Applied Sports Science newsletter – March 10, 2016

… Many players don’t need to think about regular society just yet. Others are dreading the offseason, however, now confronted with the prospect that their time in the NFL might be up. They’re good players, often just past their primes at an age when their bodies are supposedly breaking down. They will enter free agency and never hear their phone ring.

The 30-year threshold is especially cruel towards running backs, something Benson experienced, along with former Packers running back Ryan Grant.

“It’s more than just a sport to us,” Grant says. “There’s no, ‘Just get over it.’ It doesn’t work like that.”

Early in the 2012-13 season, 18-year-old Giannis Antetokounmpo landed on the radar of NBA scouts, shrouded in mystery. He didn’t attend the combine or team workouts, so he had never been extensively measured. He had played mostly in Greece’s youth system and second-tier pro league, so no one could agree on how he’d best be used in the NBA. There was only one consensus: His body was among the best scouts had ever seen.

The Bucks drafted Antetokounmpo 15th overall that year, feeling he combined big-man length with the agility of an elite guard­. Their instincts were quickly proved right: Thanks to his unique biomechanical and physiological qualities, he is one of just three players in the past decade to average 15 points, 7 rebounds, 2.5 assists and 1 block per game in his age-21 season.

To understand how Antetokounmpo’s form gives way to function, we recently spent a day measuring the 6-foot-11 forward, then asked Marcus Elliott, M.D., the founder of P3 Applied Sports Science, a training center that specializes in advanced athlete assessment, to help break him down. Welcome to our tour of the NBA’s ideal body.

Stress can have a negative influence on the human brain, but increasingly it is the ability to withstand severe stress that is the focus of research.

We aimed to explore United Kingdom professional soccer players’ (N?=?5) experiences going through a youth-to-senior career transition to first team level, and assess the immediate changes that occur during the move. Few studies have assessed this process, and no studies have focused on assessing the changes that may occur between pre- and post-transition. Data collection lasted one month with players interviewed twice, two weeks before, and two weeks after their transition to the first team. Data were abductively thematically content analysed. Prior to transition, players reported high motivation to be successful, but also feeling anxious about the transition to senior sport. Post-transition, players felt more confident about their ability to succeed in senior sport and maintained high levels of motivation to succeed. Family, friends, coaches, and teammates provided emotional, technical, and tangible support to the players throughout the transition, but were also sources of stress for athletes moving to senior sport. These findings suggest ways to assist transitioning athletes, such as the use of buddy systems with senior players.

… At the elite level of sport, the coach and/or coaching staff are usually the primary drivers of the planning of training, presumably with some level of direct or indirect input from a sport scientist or sport-science support team. The sport scientist should be using evidence-based advice to help the coach, derived most likely from a combination of experience, the results of athlete or team testing, and quality peer-reviewed information from journals like IJSPP. Junior and emerging scientists should look to be actively involved with the coach and not simply pass on the results of scientific testing without some discussion on how they might be useful for planning or making changes to the training program.

A key issue in the planning process for coaches and scientists is whether a training plan should be competition-based or training-based. Bill Sweetenham, the long-time Australian swimming coach and now consultant to coaches and sporting organizations, often poses this question to coaches and sport scientists. The answer to this question partly depends on the sport involved and/or the goal or focus of a particular phase in the season or annual plan.

You may know Charlie Batch from his 15 years in the NFL, where the 41-year-old won two Super Bowl titles with the Pittsburgh Steelers.

But what may surprise you is how Batch has transitioned from the football field to the startup world — and how he is teaming up with leading innovators to help people around the globe recover from injuries.

The former Steelers quarterback is the co-founder of Impellia, a new Pittsburgh-based startup that uses innovative research and technology to help make the rehabilitation process more efficient and effective — not just for world-class athletes, but for everyday citizens, too.

If you use a free app to map your run, track your biking or monitor your fitness activity, most likely you’re now feeding that data right into a fitness company that wants to sell you something.

… We often think first of “is there lots of data?” as the most important criteria for doing great data science work. I want to argue for a broader list that explores the processes of the team, the infrastructure that supports the team, and the boundaries between the team and the rest of the company. If you can organize those in a way that lets the team focus on the problems they own and remove friction around those problems, data scientists will excel.

This approach is inspired by Joel’s test for software engineering teams. The structure of his framework is simple. You should be able to quickly answer each question with a yes or no. More yes’s are better!

This is a baseline measure of health?—?great teams might diverge on many other dimensions. These questions are as much about the ecosystem around the team as the team itself, but in my experience data science teams are so embedded that they must be acutely concerned with their organizational environment. You can also think about this from the perspective of someone thinking about joining your team; what would you ask about a team you were thinking about joining?

… according to half a dozen experts I interviewed, ranging from industrial designer Gadi Amit to the usability guru Don Norman, in-ear assistants aren’t science fiction. They’re an imminent reality.

