although the development of strength is still neglected in some sports. Our aim was to determine whether a simple in-season strength training program would result in increases in maximal squat strength and short sprint performance, in professional soccer players. Professional soccer players (n=17, age = 18.3 +/- 1.2 years, height = 1.79 +/- 0.06 m, body mass (BM) = 75.5 +/- 6.1 kg) completed one repetition maximum (1RM) back squat and sprint tests (5-, 10-, 20 m) before and after a six-week (2 x week) in-season strength training (85-90% 1RM) intervention. Strength training resulted in significant improvements in absolute and relative strength (pre: 125.4 +/- 13.8 kg, post 149.3 +/- 16.2 kg, p < 0.001, Cohen's d = 0.62; 1RM/BM pre: 1.66 +/- 0.24 kg.kg-1, post 1.96 +/- 0.29 kg.kg-1, p < 0.001, Cohen's d = 0.45; respectively). Similarly, there were small yet significant improvements in sprint performance over 5 m (pre 1.11 +/- 0.04 s, post 1.05 +/- 0.05 s, p < 0.001, Cohen's d = 0.55) 10 m (pre 1.83 +/- 0.05 s, post 1.78 +/- 0.05 s, p < 0.001, Cohen's d = 0.45) and 20 m (pre 3.09 +/- 0.07 s, post 3.05 +/- 0.05 s, p < 0.001, Cohen's d = 0.31). Changes in maximal squat strength appear to be reflected in improvements in short sprint performance highlighting the importance of developing maximal strength to improve short sprint performance. Moreover this demonstrates that these improvements can be achieved during the competitive season in professional soccer players.

The Australian Matildas believe that they will establish Australia as a top five nation in women’s football by the next World Cup.

Could this become sport’s perfect finishing school? And in future might it even help revive the Netherlands’ international fortunes?

Ajax Amsterdam is already renowned for the success of its youth academy, but the Dutch football club is now taking its center of learning to new levels. Given the Netherlands have just failed to qualify for the European Championship, the initiative couldn’t have come at a better time.

… Re/code: What have you learned about the Apple Watch’s fitness applications in the first few months?

Jay Blahnik: The thing that we are most excited about is the response we’ve received from a broad section of people on the all-day activity app (a bullseye with concentric red, green and blue rings that measure exercise, movement and standing throughout the day). We found that there has been a consistent message back from consumers, saying, “I’m really motivated to close my rings every night.” Whether they’re beginners or elite athletes, we’re hearing the same stories all over, which is: “It’s 9 p.m., my ring’s not quite closed, I’ll take my dog out for one more walk around the block.”

It’s exactly what you would hope would happen with an all-day activity app.

“We got lucky,” said Dr Yacine Zerguini, smiling when he thinks back to the important breakthrough that has facilitated his work as a member of FIFA’s Medical Committee. “We were able to determine that the cartilage around the distal extremity of the radius at the wrist fuses in men around the age of 17.”

That single discovery, made in 2006, could well have a significant impact on the 16th edition of the FIFA U-17 World Cup, which kicks off in Chile on Saturday.

“We carried out a number of Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) scans on the wrists of players between the ages of 15 and 19,” added Dr Zerguini, speaking to FIFA.com in the Chilean capital of Santiago. “Next we got people whose birth dates we were sure of and carried out a classification. That confirmed that no one under the age of 17 had fused cartilage.”

For Irish or Welsh rugby fans recent weeks have seen a fair degree of anxiety over injuries. But what does it feel like for players? And what can a coach do?

Recently we found some new research from America about musculoskeletal injury (strains and sprains) and coaching. This was not how to treat or prevent injuries but how to deal with the anxiety suffered by players on the side lines.

In the midst of all the excitement that comes with the arrival of a new Manager, it has been a disastrous week for Liverpool on the injury front. Two of its best young players, both of whom only arrived in the summer, sustained serious knee injuries They both tore their anterior cruciate ligament (ACL). Joe Gomez injured his knee while playing for the England U21 team against Kazakhstan on Tuesday night. And then at training on Wednesday striker Danny Ings tore his ACL.

ACL injuries, which are seen mainly in sports such as netball, basketball and skiing as well as the various football codes, are devastating for both player and club as they require a lengthy time off sport.

… As with any communication, start by thinking about your audience. Who are you presenting to, and how much do they know about the topic? If you’re presenting data on three different sales strategies to the sales team that’s been testing those approaches, you can plunge right in and show them what worked. If you’re reporting on that same experiment to another part of the organization, you need to provide a lot of context before you drop the bar charts in their laps; otherwise what looks like a clear story to you may simply confuse them. A good rule of thumb is to look at the legend on your charts: if you can’t count on the audience knowing what each item in the legend actually refers to, you need to spend some time on setup before you get to the numbers.

… Online there’s a forum for basketball research called APBR Metrics [Association for Professional Basketball Researchers], and so I posted a few things there, and then I started my own little blog where I put things. I did that for a couple of months and Mike Zarren, who’s now the assistant general manager of the Celtics and my boss, he posted an internship opening to the message board and I applied and he had seen some of my work, so I got the internship. So while I was doing my Ph.D., I was sort of doing very part-time work for the Celtics from Durham.

What I found was doing things in political science and I’m getting better at statistics and getting better at statistical programming meant that I was a better basketball analyst. The difference in the subject matter wasn’t a hindrance. It actually ended up making it easier to get better at both, I think, and a lot of what I do now, I sort of describe as “social science for basketball”, where someone has an idea about what wins basketball games or what a good player is, and we can test that. It’s similar to ‘what creates democracy?’, ‘what creates a good economy?’, those kinds of questions, it’s just different data.