Applied Sports Science newsletter – November 20, 2015

It’s difficult to convey how human-sized Stephen Curry is. How unexceptionally scaled they made his body, how modestly shaped the wake is when he moves through space. It is for these reasons, mostly, that he has been serially underrated all his life—as a middle schooler who was the third-smallest kid on a team that included his little brother; as a high schooler who failed to get a scholarship even from his NBA father’s alma mater (they offered him a walk-on spot); as a college kid who looked barely old enough for double-digit birthday candles and yet led little Davidson (the Steph Curry of college basketball) to the Elite Eight; and as an NBA draftee whom the league never really expected to earn more than fifth- or sixth-man minutes. This composite of underratedness is also, Curry suggests, why basketball fans like him so, so much.

“I’m them,” he says. “I can’t jump the highest. I’m obviously not the biggest, not the strongest. And so they see me out there and I look like a normal person. Look at those guys over there, man,” he says, gesturing to two beefy white dudes in high-tops and tanks, chucking up threes at the opposite end of this bough-shaded court in downtown Charlotte, North Carolina. They’ve been baiting Steph all afternoon, looking for a game of H-O-R-S-E. Steph waves them off, but his dad, Dell, can’t help himself—and so is down there failing to miss. “Those guys,” he says, “have probably taken a hundred shots. They can sit out there all day shooting. You can’t teach them how to tomahawk dunk, but you could probably teach them how to shoot. And for fans, there’ll just always be a personal attachment to the shooting part of the game.”

Forget the Sports Illustrated and Madden cover jinxes, the wife of former Rockets coach Kevin McHale says there is another curse taking the sports world by storm.

“Yes, the @KardashianCurse is real. #WhoIsNext?” Lynn McHale tweeted from her account Thursday afternoon, one day after her husband was fired by the Rockets following a dreadful 4-7 start.

Gazing across a windswept field, FC Dallas technical director Fernando Clavijo wonders if the rest of American soccer will notice what he sees running on the grass before him.

“This is it!” he shouts. “This is the future of soccer in the US!”

But does anybody hear?

His team is in the MLS’s Western Conference Finals against Portland by doing what the rest of the league and the US national team both seem reluctant to do: build around a core of local players developed themselves in their own youth academy.

Michael Beale has had the privilege of coaching some of the best young talent in England from the very beginning of their developmental journey. A UEFA A license holder with 10 years experience at Chelsea FC before making the move to Liverpool FC where he now manages the U21s, Michael gives us an in depth insight into player development at the highest level. We discuss his philosophy and seek his advice for developing coaches at all levels to create the best learning environments for your players.

Mark Saggers was joined by journalist Matthew Syed for a Kick Off: Psychology in sport special, as the latter discussed his latest book about high performance – Black Box Thinking: Why Most People Never Learn.

Former performance director of British Cycling, and current general manager of Team Sky, Sir Dave Brailsford, joined them on the phone to discuss elite athletes and high performance cultures and talent management.

They were also joined by performance psychologist Tom Bates, who has worked with various football clubs and GB athletes to help maximise performance under pressure. [audio, 78:49]

Consider two very different basketball players. The Los Angeles Clippers star DeAndre Jordan, one of the strongest, quickest players in the NBA, nevertheless made only 39 percent of his free throws last year. Then there’s his teammate, Jamal Crawford—not as fast or as strong as Jordan, but he makes 90 percent of the shots he takes from the foul line, a rate that’s among the best in the league.

What makes one player a stellar shooter, while another has more trouble making a basket? As Jordan demonstrates, it’s not just a question of sheer athleticism. The difference between athletes like him and athletes like Crawford may well come down to a concept known as “quiet eye”: a new way of understanding how people perform precise motor-skill tasks like shooting a basketball, flying a jet, or removing a brain tumor.

Until recently, most researchers viewed these skills in terms of coordination and reflex, believing that those who were better at making a free-throw or suturing a wound simply had had superior physical dexterity. But in the past few years, a small group of neuroscientists have identified a new way of understanding coordination, one that focuses on visual and cognitive skills over physical prowess.

The advanced youth award (AYA) is the only qualification of its kind and seen 110 academy coaches flock to St George’s Park with the aim of creating better and more balanced young talent

After testing all the pieces of a tiny pill-size device, Albert Swiston sent it on a unique journey: through the guts of six live Yorkshire pigs.

Pig bodies are a lot like human bodies, and Swiston wanted to know whether the device would be able to monitor vital signs from inside a body. It did.

It’s the latest in a small but growing group of devices that soldiers, athletes, astronauts and colonoscopy patients have gulped to collect information from odd recesses of the body. Swiston calls them “ingestibles.”

We can easily be left behind by the explosion in technological developments in medicine—or is it just a sign of getting older? Many of us will remember a time before MRI were readily available, and having to learn what fat suppressed images, T1s and T2s actually meant.

