Applied Sports Science newsletter – October 28, 2015

Hoffenheim have appointed 28-year-old Julian Nagelsmann, who has yet to pass his senior coaching examinations, as their manager from next season, which will make him the youngest ever Bundesliga head coach. … “We know this is a courageous step but we see in him [Nagelsmann] such a huge coaching talent that we want to give him a prospect,” said the Hoffenheim sports director, Alexander Rosen, who confirmed Nagelsmann had been given a three-year deal.

When LeBron James was a rookie and a spring-legged 18-year-old, he didn’t always tape his ankles when playing. After games, he was often out of the locker room and into the night within a few minutes. Pizza and Fruity Pebbles were cornerstones of his diet.

That version of James wouldn’t recognize the modern incarnation. James’ life off the basketball floor these days is an endless journey of body maintenance and injury prevention, from massages to expansive stretching routines to high-tech recovery devices that use liquid nitrogen. He goes on sugar-free diets and after games more routinely eats sushi and guzzles recovery drinks. But that is only after going through a standard long ice down of his ankles, knees and back.

James’ metamorphosis in this area was born out of a combination of necessity and foresight.

Arsenal’s match with Sheffield Wednesday in the Capital One Cup on Tuesday should give Arsene Wenger the chance to give some tired legs a rest and make full use of his squad. Wenger’s men have been rightly praised in recent weeks following some fine victories but overexertion remains a worry.

It’s impossible to predict the next NBA champion with any reasonable degree of certainty. That’s because a title requires an extraordinary run of health—and how that happens has become a leaguewide obsession.

NBA teams usually focus on who’s on their roster at the start of the season. Now more than ever, though, they’re concentrating on who’s still playing at the end of the season. That shift has sent them scrambling to answer the same basic question: Why are there so many injuries in today’s NBA?

“One of the guys on our medical team said if he could answer that question he’d be driving a Ferrari,” said Milwaukee Bucks general manager John Hammond.

… Trust is an essential part of every athlete-coach relationship. Unfortunately, its significance is often overlooked. When trust is poorly understood, or executed, it leads to a breakdown in communication when it really matters.

How many coaches simply assume their athletes trust them?

… When the dialogue on any subject matter is largely anecdotal and there is little agreement on the cause of the ill-fated condition, then it is a safe bet that the performance culture of the sport is relatively immature. Moreover, when this verbiage is emanating from insiders and influencers of the sport, then it is reflective of a much deeper problem: Our sport is full of ‘experts’ but shallow on expertise. Given this condition, consistency is elusive and programs tend to oscillate from one performance model to another in a fruitless search for results.

So what is the answer? In the case of the sprint themes named above, the answer rests in embracing expertise. The answers to many of the themes listed are clearly known in both research and high performing environments.

… First thing is first, chances are if you’re reading this, you at least know the purpose and use of GPS in sports, even if you haven’t had a chance to use it. Second, as from this moment on, I will never refer to it as “GPS”. Never liked it, but of course I understand its popularity compared to “GNSS” (Global Navigation Satellite System, rather than the American-based “Global Positioning System). However my dislike is due to the increase in accelerometer data importance and other motion-sensor data becoming almost as equally important as the navigation data. So what’s the best term? Personally, I prefer the official FIFA terminology of EPTS (Electronic Performance & Tracking Systems). I mean, who’s to say we’ll even be using GNSS in 10 years’ time? Better to use a more generic term.

In the last few years, the popularity of EPTSs has increased substantially. As the money flowing into sports (read: Football) increases along with product price decreasing, its use has spread initially from the domain of AFL and the elite of football, now to the lower leagues of team sports. Which is great of course. Systems built for the rich can now be used by the poor (figuratively speaking of course).

Paris native Benjamin Carlier worked for the Sports Minister of the French government from 2012-2014, when he then moved over to work for Paris’ economic development and innovation agency, Paris&Co. Around that time Paris mayor Anne Hidalgo asked Paris&Co to create an initiative with the goal in mind of making Paris the leading city for the sports economy. With this intrepid goal stated, Le Tremplin was founded and Benjamin was asked to take the lead on it.

