Applied Sports Science newsletter – May 4, 2016

… “Our scouts were very high on him,” Fraser said, recalling the earliest days of the talented Finnish goalie, now 32 years old. “He came with real high grades on everything. He could do it all. Talented goaltender. Great skill, moves well. Big size. He had it all.”

His path to this point in his career in Dallas has been well chronicled — the inconsistencies in Atlanta, the inability to stay healthy, the questions about his physical fitness and commitment to taking care of his body off the ice. And perhaps the concern that is most pertinent now, which was whether he had the mental makeup to be a great playoff goaltender.

Here’s the thing about Kari Lehtonen: He’s really smart. He’s a guy who analyzes everything and often has a unique perspective on whatever it is he’s thinking about.

Lakers forward Metta World Peace—the once-tenacious defender formerly known as Ron Artest—has been working as an advocate to raise awareness for mental health issues for many years now.

World Peace has openly documented many of his own struggles, and in his latest project to bring more attention to the topic, the former All-Star teamed with his longtime friend and fellow Queensbridge product Chamique Holdsclaw for the documentary Mind/Game: The Unquiet Journey Of Chamique Holdsclaw. The film follows Holdsclaw and the obstacles she faced as a player clinically diagnosed with depression and bipolar disorder.

World Peace appears in the documentary, which airs Tuesday at 9 p.m. on Logo TV, to discuss his own experiences. World Peace chatted with SI.com about mental health issues in sports, his childhood and much more.

Success is a topic of enduring fascination for most people, but especially psychologist Angela Duckworth. The ex-McKinsey consultant, school teacher and Harvard, Oxford and University of Pennsylvania alum is an expert in the qualities of successful people. In her new book Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, she shares her decade of research on the topic, and finds that “genius” is not a requirement; what’s more important is your “grit,” or perseverance in the face of setbacks. We chatted with her about the myth of talent, how to build resilience and ways to become grittier:

How do you define grit?

I define grit as perseverance and passion for long-term goals. Perseverance is about stamina in your effort, where you are really trying to do something hard, day in and day out, despite setbacks. Passion is about stamina in your interest and being committed to something and staying interested in it over a long time.

Picture yourself in this scenario: you are playing in one of the most important games of your athletic career and you just can’t seem to do anything right. Your footwork is sluggish, your body is tense, and your focus is fading. Each mistake is merely fueling your frustration. Stress, regardless of where it stems from, can have a direct impact on how an athlete performs on the field. More importantly, it can interfere with our ability to perform routine tasks such as interacting with others, focusing in school or at work, sleeping, eating, and maintaining overall health.

This study investigated the changes in measures of neuromuscular fatigue and physical performance in young professional rugby union players during a preseason training period. Fourteen young (age: 19.1?±?1.2 years) professional rugby union players participated in the study. Changes in measures of lower body neuromuscular fatigue (countermovement jump (CMJ) mean power, mean force, flight-time) and physical performance (lower body strength, 40?m sprint velocity) were assessed during an 11-week preseason period using magnitude-based inferences. CMJ mean power was likely to very likely decreased during week 2 (?8.1?±?5.5% to ?12.5?±?6.8%), and likely to almost certainly decreased from weeks 5 to 11 (?10?±?4.3% to ?14.7?±?6.9%), while CMJ flight-time demonstrated likely to very likely decreases during weeks 2, and weeks 4–6 (?2.41?±?1% to ?3.3?±?1.3%), and weeks 9–10 (?1.9?±?0.9% to ?2.2?±?1.5%). Despite this, possible improvements in lower body strength (5.8?±?2.7%) and very likely improvements in 40?m velocity (5.5?±?3.6%) were made. Relationships between changes in CMJ metrics and lower body strength or 40?m sprint velocity were trivial or small (<0.22). Increases in lower body strength and 40?m velocity occurred over the course of an 11-week preseason despite the presence of neuromuscular fatigue (as measured by CMJ). The findings of this study question the usefulness of CMJ for monitoring fatigue in the context of strength and sprint velocity development. Future research is needed to ascertain the consequences of negative changes in CMJ in the context of rugby-specific activities to determine the usefulness of this test as a measure of fatigue in this population.

… Ahead of the NBA Combine, Maker has been training with Drew Hanlen, a guy whose roster includes Andrew Wiggins, Karl-Anthony Towns and Bradley Beal, to bring his game up to speed as quickly as possible. Hanlen first met Maker two years ago, when he was asked by Maker’s guardian to train him briefly while Maker was going on college visits.

STACK caught up with Hanlen at his training compound in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, where Maker has been working out, to find out how things are going.

The Arsenal SEMS Conference “Marginal Gains in Sports Medicine” provided deep insight into attaining and maintaining the highest level of sporting performance in professional athletes. As the elite athletic population becomes more homogenous, the value of “marginal gains” in achieving podium finishes and championship titles is more important than ever.

Below are our takeaway points focusing on Load, Injuries and Determination; we hope they provide a competitive edge to your practice!

