Applied Sports Science newsletter – May 31, 2016

… People (like me) get rapturous over the things Neuer does on the field and what they lead to — the way his mind processes and anticipates the game, the way he moves through and controls space. If by chance you’re not a soccer fan (in which case you’ve got no business here — leave!) or have never seen the man play, all the swooning probably seems a little corny. And there’s a reason for this: Goalies are not beautiful. They just aren’t. Strikers and midfielders, they’re beautiful, the stuff tiki-taka is made of. In their highlight-reel moments, strikers dance; they thin themselves and flit, light as bats, through space and the other bodies occupying it. Goalies, on the other hand, tend to look positively oafish in their signature moments: They turn themselves into fat, flailing scarecrows and then collapse, in willy-nilly half-splits, upon oncoming strikers. Repellent. At some level we know this, and this knowledge creates a norm for us. Believe it, then: We find Manuel Neuer to be stunning and strange and without precedent not only because of what he achieves on the field but because he looks beautiful doing it.

The guard informs me once more that “perhaps” I do not belong here, and I go, but not before watching Neuer execute another circuit. The way he coils and unfurls himself, the way he maintains his chassis and his balance in space — beautiful, balletic, strange.

Like everyone else who walks through the doors of this gym, Dion Jordan had to start by embracing the fear.

Fear of letting himself down. Fear of letting his mother down. Fear of squandering his life, not to mention the talent that compelled the Miami Dolphins to take him third overall in the 2013 NFL Draft, before a series of bad decisions and failed drug tests got Jordan banished over a year ago.

“I’m not about to waste it. I can’t waste it. And I (expletive) love doing it,” Jordan told USA TODAY Sports, breaking his long public silence on a couch in Empower founder Tareq Azim’s office before a recent workout. “Who doesn’t love running out in front of 30,000-plus fans and you get that rush? But it’s also things that you can get that rush from that can be very satisfying and can carry you on to a successful life after football.

Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” Henry David Thoreau exhorted in his 1854 memoir Walden, in which he extolled the virtues of a “Spartan-like” life. Saint Thomas Aquinas preached that simplicity brings one closer to God. Isaac Newton believed it leads to truth. The process of simplification, we’re told, can illuminate beauty, strip away needless clutter and stress, and help us focus on what really matters.

It can also be a sign of aging. Youthful health and vigor depend, in many ways, on complexity. Bones get strength from elaborate scaffolds of connective tissue. Mental acuity arises from interconnected webs of neurons. Even seemingly simple bodily functions like heartbeat rely on interacting networks of metabolic controls, signaling pathways, genetic switches, and circadian rhythms. As our bodies age, these anatomic structures and physiologic processes lose complexity, making them less resilient and ultimately leading to frailty and disease.

… Consider that Australia won seven gold medals at Barcelona in 1992, placing us tenth on the gold medal tally. It was regarded as a hugely successful performance.

Australia achieved the very same result at London 2012, but it was widely regarded as disappointing. Times and expectations have changed.

London was certainly not a Montreal moment but, given the downward trend of results over time, it was clear that intervention was needed before things got worse.

Winning Edge was not a knee-jerk reaction to results in London. It had been carefully considered well before its implementation and was a deliberate strategy. But the London performance, the worst in 20 years, did provide the catalyst for change.

Think about the block you live on: Is quiet or loud? Wealthy or poor? Walking home at night, do you feel safe? What if you didn’t — how would that affect things?

Evidently, your answers to these questions have a lot to do with social mobility. According to a new study led by Cornell University sociologist Laura Tach, the “micro-neighborhoods” that people live in limit or enhance their achievement.

Joachim Low will assess the fitness of his Germany players, including captain Bastian Schweinsteiger, before selecting a final Euros squad.

Every N.H.L. coach is, to some degree, a salesman. Instead of hawking insurance or knives, he peddles a less tangible commodity: belief. If this pack of alpha males does this and not that, if it just trusts him and the process, then glory will follow.

The transformation that ushered the Pittsburgh Penguins to the Stanley Cup finals began on Dec. 12, when Mike Sullivan stood before them, hours after taking over, and summoned his powers of persuasion.

In his booming baritone, Sullivan commanded the meeting. He conveyed his agenda in blunt terms. He saw a group that would dazzle for a period, maybe a game, before reverting to poor habits. He saw great players, stars like Sidney Crosby and Evgeni Malkin and Kris Letang, but not a great team. He wanted opponents to despise playing the Penguins, unable to contain their pace and skill, and they would soon enough, he told them.

“The players were all at a point where we knew what we were doing wasn’t good enough, it wasn’t right, and we needed to buy into something,” said defenseman Ben Lovejoy, who added, “We were all at a point where we were going to do what we were told.”

Time was when sports equipment was made only from common, everyday, low-tech materials — wood, cowhide, and pigskin.

No more, though. Today’s bats, balls, clubs, and shoes have a new high-tech ingredient. Silicon, in the form of microcontrollers, accelerometers, gyroscopes, transceivers, and memory chips, has joined the sports equipment domain. The new technology enables players to hone their game by gathering data on speed, power, and form, among many other metrics.

