Applied Sports Science newsletter – May 6, 2016

Shaun Livingston traveled to Brazil last summer to hang out with Leandro Barbosa, a teammate on the Golden State Warriors. Livingston went to see the country and visit his friend, but he also took advantage of an opportunity to dig into the secrets behind Barbosa’s durability.

Barbosa was a willing instructor, introducing Livingston to training methods that included sprinting on sand and backpedaling around traffic cones. But then Barbosa broke out his favorite recovery drink, a viscous green liquid that he poured from a large jug. This, Barbosa said, was the good stuff — his special horse medicine.

Livingston bought into pretty much everything that his friend sold at Camp Barbosa. But he declined to partake of Barbosa’s magic potion.

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.

Before they take the field on any given day, the Mets might look less like a major league ballclub and more like a bunch of regular guys getting ready for a twilight softball game. This is in part because they have players both old (Bartolo Colon) and young (Michael Conforto), who come in many shapes and sizes. But it’s also because many Mets actually are softball players before games—at least, they are while they’re tossing a softball around instead of a baseball during warm-ups.

Outfielders Yoenis Cespedes and Juan Lagares, who have two of the strongest arms in baseball, swear by it. They say that working with softballs—or other heavy balls that are baseball-sized but weighted—helps them get loose before games and throw harder.

Recently, the prospect team here at Baseball Prospectus ranked the Dodgers the top farm system in baseball on the strength of the league’s finest combination of high-end talent at the top and depth throughout. In my 2016 team preview a few weeks back, I talked at some length about the front office and scouting department overhauls—and the funding structure behind them—that paved the way for this transformation. Current Director of Player Development Gabe Kapler was part of the wave of front office hires by the organization in 2014, and I sat down to talk with him about how he views his role and how the organization is going to go about turning its giant minor-league collection of tools into big-league talent that will help the club win games.

Change of direction speed (CODS) underpins performance in a wide range of sports but little is known about how stiffness and asymmetries affect CODS. Eighteen healthy males performed unilateral drop jumps to determine vertical, ankle, knee and hip stiffness, and a CODS test to evaluate left and right leg cutting performance during which ground reaction force data were sampled. A step-wise regression analysis was performed to ascertain the determinants of CODS time. A two-variable regression model explained 63% (R2 = 0.63; P = 0.001) of CODS performance. The model included the mean vertical stiffness and jump height asymmetry determined during the drop jump. Faster athletes (n = 9) exhibited greater vertical stiffness (F = 12.40; P = 0.001) and less asymmetry in drop jump height (F = 6.02; P = 0.026) than slower athletes (n = 9); effect sizes were both “large” in magnitude. Results suggest that overall vertical stiffness and drop jump height asymmetry are the strongest predictors of CODS in a healthy, non-athletic population.

Purpose

Damage to skeletal muscle necessitates regeneration to maintain proper muscle form and function. Interindividual differences in injury severity, recovery time, and injury rate could be explained by the presence of single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in genes involved in the reparation and regeneration of connective tissue . We wished to identify new genetic biomarkers that could help to prevent or minimize the risk of non-contact muscle injuries and are associated with a predisposition to developing muscle injuries.
Methods

Using allelic discrimination techniques, we analysed 12 SNPs in selected genes from the genomic DNA of 74 elite soccer players.
Results

SNPs in the hepatocyte growth factor (HGF) gene showed evidence of a statistically significant association with injury incidence, severity, and recovery time. SNPs in the SOX15 gene showed evidence of a statistically significant association with injury incidence. SNPs in the GEFT and LIF genes showed evidence of a statistically significant association with recovery time.
Conclusions

Genetic profile could explain why some elite soccer players are predisposed to suffer more injuries than others and why they need more time to recover from a particular injury. SNPs in HGF genes have an important role as biomarkers of biological processes fragility within muscle injuries related to injury rate, severity, and long recovery tim

… Overuse injuries come on gradually and may take time for the symptoms to be noticed. As a result, they often go undiagnosed and untreated for longer periods of time. This can lead to long-term consequences, including loss of playing time, reduced function and mental exhaustion.

While more research needs to be done on specific causes of overuse injuries in young athletes, factors such as improper techniques, excessive sports training, inadequate rest, muscle weakness, imbalance and early specialization have been linked to overuse injuries.

It takes a comprehensive, multidimensional approach to reduce the risk of these injuries. Parents, athletic trainers, physicians, other medical professionals, coaches and strength and conditioning experts should be aware of the risk of overuse injuries and do their best to prevent them.

The National Basketball Association (NBA) and GE Healthcare (NYSE: GE) today announced the first round of winning research proposals submitted to their Sports Medicine and Orthopedics Collaboration. Launched in the summer of 2015, this strategic collaboration is funding research to address the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of musculoskeletal injuries* affecting NBA players and everyday athletes. The collaboration is directed by a Strategic Advisory Board led by Dr. John DiFiori, the NBA’s Director of Sports Medicine, and an NBA/GE Healthcare steering committee.

This first round of research proposals focused on the natural history, diagnosis, treatment and prevention of tendinopathy. “Tendinopathy – and specifically that involving the patellar tendon – is a common issue among basketball players at all levels,” said Dr. DiFiori, who also served as co-chair for this call for proposals.

