Applied Sports Science newsletter – May 3, 2016

… After she won over millions of fans with her five Olympic medals in 2012, her fondness for dancing to Justin Bieber and her electric smile, the then-17-year-old Franklin decided to maintain her amateur status to go to college. She spent two years at Cal, winning four individual NCAA titles, before turning pro last summer. She has spent the past year and will spend the coming months training for Rio at home in Colorado with coach Todd Schmitz, who trained her before London, too. No more college classes or finals to worry about.

“It’s definitely a different atmosphere,” Franklin said in mid-April. “It’s been a different kind of juggling. I think the atmosphere that I’m in right now is exactly the atmosphere that I need to be in. I think for the past two years, being part of a college atmosphere, being with (Cal coach) Teri (McKeever), being with Cal, that was exactly what I wanted. That was exactly what I needed. Now this year it’s all a little bit more individual-(focused).”

… Are you proud to be a footballer from the streets?

The streets, for me, was about dribbling, dribbling, attempting to score on your own. When I arrived at the professional level, I learnt nothing about dribbling. I knew how to do it all. At professional level, I worked on my physicality to eliminate opponents, to make the difference. A bit at Quimper, in the CFA, but certainly at Le Havre after that. It was there where I went to another level.

Every Thursday afternoon, we would tone our abs. Plus another hour of body conditioning. That hardened me. Tactically, I was not very good either. I stayed upfront and I waited for the ball. In the street, there is no offside. Érick Mombaerts really made me work on that. A great developer of talent. Before, I never came deep, I never re-positioned myself. I wanted the ball at my feet so that I could dribble.

Background: Early sport specialization is not a requirement for success at the highest levels of competition and is believed to be unhealthy physically and mentally for young athletes. It also discourages unstructured free play, which has many benefits.

Purpose: To review the available evidence on early sports specialization and identify areas where scientific data are lacking.

Study Design: Think tank, roundtable discussion.

Results: The primary outcome of this think tank was that there is no evidence that young children will benefit from early sport specialization in the majority of sports. They are subject to overuse injury and burnout from concentrated activity. Early multisport participation will not deter young athletes from long-term competitive athletic success.

Conclusion: Youth advocates, parents, clinicians, and coaches need to work together with the sport governing bodies to ensure healthy environments for play and competition that do not create long-term health issues yet support athletic competition at the highest level desired.

Early specialisation is characterised by formal participation in a single sport at the exclusion of others. Limited data are available to support this approach in the development of soccer players who attain elite status later in life. Of growing concern is the associated increased risk of injury and suggestions that single sport specialisation is a risk factor independent of age, growth, biological maturation and training volumes. In the United Kingdom, elite soccer organisations have recently adopted an early sport specialisation approach following the introduction of the Elite Player Performance Plan. A key tenet of this programme is increased opportunities for training through a marked rise in the specified on-pitch hours per week. The accumulation of high training hours may be less of a relevant marker for success, and the impact of such a significant increase in training volume for young athletes who are experiencing a range of growth and maturational processes is currently unknown. This critical commentary includes an evidence-based discussion of the effectiveness of early sport specialisation and the potential injury risks associated with such programmes placing a specific focus on elite male youth soccer players. Available data indicate that modifications to the existing Elite Player Performance Plan framework could enhance players’ development and reduce injury risk. Proposed alterations include reduced volume of soccer-specific training at key stages of growth and maturation and guidelines for the provision of a greater variety of physical activities that are integrated within other programme components.

The developmental environment of youth sport is ever changing. Our coaching methods, our curriculum and learning environment (The Learning Space) need to not only be adapted for the development of the individual over time but in some way must respond to the ever accelerating changes in our world, social structures and immediate environment. Many models are developed on the assumption that they can predict and control future out-comes when clearly it is not possible to do this just by knowing the existing conditions. Early “ability” that is identified as talent and used as an indicator of future ability and performance is a common example of this erroneous assumption.

A quiet revolution is taking place in Sweden. The Swedish FA has reformed child and youth coach education. They have translated both national and international evidence based findings into guidelines for coaches and coach educators. The emphasis is on the young person, their perspective, their learning, development and needs. A common problem when presenting evidence based material is that the academic language is not appropriate for the dissemination of information. The language used in the new coach education curriculum ensures that the content is accessible for coaches, parents and coach educators.

The Asian Football Confederation (AFC) has reaffirmed its commitment to prepare the continent’s brightest talents for future success as the AFC Elite Youth Panel concluded its first meeting in Kuala Lumpur on Tuesday.

Youth football and technical specialists met to examine the current state of youth football development and discuss ways to support and promote the future of elite youth pathways in Asia through progressive coach education and enlightened player development.

Following a six-month application process, 34 clubs and centres will deliver coaching and education to the best young female footballers in the country, on three-year licences.

The clubs have been grouped into three tiers, dependent on their facilities, workforce, coach and player development, performance service provision and the number of age groups they will work with. The clubs will also have FA funding aligned to their tier, which they are required to match fund a percentage of, and increased FA support.