In fact, a notable pile of discreet, wireless earbuds enabling just this idea are coming to market now. Sony recently released its first in-ear assistant, the Xperia Ear. Intel showed off a similar proof-of-concept last year. The talking, bio-monitoring Bragi Dash will be reaching early Kickstarters soon, while fellow startup Here has raised $17 million to compete in the smart earbud space. And then there’s Apple: Reportedly, the company is eliminating the headphone jack in future iPhones and replacing it with a pair of wireless Beats. “People have no idea how close we are to Her,” says Mark Stephen Meadows, founder of the conversational interface firm Botanic.io.

But to reach the husky “pherotones” of Scarlett Johansson, we have considerable cultural, ergonomic, and technological design problems to solve first.

Statsports develops wearable GPS equipment and performance analysis systems for top-level teams in soccer, rugby, American football, basketball and athletics. Now based in Newry, Co Down, the company employs 30 people across offices in Dublin, London, Chicago and Florida. Seán O’Connor is co-founder and chief operating officer.

What sets you apart in your sector?

It is getting more competitive every year as different people come out with their take on the technology. It means we have to keep putting money and resources into R&D so we’re always able to offer our current and future clients the best and most advanced technology.

… Every general manager in the NFL will tell you the medical exam is the most critical piece of information gathered on a prospect at the NFL Combine. When you’re investing millions of dollars in players you want to know whether they’re fit to play at the pro level, how long they could play and anything that might stand in the way of a long and successful career.

That’s why every NFL club invests a sizable amount of expertise and resources to gather as much medical information on each of the 300-plus players invited to the NFL Combine.

“For us we come with five doctors and five athletic trainers so obviously we’re doing stuff in depth both orthopedically and medically,” said [Bud] Carpenter.

Not long after he decided to conclude his 19-year playing career, Jason Kidd faced his first post-basketball dilemma. Kidd, who had yet to coach in any capacity, much less the NBA, could either get a head start on his next profession or undergo surgery to repair the hip injury that forced him to retire.

Given his history of playing with and through injuries as a player, Kidd’s next move was hardly surprising. He became head coach of the Brooklyn Nets with only a summer to spare before he took to the sidelines. But after three seasons coaching the Nets and Bucks, Kidd could no longer ignore the pain. A player once known for his grace and speed, Kidd had no cartilage around his hip and walked with a limp. He knew it was finally time to take action.

“I just couldn’t take the pain going into this season so we had to make a decision,” Kidd said. “It’s never a good decision to have surgery, so we tried to have it as soon as possible so it didn’t affect where I would miss a lot of games. It’s been since 2011, so to have a 25-year-old hip now feels great.”

Objective: The aim of this study is to investigate if changes in perceived stress and recovery over the course of a season are risk factors for acute and overuse injuries.

Design: A prospective nonexperimental cohort design.

Setting: Data were gathered at the SportsFieldLab Groningen and at the facilities of the participating teams.

Participants: Eighty-six male and female basketball, volleyball, and korfball players aged 21.9 +/- 3.5 years.

Interventions: In this 10-month observational study, the independent variables are the changes in perceived stress and recovery.

Main Outcome Measures: The Recovery-Stress Questionnaire for Athletes (RESTQ-Sport) was filled out every 3 weeks throughout the season to assess changes in perceived stress and recovery. Acute and overuse injuries were registered by the teams’ physical therapists. Odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals were calculated.

Results: During one season, 66 acute and 62 overuse injuries were registered. Multinomial regression analysis showed that perceived General Recovery, shown in the scales Social Recovery and General Well-Being, decreased in the 6-week period before an acute injury (OR 0.59 and 0.61, respectively, P <= 0.05) compared with healthy periods. Risk of overuse injuries increased when perceived Sport Recovery, shown in the Personal Accomplishment scale, decreased in the 3-week period before the injury (OR 0.59, P <= 0.05) compared with healthy periods.

Conclusions: Therefore, decreased perceived recovery can indicate an increased injury risk. General Recovery affects acute injury risk and Sport Recovery affects the risk of an overuse injury. Monitoring perceived recovery over the course of a season could give guidance for recovery enhancing practices to prevent injuries.

In 2014, the NCAA ruled that colleges are allowed to give student-athletes unlimited meals and snacks. As a result of the rule change, universities are now playing a bigger role in what their athletes in all sports—including cross country and track—are eating.

The policy, according to NCAA.org, applies to walk-ons as well as scholarship athletes and was “an effort to meet the nutritional needs of all student-athletes.”

Now, more than a year after the rule has taken effect, athletic departments are working with sports dietitians to develop new ways to get healthy foods into runners. Here’s a look at some of the foods being provided to runners in top Division I programs and the common nutritional problems among runners that dietitians are trying to solve.

Team-based invasion sports such as football, basketball and hockey are similar in the sense that the players are able to move freely around the playing area; and that player and team performance cannot be fully analysed without considering the movements and interactions of all players as a group. State of the art object tracking systems now produce spatio-temporal traces of player trajectories with high definition and high frequency, and this, in turn, has facilitated a variety of research efforts, across many disciplines, to extract insight from the trajectories. We survey recent research efforts that use spatio-temporal data from team sports as input, and involve non-trivial computation. This article categorises the research efforts in a coherent framework and identifies a number of open research questions.