Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 8, 2016

“Uphill, uphill, uphill,” Kris Dunn says to a swath of the reporters at the NBA Draft Combine in Chicago. He’s talking about his life. The recent Providence graduate and the premier point-guard prospect of this upcoming NBA Draft class has lived through more than anyone his age should. Largely raised by his slightly older brother, with a father out of the picture and a mother stuck in a revolving door between the streets and various jails—”Everything she did was for us,” Dunn says—Dunn has faced adversity that far overshadows anything found on a basketball court. For many months-long stretches as a pre-teen, Dunn and his brother would have to lie to teachers and parents about their circumstances, so they wouldn’t be treated like orphans and separated. “We became men very early in life,” he says.

Stuff like this might have nothing to do with basketball, strictly speaking. Still, it’s tough to separate Dunn’s fight through life with his success at the game that will soon make him a millionaire. Like Derrick Rose before him, Dunn’s speedy, hyper-coordinated sorties up and down the floor seem somehow to upend a universe of odds stacked against him; he’s a folk hero at Providence, and it’s easy to imagine that he will be again wherever he winds up.

LeBron James and the Cleveland Cavaliers have their work cut out for them following Game 2 of the NBA Finals. To bring a title to northeast Ohio, James will have to lead the Cavs to four wins in the next four or five games. Even more imposing, it would have to come against a Golden State Warriors team that hasn’t lost more than twice in a row all season.

For James, playing in his sixth straight NBA Finals dating to his time with the Miami Heat, the grind of yet another long season might have started to take a toll (as evidenced by his seven turnovers and sub-50 percent shooting from the field). While that’s hard to say with surety, this much is certain: The totality of playoff games and minutes in his six-year stretch of Finals appearances is unlike anything seen before in league history.

… The Australian sports science community has rapidly spread its tentacles throughout the major North American leagues.

Riding the wave of interest in the country’s elite sporting programs and following in the footsteps of those who first ventured into European football, Australian medical and high performance personnel have found roles with the Warriors, Spurs, Sixers, Bucks, and Celtics, among others.

… All of the game’s luminaries were gathered together in the same resort complex for days on end, and there was not a mention in any meeting room of restoring some sort of developmental league or academy that could address the issues of officiating, technological advances (in everything from helmets to microchips in footballs), and diversity in coaching and the front office all at once.

“It’s not something we’ve really talked much about as a group,” Giants owners Steve Tisch said shortly before he departed that March meeting in Florida. “I agree it sounds like a good idea, and something worth exploring. But it just isn’t a priority at this point.”

This is the state-of-the-art ‘pop-up’ gym installed in England’s Euro 2016 team hotel at Roy Hodgson’s request.

Bosses at the luxury Auberge du Jeu de Paume agreed for a conference room to be transformed into a training suite for the team.

Workers from sports science firm Perform Better, based in Southam, Warks, installed the gym in Chantilly on Saturday.

Chris Stewart knows when the cameras turn to him, something bad has happened.

The Pittsburgh Penguins athletic trainer is perfectly content standing in the shadows during games – especially in the Stanley Cup playoffs.

Stewart keeps tabs on players between games, tapes and wraps the sore joints before they take the ice.

And by Game 4 of the Stanley Cup Final – set for Monday night in San Jose – every player has bumps and bruises, aches and pains.

“Sleep is the most important thing when it comes to recovery,” James said. “And it’s very tough with our schedule. Our schedule keeps us up late at night, and most of the time it wakes us up early in the morning. … There’s no better recovery than sleep.”

Scientists are in agreement that even one sleepless night is the equivalent of having a few alcoholic drinks; 22 hours without sleeping has been shown to cause cognitive and reactive impairment comparable to being legally drunk.

In the NBA, trainers, coaches and the billionaires who pay millionaires to play basketball for them are only now beginning to realize how poor sleep habits can devastate performance and perhaps even affect longevity and injury rates. They can be damaging to the bottom line, too.

The University of Alabama licensed the technology behind a collapsible sideline tent designed to give better medical care to athletes to a spin-off company that will develop, market, manufacture and distribute the tent.

Under an agreement between UA and Kinematic Sports LLC, the SidelinER, as it is now called, is available to be purchased by prep, collegiate and professional sports teams and has the potential for other applications such as emergency response.

