Applied Sports Science newsletter – October 26, 2015

Manchester United manager Louis van Gaal says his training methods last season were responsible for their injury crisis.

United’s players returned to Manchester on Thursday afternoon following their Champions League 1-1 draw against CSKA Moscow and now turn their attentions to Premier League duty ahead of Super Sunday’s battle with Manchester City.

In the build-up to the clash between the league’s first and third-placed teams, Van Gaal described the schedule in English football as “evil” because of the lack of a winter break, stating that clubs and the national team suffered with players being “exhausted at the end of the season”.

… The first thing Delle Donne does when shooting a free throw is look for the dot—sometimes it’s a nail—that marks the middle of the free-throw line. She lines up her right foot with the dot. After she bounces the ball three times, she places her index finger on the ball’s air pinhole. She bends her knees slightly and makes an L-shape with her shooting arm.

“From there I just lift and flick, and a little bit of ankle pop,” Delle Donne said.

There’s one more thing.

“I actually just tell myself, ‘It’s going in,’” she said. “Every single time.”

The record for fastest goal ever scored in Major League Soccer belongs to a guy very nearly wasn’t on the field to score it. On Saturday, Mike Grella broke Tim Cahill’s two-year old record for the quickest tally in MLS history when he streaked up field, picked off an errant pass, and fired a (deflected) shot past Andre Blake inside of 8 seconds against the Union.

Grella’s prominent position in the New York Red Bulls high-pressure style is almost as unlikely as the corporate-backed club playing in the country’s largest media market having the lowest payroll in MLS.

Of course, Grella’s prominent role in the team is part of what has enabled the Red Bulls’ successful season while having the lowest payroll in the League. At a $60,000 salary, he’s more than a steal, and represents not only the new mindset of the one of the league’s most high-profile teams, but the “second chance/last chance” ethos that still pervades in MLS–but might not forever.

Midfielder Victor Souto thought he was ready for the cryotherapy chamber’s minus 200 to 290 degrees Fahrenheit.

But it took all the mental toughness the University of Akron junior could muster to survive the maximum three minutes as he became the first Zip into the tube.

“I was ready to be cold, but not as cold as when I got in the machine,” Souto said.

… “We’ll actually use it with a lot of the guys Sunday morning before they go to the stadium, so about three hours before kickoff we’ll go through and use the cryotherapy on them because it cleans out any inflammation, soreness that they have, but it also kind of dumps endorphins back into the body,” said Dr. Ryan Tuchscherer, a chiropractor and the co-founder of Cherry Creek Spine and Sport Clinic. “It really gets them amped up and ready to go, versus the old, traditional way of doing an ice bath or an ice tank.”

… the best predictor of when the subjects would give up was their level of perceived effort, which reached the same level in both trials at the moment of exhaustion. Somehow, the effects of arm cycling lingered and influenced the overall perception of fatigue during the leg trial—which, of course, raises an even bigger question: what is effort? In this case, the study focused specifically on the sense of discomfort in the legs and breathing, but there’s plenty of debate about what contributes to the sensation of effort and how it should be defined.

Bully whippets may have competition in doggy body-building contests. Two beagles in China have been genetically engineered to be extra buff. The small hounds are the latest addition to a menagerie of gene-edited animals that also includes pigs and monkeys.

Researchers in China decided to mutate a muscle gene in beagles to test whether a powerful gene-editing technology called CRISPR/Cas9 will work in dogs. Mutations in the gene, called myostatin, give bully whippets and Belgian Blue cattle their bulky muscles, but are not known to cause health problems.

… As the NBA prepares to tip off the regular season on Tuesday, the biggest issue facing a league on the upswing may not be labor strife or the age limit for draft eligibility. After a season in which star after star missed huge chunks of time, one of the biggest priorities is player health.

“I think what we saw in this season and in the playoffs, especially, is there is no question that injuries had a big impact on the competition,” NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said. “Not that that’s anything new. One of the things we’re looking at as a league is what can we do to keep players on the floor?”

A new study finds the overall rate of anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries among high school athletes is significantly higher among females, who are especially likely to experience ACL tears while playing basketball, soccer and lacrosse.

The study, “Sport-Specific Yearly Risk and Incidence of Anterior Cruciate Ligament Tears in High School Athletes: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis,” will be presented at the 2015 American Academy of Pediatrics Conference & Exhibition in Washington, DC.

The media hype around the issue of concussion in sport is “way ahead of the science”, a leading doctor told Reuters at an annual National Football League (NFL) conference on Saturday.