Genomics is another example of a rapidly expanding technological development with major implications for medicine, and even experienced clinicians (many without formal training in molecular biology) are struggling to understand this. It requires learning a whole new language. The sequencing of the 3.2 billion nucleotides that compose the human genome was first completed only in 2003, at an estimated cost of $2.7 billion. At the time, it was simply something of interest, unlikely to influence our working lives any time soon. Now, in just over a decade, it is possible to sequence the whole genome for $1000.

Over the last 2+ years, my team here at Volt has been dedicated to delivering awesome strength training to athletes worldwide. In doing so, we have received a lot of great feedback from our Volt Family of strength coaches, sport coaches, athletes, athletic trainers, administrators, and more. We listened to your comments, your complaints, and your suggestions. And we took action. For the last year, while teams have been winning championships while training on our original Volt platform, our rock-star team of software developers has been working behind the scenes to construct the V2 Platform: a much-anticipated, groundbreaking technology that continues to push the limits of what digital training systems can be. The result is a simple and beautiful user interface, brand-new platform functionality and unprecedented customization features—all backed by the same solid strength and conditioning expertise you’ve come to expect from Volt. We are proud to introduce you, our Volt Family, to next big thing in sport performance technology: the Volt V2 Platform.

Return to play After ACL Reconstruction : train the brain as well as the muscles Presented by Clare Louise Ardern.

Background: Previous studies examining nondisclosure among athletes in various settings have found substantial proportions of athletes with undisclosed concussions. Substantial gaps exist in our understanding of the factors influencing athletes’ disclosure of sports-related concussions.

Purpose: To examine the prevalence of, and factors associated with, nondisclosure of recalled concussions in former collegiate athletes.

Study Design: Cross-sectional study; Level of evidence, 3.

Methods: Former collegiate athletes (N = 797) completed an online questionnaire. Respondents recalled self-identified sports-related concussions (SISRCs) that they sustained while playing sports in high school, college, or professionally, and whether they disclosed these SISRCs to others. Respondents also recalled motivations for nondisclosure. The prevalence of nondisclosure was calculated among those who recalled SISRCs. Multivariate binomial regression estimated adjusted prevalence ratios (PRs) with 95% CIs, controlling for sex, level of contact in sports, and year the athletes began playing collegiate sports.

Results: A total of 214 respondents (26.9%) reported sustaining at least 1 SISRC. Of these, 71 (33.2%) reported not disclosing at least 1 SISRC. Former football athletes were most likely to report nondisclosure (68.3% of those recalling SISRCs); female athletes who participated in low/noncontact sports were the least likely to report nondisclosure (11.1% of those recalling SISRC). The prevalence of nondisclosure was higher among men than women in the univariate analysis (PR, 2.88; 95% CI, 1.62-5.14), multivariate analysis (PR, 2.11; 95% CI, 1.13-3.96), and multivariate analysis excluding former football athletes (PR, 2.11; 95% CI, 1.12-3.94). The most commonly reported motivations were as follows: did not want to leave the game/practice (78.9%), did not want to let the team down (71.8%), did not know it was a concussion (70.4%), and did not think it was serious enough (70.4%).

Conclusion: Consistent with previous studies, a substantial proportion of former athletes recalled SISRCs that were not disclosed. Male athletes were less likely to disclose all of their SISRCs than female athletes.

Arsene Wenger has called for there to be mandatory blood testing on all players after every match and is adamant that clubs, as well as individual players, must be sanctioned for positive results.

Watching our HD TV images over this winter football period, one thing will be very clear to the viewer. The muddy centre circles, goalkeeper boxes and icy stitching along the touch lines have all but disappeared from the game. The players, managers and fans are now treated to manicured playing surfaces akin to Wimbledon or Augusta National Golf Club. The game is thus much faster and encourages a style of play very different to the third?round FA Cup games of yesteryear.

There is no debate that these pitches have improved the quality and beauty of the game, but what is the physical impact on the players? This week Roy Hodgson, the England coach, has accused these pitches of being a “snake in the grass”. For many, pitches are becoming a common villain in the player injury story.

What was performance analysis like in Pat Lam’s playing days? “We’d probably just sit in the bar talking about the game,” the Connacht coach told an RDS audience earlier this month. “It started to be introduced once we hit professionalism but it was nowhere near as detailed as it is now.”

Last summer the LA Lakers hired a liaison to sit between their analysts and coaching staff. To manage the pipeline of ideas, apparently. One could view such an appointment in a number of ways – were the analysts generating so many bursts of number-driven genius that the coaching staff were overwhelmed? Or did the coaching staff need somebody to sit between the two, translating numbers into coach-speak?

Whatever one’s view, there is one core truth: all the analysis in the world isn’t worth a damn if it doesn’t get translated into something useful on the pitch, the training paddock or player scouting.