Applied Sports Science newsletter – December 29, 2016

I am planning to cut back the distribution of this newsletter by asking longtime readers (greater than 1 year) to pay for it. Details are posted at https://sports.bradstenger.com/2016-payments.

This newsletter goes out to approximately 150 people at approximately 100 different sports and technology organizations. My goal is to reduce those numbers and then re-populate the newsletter distribution with new readers/organizations, stopping once the distribution is back to its current size (fewer than 200 readers and approximately 100 organizations).

… In Rio, Huddle was one of 37 world-class athletes to toe the line for Olympic 10,000m final. “It was a strange, difficult race,” admits Huddle who worked with Treacy to carefully analyze and anticipate how the race would unfold. “You can never really predict the race based on times. We had just looked at past 10K finals to kind of get an idea of maybe what would happen and what the pattern might be. Just judging from Beijing – where Shalane [Flanagan] medaled and set the American record – Shalane ran pretty evenly and passed people at the end as they fell off the pace. We hoped that would happen,” states Huddle. “When it went out hard, I raced remembering Ray’s advice: ‘Don’t be afraid to go out in 15:10 – 15:15 for the first 5K.’ It was actually a lot faster than that,” notes Huddle who split halfway in 14:55.5 trailing Kenya’s Alice Nawowuna’s leading opening 5K in 14:46.81. “When [ultimate winner Almaz] Ayana started to pull away at 5K, I thought, ‘I was hoping it would settle at this point, but it’s getting faster. But just try and stay under 15:20 pace for the next 5K and see if that reels anybody in.’ And when it became clear that I wasn’t reeling anybody in, I was just focused on the record at that point,” explains Huddle on how she shifted her attention from placing to Flanagan’s American record. Running her own race within a race, Huddle stayed on task – crossing the line in 30:13.17 to take down Flanagan’s AR by a whopping 9.05 seconds.

New England Patriots wide receiver Julian Edelman endured a challenging 2015 season, breaking a bone in his foot in mid-November and remaining on the sidelines until he returned in the playoffs. He then underwent a follow-up surgery in the offseason.

So as the Patriots prepare for their 2016 regular-season finale, and Edelman will be suiting up for his 16th game of the year, it is something in which he takes great pride.

“That’s a big goal. I haven’t done that in a while. It will be good to go in there and play my 16th game,” he said. “That’s the No. 1 thing that we preach around here, the health of the team. Fortunately I have [good] health right now.”

… “At the outset you are talking not about a league but you are talking about a platform for development,” Ellis said. “I think in the fundamental basis of what this is going to serve, it’s for development. The Development Academy is going to bring clubs and coaches to become more aligned in terms of what the big picture is: to find players and help them become the best soccer players they can be.”

Another aspect that Ellis touched on was how the Girls’ Development Academy will be a revolutionary step towards de-emphasizing winning and losing. “This is not a league where it is about points and trophies,” Ellis said. “This is a development platform, where it’s about competing, growing and helping players get better. That base philosophy is going to send messages to coaches and the coaches will embrace it.”

How can you transform a competitive, star-driven culture into a collaborative one? Companies struggle with that question, particularly when knowledge work is the offering. Here’s the underlying tension: Their subject-matter experts must deeply immerse themselves in their disciplines to stay on the cutting edge. And yet that expertise must be integrated across fields and areas of practice to solve the complex problems that today’s customers face.

Can you have it both ways? Yes—by engaging in smart collaboration, which is about producing results, not just playing nicely together in the sandbox (though that’s also important). By pooling their know-how and resources across boundaries, organizations can solve problems more creatively, increase their productivity, and reap higher profits—achievements that attract top-caliber talent and keep the stars engaged. Collaboration is not easy, given how time-pressed managers are, how reluctant they are to cede control over projects and relationships, and how tough it is for them to stop working in silos when they’ve been doing so for ages. Those rewards make it worth the effort.

Studies have shown that more than half of us abandon our trackers after purchasing. The more effective, low-tech answer to your fitness goals? A friend.