The global race to increase performance and reduce injuries is at, what feels like, a peak. The last number of years have seen a radical explosion in the amount of data available to sports scientists but has this information made us smarter? And is it making our teams healthier?

It might go down as the most expensive bong hit in history. Last Thursday night, Ole Miss offensive tackle Laremy Tunsil tumbled in the NFL draft right after a video appeared on his Twitter feed showing him smoking from a gas-mask pipe. Tunsil went from a potential No. 1 pick to the No. 13 slot, when he was selected by the Miami Dolphins — potentially losing more than $8 million over the course of his rookie contract and at least $7.3 million in guaranteed payments.

Tunsil isn’t the first NFL player to have his career threatened by marijuana use. Ricky Williams, for example, faced multiple suspensions and spent several years not playing for the NFL because of multiple positive marijuana tests. “I was a really good football player, a really good person, my teammates loved me, my coaches loved me, but my career and life were ruined because of a drug test,” he told International Business Times over the phone from Italy. “It doesn’t make sense. They have to take a more humane approach to this.”

But now, Williams is finding ways to benefit from his association with cannabis: He’s in the process of launching a marijuana-friendly gym in San Francisco.

Another NFL draft has come and gone, and with it has come the predictable displays of unyielding optimism, stale and arguably race-based generalizations of player skill, and, as a relative newcomer in 2016, lazy misuse of the term analytics.

In following along this spring, it became clear that what is mainstream knowledge among researchers is far from it in the national media. This despite a decent amount of both academic and non-academic research into the topic.

For those new to the scene, or even for a few veterans who may have missed an article or two along the way, I decided to write a quick review of what’s out there. Note that many of the following points are related to one another.

1. Top draft picks are overvalued.

In 2013 Sam Allardyce, then the manager of West Ham football club, came up with a no-nonsense explanation for footballing success. “Where you actually finish in the league depends on the money you’ve spent,” he bemoaned. “It’s a statistical fact, that.” But when the facts change, you?re supposed to change your mind—and following the crowning of Leicester City on May 2nd as champions of the English Premier League (EPL), the facts have changed dramatically. During the Foxes’ rapid ascent from the relegation zone to the title, they defied not only the bookmakers (who put the odds of their victory at 5,000 to 1) but also the nearly iron-clad relationship Big Sam bemoaned between pay and performance in the EPL. Since 1995-96, the league’s average champion has spent 2.25 times as much on salaries as the median team. The four clubs with the highest wages bills during that period—Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester United and Liverpool—finished in the top four positions 80% of the time. In contrast, The Economist estimates that Leicester City’s payroll was just three-fourths of the league median this year. That made them the second club in EPL history, after Newcastle United in 2001-02, to even break into the top four with a below-median wage bill.

Much of the success the Los Angeles Kings generated in recent peak years stemmed from their ability to mesh the calculable with the intangible. They have been, at the same time, a team that possessed the puck to a greater degree than any other National Hockey League team, while also relying on a leadership group that had forged its own identity in constructing the pillars of a team culture. “Resilient” was among the adjectives to describe the 2013-14 Los Angeles Kings, a team that colloquially was referred to in the playoffs as “cockroaches” because of their unwillingness to go away.

But as data and “advanced” statistics have proliferated past arbitration hearings and throughout far reaches of the sport over the last decade, the way many observers follow and analyze the game has evolved, and there is still a divide over how best to incorporate new schools of thought when there can be a pervasive old school approach exhibited by those who have played, coached and managed the game for virtually their entire lives.

“What do you think my chances are to go downstairs and hand Darryl Sutter a computer sheet?” Dean Lombardi said during media availability last month. It was an anecdotal statement, and it’s also fairly misleading. The Kings, winners of two Stanley Cups this decade, do have a finely tuned analytics approach, and to think that Darryl Sutter isn’t aware of particular aspects of performance – namely possession, zone exits, entries and starts – and methods in which he can wring the highest level production out of his team would be to underestimate someone who is the smartest person of any room he enters. Sutter does rely, to varying degrees, on numbers, statistics and data in many of his decisions.

When Aurelien Collin arrived at the New York Red Bulls training facility in Hanover, New Jersey, last week after a trade brought him north from Orlando City SC, the first thing he did was take a seat in a dark room.

Jesse Marsch joined his new center back and fired up the projector. On the screen, the Red Bulls’ head coach ran the 30-year-old Frenchman through play after play. This was what would be expected from him. This would be his role – defined one clip at a time.

For Marsch and the Red Bulls, gaining an edge via video analysis has turned into something of an obsession.

Last Sunday (1st May) saw the sixth annual Science+Football Conference held at St. George’s Park National Football Centre, bringing together people from all areas of Sports Science for a day of sharing insights and networking. With some great speakers lined up and a strong delegate presence from professional football clubs, I was really looking forward to getting involved in the Sports Science community again.

In this two-part blog, I review the presentations and detail the key messages I took away. In Part I, I’ll be looking back on the morning’s keynote presentations from Nick Levett, Talent ID Manager at The FA, and Grant Downie, Head of Performance at Manchester City’s Academy.