Here, we’ve gathered a fraction of the many high-tech products aimed at the sports equipment market. From golf club motion sensors to ultra-wideband basketballs, we offer a look at some of the latest and greatest.

… a team of University of Wisconsin—Madison engineers has created the world’s fastest stretchable, wearable integrated circuits, an advance that could drive the Internet of Things and a much more connected, high-speed wireless world.

Led by Zhenqiang “Jack” Ma, the Lynn H. Matthias Professor in Engineering and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor in electrical and computer engineering at UW–Madison, the researchers published details of these powerful, highly efficient integrated circuits today, May 27, 2016, in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.

The advance is a platform for manufacturers seeking to expand the capabilities and applications of wearable electronics — including those with biomedical applications — particularly as they strive to develop devices that take advantage of a new generation of wireless broadband technologies referred to as 5G.

While the words “fit” and “healthy” are often used synonymously in everyday language, the terms have entirely separate meanings. Fitness describes the ability to perform a given exercise task, and health explains a person’s state of well-being, where physiological systems work in harmony. Although we typically view athletes as fit and healthy, they often are not. The global term we place on unhealthy athletes is the overtraining syndrome. In this current opinion, we propose that two primary drivers may contribute to the development of the overtraining syndrome, namely high training intensity and the modern-day highly processed, high glycemic diet. Both factors elicit a sympathetic response through the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, in turn driving systemic reactive oxygen species production, inflammation, and a metabolic substrate imbalance towards carbohydrate and away from fat oxidation, manifesting in an array of symptoms often labeled as the overtraining syndrome. Ultimately, these symptoms reveal an unhealthy athlete. We argue that practitioners, scientists, and athletes may work towards health and alleviate overtraining syndrome by lowering training intensity and removing processed and/or high glycemic foods from the diet, which together enhance fat oxidation rates. Athletes should be fit and healthy.

A one-day workshop on September 10, 2016 showcasing state-of-the-art research in analytics for college and professional hockey

Prediction of adult performance from early age talent identification in sport remains difficult. Talent identification research has generally been performed using univariate analysis, which ignores multivariate relationships. To address this issue, this study used a novel higher-dimensional model to orthogonalize multivariate anthropometric and fitness data from junior rugby league players, with the aim of differentiating future career attainment. Anthropometric and fitness data from 257 Under-15 rugby league players was collected. Players were grouped retrospectively according to their future career attainment (i.e., amateur, academy, professional). Players were blindly and randomly divided into an exploratory (n = 165) and validation dataset (n = 92). The exploratory dataset was used to develop and optimize a novel higher-dimensional model, which combined singular value decomposition (SVD) with receiver operating characteristic analysis. Once optimized, the model was tested using the validation dataset. SVD analysis revealed 60 m sprint and agility 505 performance were the most influential characteristics in distinguishing future professional players from amateur and academy players. The exploratory dataset model was able to distinguish between future amateur and professional players with a high degree of accuracy (sensitivity = 85.7%, specificity = 71.1%; p<0.001), although it could not distinguish between future professional and academy players. The validation dataset model was able to distinguish future professionals from the rest with reasonable accuracy (sensitivity = 83.3%, specificity = 63.8%; p = 0.003). Through the use of SVD analysis it was possible to objectively identify criteria to distinguish future career attainment with a sensitivity over 80% using anthropometric and fitness data alone. As such, this suggests that SVD analysis may be a useful analysis tool for research and practice within talent identification.

Last post, I wondered how accurate bookmakers are at evaluating English Premier League (EPL) team talent. In the comments, Tom Tango suggested a method to figure that out, but one that requires knowing the bookies’ actual “over/under” forecasts. I couldn’t find those numbers, , but bloggers James Grayson and Simon Gleave came to my rescue with three seasons’ worth of numbers, and another commenter provided a public link for 2015-16. … So, armed with numbers from James and Simon, what can we figure out?

The book The Only Rule Is It Has To Work is the true story of how a couple of clever quants, Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller, tried to bring sabermetric superiority to the Sonoma Stompers, a minor league baseball team nestled in California’s wine country. The self-described “statheads” have the chance-of-a-lifetime opportunity to test out their own Moneyball-style theories when the management team and owners of the Stompers invited them to run operations as part of a learning experience and team promotion. … Lindbergh and I recently discussed lessons learned from their experience bringing analytics to an ambivalent and under-resourced enterprise. These lessons deservedly extend beyond dugouts and diamonds into C-suites and boardrooms.

… There is no magic formula guaranteed to keep teams in the Premier League. In reality, there are a broad range of factors that contribute to the relative success (or otherwise) of a league campaign.

The ability to attract higher calibre players through the transfer window is often crucial, as is the health of players and the ability to avoid serious injuries among the squad. As has been widely reported, Leicester City suffered the fewest injuries in 2015/16, enabling Claudio Ranieri to use fewer players than any other team and enjoy high levels of consistency in selection.

Similarly, factors such as budget, refereeing decisions, coaching and analysis all influence outcome and can have a significant impact over the course of a season. Perceived success or failure is the result of hundreds of different (and often random) influences impacting on-field performance, but clubs can skew the odds in their favour by using advanced data to their advantage.