This study investigated (i) whether the accumulated oxygen deficit (AOD) and curvature constant of the power–duration relationship (W′) are different during constant work-rate to exhaustion (CWR) and 3-min all-out (3MT) tests and (ii) the relationship between AOD and W′ during CWR and 3MT. Twenty-one male cyclists (age: 40 ± 6 years; maximal oxygen uptake [V̇O2max]: 58 ± 7 ml · kg−1 · min−1) completed preliminary tests to determine the V̇O2–power output relationship and V̇O2max. Subsequently, AOD and W′ were determined as the difference between oxygen demand and oxygen uptake and work completed above critical power, respectively, in CWR and 3MT. There were no differences between tests for duration, work, or average power output (P ≥ 0.05). AOD was greater in the CWR test (4.18 ± 0.95 vs. 3.68 ± 0.98 L; P = 0.004), whereas W′ was greater in 3MT (9.55 ± 4.00 vs. 11.37 ± 3.84 kJ; P = 0.010). AOD and W′ were significantly correlated in both CWR (P < 0.001, r = 0.654) and 3MT (P < 0.001, r = 0.654). In conclusion, despite positive correlations between AOD and W′ in CWR and 3MT, between-test differences in the magnitude of AOD and W′, suggest that both measures have different underpinning mechanisms.

It wasn’t so long ago that we were all excited about the next great computing platform: wearable devices and (especially) smartwatches.

Many people thought that by 2017 we’d be fairly dependent on our smartwatches and that many of the tasks we normally do on our smartphones would be transferred to the little computers on our wrists.

That wasn’t to be. Wearables, by and large, are being used for health and fitness tracking, which we can expect to remain true throughout 2017.

… In today’s world of medical devices that are connected to a hospital’s network or even a patient’s own Internet service at home, we see significant technological advances in patient care and, at the same time, an increase in the risk of cybersecurity breaches that could affect a device’s performance and functionality.

The best way to combat these threats is for manufacturers to consider cybersecurity throughout the total product lifecycle of a device. In other words, manufacturers should build in cybersecurity controls when they design and develop the device to assure proper device performance in the face of cyber threats, and then they should continuously monitor and address cybersecurity concerns once the device is on the market and being used by patients.

Objectives

Recurrent ankle sprains can be reduced by a neuromuscular training program (NMT). The way NMT is delivered may influence the incidence of long term recurrent injuries, residual pain and disability.
Design

This RCT with a follow-up of twelve months, evaluated whether the implementation method of a proven effective NMT program delivered by a mobile application or a written instruction booklet, resulted in differences in injury incidence rates, functional ankle disability/pain in the long term, assuming equal compliance – as is shown in previous research – with the 8-week intervention.
Methods

220 athletes with a history of ankle sprain were recruited for this RCT. 110 athletes were offered the freely available “Strengthen your ankle App” and the other 110 received a printed Booklet. Primary outcome measure was incidence density of ankle sprains. Secondary outcome measures were residual pain/disability and the individual cumulative number of ankle sprains during follow-up.
Results

The incidence densities of self-reported ankle sprain recurrences were not significantly different between both groups (HR 1.06; 95% CI 0.76–1.49). Median FADI (Functional Ankle and Disability Index) scores increased equally over time in both groups, indicating a lower rate of limitation and pain in both groups at follow-up. Neither FADI scores nor cumulative recurrent injuries were significantly different between groups.
Conclusions

This study showed that the implementation method of a NMT program by using an App or a Booklet did neither lead to different injury incidence rates in the long term nor did it influence residual functional disability/pain. Assuming equal compliance during the 8-week intervention, both methods show similar effectiveness in twelve-month follow-up.

The secret to reliably diagnosing concussions lies in the brain’s ability to process sound, according to a new study by researchers from Northwestern University’s Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory.

Widely considered a crisis in professional sports and youth athletic programs, sports-related concussions have had devastating neurological, physical, social and emotional consequences for millions of athletes. Still, no single test has been developed to reliably and objectively diagnose concussions.

The groundbreaking research, to be published Dec. 22 in the journal Nature, Scientific Reports, has found a biological marker in the auditory system that could take the ambiguity and controversy out of diagnosing concussions and tracking recovery.