The issue of concussions and head trauma has become an increasingly controversial topic in a number of sports in recent years, with many governing bodies changing rules and protocols to better ensure player safety.

Dr. Michael Turner, medical director of the International Concussion and Head Injury Research Foundation (ICHIRF), believes the science behind concussion is now playing catch-up to the media debate around the issue.

At least three familiar faces will pass by the away dressing-room door at Anfield on Sunday. You might call them part of the Southampton diaspora – Adam Lallana, Dejan Lovren and Nathaniel Clyne – three of six major sales who have earned the club upwards of £100?million in transfer fees over the previous two summer transfer windows.

Of all the clubs to whom Southampton have sold players since the summer of last year, it is Liverpool, their opponents, who have bought most eagerly into the great St Mary’s supply line. Around £60?million has been spent on the three aforementioned as well as Rickie Lambert and it will not go unnoticed that as things stand, Southampton are three places ahead in the Premier League on goal difference. How long can this remarkable story of player trading and player development last?

… For decades a club could not gain access to schoolboy players until they were 14, prior to that their footballing abilities belonged to the school, district and England schools teams. In 1984 clubs gained permission to coach nine to 14-year-olds one evening a week at centres of excellence. Seven years later the time restriction was eased. Regular overhauls of coach education and youth development mean an academy player should now be better trained than any of his forbears.

And yet young English players are still not being produced in sufficient numbers, so attention has turned to recruitment.

I’m convinced that the ingredient for the effective use of data and analytics that is in shortest supply is managers’ understanding of what is possible. Data, hardware, and software are available in droves, but human comprehension of the possibilities they enable is much less common. Given that problem, there is a great need for more education on this topic. And unfortunately, there aren’t a lot of other good options out there for non-quantitative managers who want to learn about analytics. MOOCs and traditional academic courses mostly focus on methods. And while there are lots of executive programs in “Accounting and Finance for Nonfinancial Managers,” there aren’t any that I know of on “Analytics for Non-Quantitative Managers.”

I have designed or taught in analytics programs for managers at Babson, Harvard, MIT, Boston University, and University College Cork, so I have some opinions about what content ought to be included. If you’re a potential consumer of programs like these, make sure the one you sign up for has the components you will read about below. Or do some targeted reading in these areas.

Background: Anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries are common and potentially career ending in the National Football League (NFL). Although statistical performance has been demonstrated after ACL reconstruction, functional performance is not well defined.

Purpose/Hypothesis: The purpose of this study was to determine the functional performance of NFL combine participants after ACL reconstruction compared with an age-, size-, and position-matched control group. The hypothesis was that there would be no difference between players after ACL reconstruction as compared with controls in functional athletic performance.

Study Design: Cohort study; Level of evidence, 3.

Methods: A total of 98 NFL-caliber athletes who had undergone primary ACL reconstruction and participated in the NFL scouting combine between 2010 and 2014 were reviewed and compared with an age-, size-, and position-matched control group. Data recorded for each player included a 40-yard dash, vertical leap, broad jump, shuttle drill, and 3-cone drill.

Results: With regard to speed and acceleration, the mean 40-yard dash time for ACL-reconstructed players was 4.74 seconds (range, 4.33-5.55 seconds) compared with controls at 4.74 seconds (range, 4.34-5.38 seconds; P = .96). Jumping performance was also similar, with a mean vertical leap for ACL-reconstructed players of 33.35 inches (range, 23-43 inches) and broad jump of 113.9 inches (range, 96-136 inches) compared with respective values for the controls of 33.22 inches (range, 23.5-43.5 inches; P = .84) and 113.9 inches (range, 92-134 inches; P = .99). Agility and quickness testing measures also did not show a statistically significantly difference, with ACL-reconstructed players performing the shuttle drill in 4.37 seconds (range, 4.02-4.84 seconds) and the 3-cone drill in 7.16 seconds (range, 6.45-8.14 seconds), respectively, compared with respective times for the controls of 4.37 seconds (range, 3.96-5.00 seconds; P = .91) and 7.18 seconds (range, 6.64-8.24 seconds; P = .75).

Conclusion: This study suggests that after ACL reconstruction, high-caliber athletes can achieve equivalent levels of performance with no statistically significant differences compared with matched controls. This information is unique when advising high-level athletes on athletic performance after ACL reconstruction, suggesting that those who fully recover and return to play appear to have no decrement in athletic performance.