Resident positive psychology expert, Lara Mossman discusses how to create positive sports environments for developing players. In this challenging article Lara discusses what role coaches can play in trying to apply positive psychology to their approach and whether traditional coach education has done enough to arm coaches with the right skills to do so.

Research Question(s): Talent selection is a stepping stone to sporting success at national and international levels. The research questions that guided this study were: (a) What is the decision-making (DM) process that coaches (as key selectors) use during talent selection? and (b) In what ways does awareness of the relative age effect (RAE) influence their DM?
Research Methods: This study employed an action research approach in order to raise coach awareness of RAE on talent selection to examine the decisions surrounding selection of players. From a sample of 263 male football (soccer) players (age range 12–15) and 4 coaches, qualitative and quantitative data were collected on coach decisions for selection of players and frequencies of selected players in birth-months. Secondary data were also gathered from previous year’s selections.
Results and Findings: Logistic regression showed that coaches’ awareness of RAE did not eliminate nor reduce it. In-depth interviews revealed that coaches’ DM was influenced by preconceptions and various pressures to select certain players. Pressures resonated within the volatile nature of their profession and career goals, the existence of competing decision-makers such as peers and parents, and the tension to select players for immediate success.
Implications: The results lead to the consideration of various practical recommendations on coach organisation, coach education and alternative interventions in DM such as an alternative staged approach to talent selection that lends itself open for future research.

Currently, there are over 40 million youth ages 5-18 who participate in organized sport.1 Sports are one of the primary ways that children and adolescents engage in physical activity. However, with sports also come the risk of injury, which can lead to acute and long-term issues, as well as potential decreases in physical activity due to restraints from the injury or fear of re-injury2-4 Recent focus on safety and prevention of injuries, specifically traumatic brain injury (TBI), has shifted to implicating the “culture of sport” as one of the primary contributors to injuries and patterns that may reduce safety in youth sport. However, little data exists to provide the perceptions and norms that contribute to this culture. Coaches are often the main focus of this discussion due to their unique and influential relationship with young athletes. Coaches are also often the leaders in creating the culture of a team and the environment of play.5-7 Despite preliminary work inclusive of coaches’ knowledge about concussion, no studies have examined coaches’ perceptions of sport culture and its relationship to safety and injury in sport. Broadly, this study serves as the initial framework in understanding perceptions of sport culture and its influence on injury prevention and safety.

… I have been building self-directed learning time into my sessions for a while now and have found it to be really effective at whatever level I do it.

Although it isn’t without it’s challenges…

In my hockey talent academy the kids seem to be so unused to not being told what to do that having the opportunity to explore and work on things that are not given to them is totally alien. This has meant that some of them struggle initially but then they start to embrace it and begin to really thrive.

Harrison Heffley played nearly every sport that caught his interest during junior high and high school, from his dominant trade of baseball to basketball, football and even golf.

Over the years, the senior from nearby Rogers has seen and felt pressure from coaches for athletes to take part in year-round, single-sport training just to earn playing time at the varsity level. He has watched friends and opponents train outside school and hit the road with their travel teams, chewing up weekends for months at a time. The hard-throwing left-handed pitcher wasn’t immune from this kind of effort, either, scheduling baseball workouts each week while playing other sports and often throwing late into the night at his school’s indoor facility.

Luckily for Heffley, the message he received from his father has always been to have fun and play as many sports as he could.

A group of University of Maryland (UMD) researchers has developed an algorithm that can not only detect a face, but also simultaneously determine the gender and pose, and extract fiducial, or reference, points.

The Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) has provided funding and support for the invention, which has been dubbed HyperFace. The algorithm simultaneously detects faces; finds facial landmarks, including eye center, nose tip, etc.; estimates the head pose; and recognizes the person’s gender from any real-world images and videos, Rama Chellappa, UMD chair of electrical and computer engineering, said in a written announcement.

The team’s inspiration for this technology is deeply rooted in the brain’s ability to analyze features, landmarks and emotions of a human face all at once. While some social media platforms can recognize and tag faces, HyperFace goes far beyond those capabilities, and the implications for the future are far-reaching, the researchers say.

Most fitness trackers are all about numbers. How many steps did you take? How many flights of stairs did you climb? How many projected calories did you burn?

But there is one number (an important one, if you’re a health nut) that is left out of almost every fitness tracker on the market: BMI.

The InBody Band, made by a South Korean company that makes professional-scale body composition tools, is one of the first trackers for the consumer market that will tell you about the makeup of your body.

What’s the biggest challenge for distance runners? I think it’s the challenge to stay injury free. So often we self-diagnose injuries and recovery in a rush to stay on plan. Many injuries don’t have a simple diagnosis and may be the result of many factors including muscle imbalance or another physiologic root cause. Mis-diagnosis is common when evaluation is completed by someone who is unqualified. The good news is that I have a solution.

This case study shows how a full biomechanical and physical review with my physical therapist lead to corrective actions that healed my injuries and improved my quality of life.