How much does a fumble affect the probability of winning an American football game? How balanced should your offense be in order to increase the probability of winning by 10%? These are questions for which the coaching staff of National Football League teams have a clear qualitative answer. Turnovers are costly; turn the ball over several times and you will certainly lose. Nevertheless, what does “several” mean? How “certain” is certainly? In this study, we collected play-by-play data from the past 7 NFL seasons, i.e., 2009–2015, and we build a descriptive model for the probability of winning a game. Despite the fact that our model incorporates simple box score statistics, such as total offensive yards, number of turnovers etc., its overall cross-validation accuracy is 84%. Furthermore, we combine this descriptive model with a statistical bootstrap module to build FPM (short for Football Prediction Matchup) for predicting future match-ups. The contribution of FPM is pertinent to its simplicity and transparency, which however does not sacrifice the system’s performance. In particular, our evaluations indicate that our prediction engine performs on par with the current state-of-the-art systems (e.g., ESPN’s FPI and Microsoft’s Cortana). The latter are typically proprietary but based on their components described publicly they are significantly more complicated than FPM. Moreover, their proprietary nature does not allow for a head-to-head comparison in terms of the core elements of the systems but it should be evident that the features incorporated in FPM are able to capture a large percentage of the observed variance in NFL games. [full text]

… Players for years have had to abide what the owners want, without any ability to collective bargain, when it comes to the critical and numerous in-game “work rules.” So when it came to the anti-flopping rules and the fines players had to pay for committing those rules violations, they had no say in establishing those guidelines. But going forward, players will for the first time get to negotiate with owners when it comes to how they have to comport themselves during the playing of “The Star-Spangled Banner” and how they’ll be required to dress if they’re sitting on the bench.

Before giving the players more power than they’ve ever had before in this area, owners and players settled their previous differences to have a clean slate going forward. Players had filed grievances with the National Labor Relations Board over such things as flopping fines and the dress code. But all of those have been resolved. Rules covering conduct and everything else that pertains to work rules, including “wearables” that monitor a player’s heart rate, for instance, will now be collectively bargained. The days of the players running to the NLRB to help their cause are over. Now they’ll sit down with the owners and hash it out, making this more of a partnership than ever before.

… When teams suddenly emerge, the usual question they face is an obvious one: Is the success real, and is it sustainable? The NHL – perhaps more so than any other North American sports league – lends itself to teams running hot and cold regardless of how well (or how poorly) they’re playing. Talent tends to win out in the end, but it does make team-level analysis quite tricky when you are trying to separate pretenders from contenders.

One of the most prominent signals on either end of the spectrum is when a team sees a large divide between territorial dominance (be it by shots, scoring chances or expected goals) and shooting/save percentages. Your true playoff-calibre teams and eventual Stanley Cup winners tend to dominate the volume of chances over the duration of the regular season to sustain their winning ways. Pretenders, on the other hand, tend to ride the percentages – be it a white-hot shooting lineup or incredible goaltending. These teams are the ones that usually get themselves into trouble, and watch performance degrade as the season progresses.

The question about contender and pretender status is particularly interesting this year in light of the rise of the Columbus Blue Jackets in the East and the Minnesota Wild in the West, two teams that are obliterating the competition through the Christmas break. Columbus currently sits atop the NHL with 23 wins and a ridiculous +45 goal differential, which is also tops. Minnesota is fifth in the NHL with 21 wins and a +36 goal differential, second only to Columbus.

Tim Ohashi’s first piece of hockey analytics focused on the Washington Capitals, and was created at age 7. “Hockey’s Capitals Playing Players Now,” it was called, and each page was chock full of data, plus pictures of smiling (if a bit blobby) hockey players playing hockey.

“10 is Kelly Miller,” the book accurately reported. “12 is Peter Bondra.” Fine, the information contained therein may not have been proprietary, but it was awfully cute.

There were surely other suburban D.C. kids drawing blobby artwork of Kelly Miller in the mid-‘90s, other kids memorizing Washington’s roster and wearing a Jim Carey jersey during street-hockey games. Few of them, it’s safe to say, grew up to become members of the Capitals’ coaching staff.

… The Raptors’ problem is shared by other respectable teams like the Celtics and the Grizzlies, who seem condemned for now, if not forever, to being good rather than great in a league dominated by superpowers. There is only so much they can control.

Brad Stevens, the coach of the Celtics, said he would continue to seek improvement.

“I’m not even thinking about any other team,” he said. “We’re trying to be the best version of ourselves.”