Share on Facebook
Share on Twitter
Share on LinkedIn
Share on Reddit
Share on Google+
E-mail

Fitbit Inc. won over Wall Street with a series of hit fitness trackers. Now, with competition intensifying and new products selling less briskly than expected, investors are clamoring for a next act.

Fitbit’s answer is turn itself into a “digital health company” that relies less on consumers. Having introduced a heart-monitoring bracelet last year, the company eventually wants to sell a range of clinical technology to the health-care industry.

The strategy has merit since it would dramatically broaden Fitbit’s market beyond fitness enthusiasts. But counting a runner’s paces is relatively simple: tracking someone’s vital signs is far more fraught.

The FDA declined to approve what would have been the first mass market drug to incorporate Proteus Digital Health’s ingestible sensor. The drug, a collaboration between Proteus and Otsuka Pharmaceuticals, combines the Proteus system with the antipsychotic pharmaceutical Abilify.

“While we are disappointed in the FDA’s decision not to approve this digital medicine at this time, both Otsuka and Proteus are committed to working with the FDA to address its questions and provide the additional data that has been requested,” Robert McQuade, executive vice president and chief strategy officer, Otsuka Pharmaceutical Development & Commercialization, said in a statement. “We believe in the potential of this product to help people with serious mental illness manage their daily medication, which remains a serious unmet need.”

Players skilled enough to reach the professional level are often lauded for their relentless work rates. But that truism has a flip side: Many of soccer’s elite performers rest far more each day than their fellow humans, a lesson the Seattle Sounders try to drive home to their squad whenever possible.

Using high-tech wristwatches that track sleep patterns, Seattle’s highly-respected sports scientists have spent significant amounts of time and money to track their players’ rest habits over two- to three-week periods during various stages of the season.

“We wanted to show players how they have been sleeping and if they can get some help,” Sounders performance analyst Ravi Ramineni told MLSsoccer.com. “Sleep is the best recovery tool, and if you get seven nights of good sleep every week, your chance of getting injured is less. You probably are going to be in better shape, physically and mentally, to play.”

Helmy Eltoukhy’s company is on a roll. The start-up is a leading contender in the crowded field of firms working on “liquid biopsy” tests that aim to be able to tell in a single blood draw whether a person has cancer.

Venture investors are backing Guardant Health to the tune of nearly $200 million. Leading medical centers are testing its technology. And earlier this month, it presented promising data on how well its screening tool, which works by scanning for tiny DNA fragments shed by dying tumor cells, worked on an initial group of 10,000 patients with late-stage cancers.

Just one thing is holding the company back: Guardant Health has yet to get approval from Food and Drug Administration.

Fame, popularity and celebrity status, frequently used tokens of success, are often loosely related to, or even divorced from professional performance. This dichotomy is partly rooted in the difficulty to distinguish performance, an individual measure that captures the actions of a performer, from success, a collective measure that captures a community’s reactions to these actions. Yet, finding the relationship between the two measures is essential for all areas that aim to objectively reward excellence, from science to business. Here we quantify the relationship between performance and success by focusing on tennis, an individual sport where the two quantities can be independently measured. We show that a predictive model, relying only on a tennis player’s performance in tournaments, can accurately predict an athlete’s popularity, both during a player’s active years and after retirement. Hence the model establishes a direct link between performance and momentary popularity. The agreement between the performance-driven and observed popularity suggests that in most areas of human achievement exceptional visibility may be rooted in detectable performance. [full text article]

As single-sport specialization increases in youth sports, take note that nearly 90 percent NFL Draft picks this year were multi-sport athletes in high school.

The team at TrackingFootball.com, which helps coaches track data, put together the numbers and determined that 224 of 253 picks (88.5 percent) played multiple sports in high school, whether that was basketball, baseball, track and field or something else. A year ago, the number was 87.5 percent of picks with multi-sport backgrounds.

This May, NFL teams will finally be granted access to league-owned player tracking data from the 2015 season. The league had previously reached an agreement with Zebra Technologies to install chips in players’ shoulder pads that use radio frequency to broadcast each player’s location and speed 25 times per second, effectively generating data similar to SportVU in the NBA and Statcast in the MLB. This data has already been used in TV broadcasts for simple purposes such as speed and distance run (see above for an example). While these simple metrics can make for good supplemental TV broadcast content, they aren’t exactly all that relevant to the player personnel or game management decisions that teams face to try to gain a competitive advantage on one another. So are there any relevant uses of player tracking data from a football operations standpoint?

Luckily, ESPN has been developing a similar player tracking technology which was put to the test during the second half of the 2016 Under Armour High School All-American Game. And the participants of the 2016 Sloan Sports Analytics Conference Hackathon, presented by ESPN, received access to that player tracking data.

Bernard Schuiteman (42) is a former football player who was active for Bayer Leverkusen, Feyenoord, Mainz, Apollon Limassol and FC Utrecht. After his playing career, he worked as an international scout for FC Twente, after which he became head scout for Rapid Wien. He is currently active as an opponent analyst for the Austrian Football Association. In that capacity he will analyse matches during the European Championship in France this summer. SciSports talked with him about his experiences on analyses, scouting and the developments influenced by science and data intelligence.