… At the moment, there is no industry standard for defining how an experience will affect an individual, but Oculus Rift has released a set of comfort ratings that people can refer to before diving into a title for the first time.

According to the Oculus Support Center, there are three levels of comfort in virtual reality—comfortable, moderate and intense. Developers can tailor their experience to fit these three levels in the same way that a video game developer does with age appropriate content.

… EXOS is currently launching new education courses designed for fitness professionals, focusing on behavior upgrades and wearables data collection. This includes the first in a series of EXOS Presents courses, in collaboration with Intel, on wearables data. The initial course focuses on leveraging data to help facilitate recovery.

Aspire Academy, one of the world’s leading youth athlete academies, and the global technology company SAP have decided to work together to drive Qatar’s youth sports development programmes, thanks to a partnership announced yesterday.

The Aspire Academy coaches, sport scientists, athletes, and management will be able to easily access real-time data on athlete performance development, sports science, and sports operations management on any mobile devices, supporting global best practices in youth athlete development.

On one platform, users can access data such as match results, development summaries, competition plans, and sports science profiles from Aspire Academy’s clubs and leagues. Aspire Academy and SAP will also explore innovations in feedback visualisation, predictive analytics, and cognitive training.

Eugene Monroe made up his mind, his conviction steeled by obsessive research. He would advocate publicly for medical marijuana use in the NFL. He knew he would create consternation inside a powerful, conservative institution. He understood it might jeopardize his career as a Baltimore Ravens offensive lineman.

And the first skeptic he faced was his wife, Nureya.

When Monroe first shared his self-appointed mission in December, Nureya was confused. She had understood marijuana as illegal and dangerous since childhood, and ever since they met at the University of Virginia, she had known her husband as a health-shake-chugging, gluten-free, dairy-free, pescatarian athlete who didn’t use marijuana.

“That conversation,” Nureya said, “was a lot of me rolling my eyes.”

But once Monroe described peer-reviewed studies and explained the benefits, she learned the difference between cannabis compounds. Her initial skepticism dissipated. “It definitely has allowed me to say, ‘Wow, this is something that can help people,’?” Nureya said.

Injuries, once again, have dominated the playoffs. They happen to tired players more often. They are happening more than ever before. And now, they are fueling an exodus of the league’s best players from Team USA. … Entering these Finals, rotation players (top seven players per team in minutes per game) have missed 61 playoff games in 2016. That’s the highest total in the past two decades and three times the rate from 1996 to 1999. In the past five postseasons, 217 games were lost to injury — a whopping 105 games more than the total in the previous five postseasons, from 2007 to 2011 (112).

… The NBA has quietly been gathering mountains of injury data since the 2012-13 season, according to sources with direct knowledge. In 2014-15, the league started working with Quintiles, a Durham, N.C.-based health-care company that focuses on data analytics and has recently worked directly with the NFL’s medical committees. Quintiles’ mission: break the data down.

Former Los Angeles Lakers head athletic trainer Gary Vitti, who retired from his full-time post in April after 32 seasons, said he has sent recommendations to Quintiles.

“One of the things that I said to them is, from [SportVU cameras in every NBA arena], you have an average speed for every player in the league,” Vitti said. “You own that information. You just need to extrapolate it. So let’s see who’s getting hurt. Is it fast guys or is it slow guys? Because I think it’s fast guys. I think the slow guys don’t get hurt much.

Monkeys can tell numbers apart, make ordinal comparisons, and even add and subtract, but that’s where their abilities peak. The question is why. Our outlier status is a longstanding puzzle. Many studies of why humans are so smart have focused on how we use tools and technology, on our diets, and our language use. In a new study, though, titled “Extraordinary intelligence and the care of infants,” a pair of cognitive scientists at the University of Rochester used a novel approach to show how, instead, it could have been a combination of parenting smarts and early births that made us so brainy.

“The fact that our infants are helpless requires us to be intelligent,” says Celeste Kidd, the study’s co-author. Or you could also turn that around: Our infants are helpless because humans are intelligent. The two go hand-in-hand, Kidd says. Because babies are helpless, parents need to be smart to take care of them. Because humans are smart, they need to be born early, and relatively helpless, so that they can squeeze their big-brained noggins through the tight birth canal. “Human babies are born undercooked, essentially, because they have to fit through a human pelvis,” says Evan MacLean, an evolutionary anthropologist at Duke University.