Benjamin was kind enough to host me for a day at the incubator in the north part of Paris, where I immediately spotted their office demarked by sticky notes on the windows visible from the street. Roughly translated as springboard or bridge, Le Tremplin’s number one initiative is to “create partnerships with the Olympics, media, sponsors, IT, health and to do so geographically” for its startups according to Benjamin.

… Somewhere in the foothills of Oregon’s Cascade Mountains, an astrophysicist and his son are working, with the backing of an outspoken billionaire, to bring us just such a glimpse. Armed only with a camera, a laptop and their custom code, they’re working on a system that calls a 3-pointer a swish or a brick, a volleyball serve in or out, a soccer shot over the bar or in the goal, all before the ball completes its flight. If the system works — and that’s a big “if” — it would be equivalent to a minor superpower: flash precognition. The sports fan would become, if only for a second or two, a superhero.

And the system is almost done. This, right here, could be the future of sports.

Automatically describing the content of an image is a fundamental problem in artificial intelligence that connects computer vision and natural language processing. Recent advances are starting to enable machines to describe image with sentences. This experiment uses neural networks to automatically describe the content of videos.

Running is a bit of an interesting topic in our current sports medicine environment. It wasn’t that long ago that running for cardiovascular fitness was considered a pillar of physical fitness. As the fitness industry has changed, running has been looked upon by some as almost a dirty word stating, “steady state cardio training is dead.” Some in the corrective exercise specialty area of the sports medicine field have made the bold proclamation that no one should ever run until they can score a certain score on the FMS or some other standardized test because they are causing harm to their bodies by doing so.

YOUNG ATHLETES PARTICIPATING IN HIGH-INTENSITY SPORT DISPLAY AN INHERENT RISK OF SPORTS-RELATED INJURY, AND THIS IS HEIGHTENED AT VARIOUS STAGES OF GROWTH AND MATURATION. RECENT TRENDS HAVE HIGHLIGHTED A RANGE OF INJURY RISK FACTORS AND THE IMPORTANCE OF INJURY PREVENTION STRATEGIES WITHIN FEMALE SOCCER PLAYERS. HOWEVER, THERE IS A PAUCITY OF INFORMATION PERTAINING TO MALE YOUTH PLAYERS. THIS ARTICLE PROVIDES AN OVERVIEW OF THE AVAILABLE LITERATURE AND OUTLINES A RANGE OF RISK FACTORS THAT MAY INCREASE RELATIVE RISK OF INJURY IN MALE YOUTH SOCCER PLAYERS, INCLUDING GROWTH AND MATURATION, MOVEMENT SKILL, FATIGUE, AND PREVIOUS INJURY.

When marketing researchers at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School rigged shopping carts at a major East Coast supermarket with motion-tracking radio-frequency tags, they unwittingly stumbled on a metaphor for our path through the aisles of life.

Route data from more than 1,000 shoppers, matched to their purchases at checkout, revealed a clear pattern: Drop a bunch of kale into your cart and you’re more likely to head next to the ice cream or beer section. The more “virtuous” products you have in your basket, the stronger your temptation to succumb to vice.

Such hedonic balancing acts are neither unpredictable — who, after all, hasn’t rewarded themselves with a piece of cake or an extra beer after a killer workout? — nor inherently bad. But an emerging body of research into what psychologists call the “licensing effect” suggests that this tit-for-tat tendency is deeply wired in us, operating even when we’re not aware of it.

… Ever wonder why Joe Maddon is one of the best modern managers? It’s not because he’s a statistical genius, or not just because he’s a statistical genius. It’s because he’s one of the few managers to take a hands on approach to applying modern analytics in an industry driven by ego, money, and short-term results-oriented thinking.

Some people see his clubhouse stunts—like having bizarre dress codes for travel days—as gimmicks or stunts. But fostering team unity, shaping personal motivators, and reserving pools of money for spot bonuses and morale building events have been part of the naturalized workplace for years—and they work.