Applied Sports Science newsletter – January 14, 2017

ESPN’s Prim Siripipat sits down with Seahawks WR Doug Baldwin and Sports Psychologist Michael Gervais to discuss the importance of training your mind as well as your body before stepping onto the field.

… For centuries, Congo has been hamstrung by the machinations of foreign powers, megalomaniac leaders and a host of other rapacious forces seeking bounty from its rich soil, leaving it in a near-constant state of unrest. Consequently, it should come as no surprise that, like the country itself, Congolese football has, for the most part, been prevented from fulfilling its potential; its one true period of international competitiveness – until recently – came during an era of relative stability during the 1960s and early 1970s.

But football in the DRC is now once again on the up, both at international and domestic level. Having taken third-place at the 2015 African Cup of Nations and won the 2016 African Nations Championship (CHAN), Congo go into AFCON 2017 with an outside chance of victory, while TP Mazembe and Vita Club have re-established themselves as giants of club football on the continent. It’s a renaissance that bears echoes of events and figures from times past, not least for the implicit influence of politics on the Congolese game.

Around Chelsea’s Cobham training base, club sources told ESPN FC how some staff are still struck by how quiet and humble N’Golo Kante is, especially given how much talk the midfielder provokes.

Kante’s remarkable ability to appear from nowhere and close down an attacker still raises impressed, but incredulous, laughs from teammates at training, and respectful gratitude during games. It follows on from the attitude at Leicester City, where they never got over how relentless the midfielder was.

… The most notable thing about the 2010 Cowboys’ offensive line was its age.

Left tackle Doug Free, in his first full season as a starter after being selected in the fourth round of the 2007 draft, was the line’s youngest member at 26 years old. Fellow starters Marc Colombo, Leonard Davis, Kyle Kosier and Andre Gurode were all in their age-32 season. They all had a history of above-average play but they were also all on the downside of their careers. None of them would last more than three additional years in the league.

Combined, that group of five — along with injury fill-ins Montrae Holland (30), Phil Costa (23) and the aforementioned Barron (28) — gave the Dallas offensive line a snap-weighted age of 30.5 years old, one of the oldest in football.

It’s a new year and a good time to reflect on where the high school sports experience stands, the good and the bad.

I’ve witnessed lots of changes since 1976, my first year as a reporter. Neighborhood sports teams have pretty much vanished. They exist in a distant memory.

Brothers and sisters used to follow one another to the same school. Coaches used to know who would be coming each fall by seeing who was at the local junior high. Parents knew other parents since their children were in elementary school and would remember stories of their carpool and cupcake party days.

Those days are mostly gone in the era of private coaching, open enrollment, travel ball and the endless quest to be rewarded with a trophy or scholarship.

Kentucky’s newest basketball commit, Hamidou Diallo, is planning to redshirt at Kentucky this year, and not actually play until next season. He’ll get to work out and practice with the team for the remainder of this year, which some of his coaches think is a great idea.

“It makes so much sense,” Diallo’s now former coach with the NY Rens, Andy Borman, said after Diallo’s commitment, according to ZagsBlog.

“Hamidou is going to get to lift with the college strength coach,” Borman said. “He’s going to get to practice with college kids as opposed to high school. When the team goes on a road trip, he can stay home with a grad assistant and work out two hours a day.”

Strength training is an indispensable part of the training of elite sprinter, at least for most sprinters, not for all. I have personally coached good sprinters, man running sub.10 secs hardly being able to squat 80 kgs (180 lbs) or women running sub.11 secs having trouble squatting 50 kgs. (120 lbs.)
Had I not seen and tested them myself I would not have believed it. But also other sprinters like Carl Lewis or Kim Collins are known not having lifted heavy or at least not being as strong in lifting weights as other sprinters.
Nowadays, I see a lot of young sprinters hardly breaking the 11 secs barrier, but being able to squat 200 kgs (440 lbs). Something is out of balance here.

… “The sleep people were saying that this schedule . . . could be an issue and to make sure we started as late as possible,” Casey said.

“For me, I’m superstitious and old school — ‘Hey, let’s go through shootaround.’ It’s definitely not going to be an all-the-time thing. We’re going to consult with them and find out what days are red flags.”

The system of core beliefs, this daily guidebook for going about your business, has carried Nick Saban and Alabama to the brink of yet another national championship.

Call it The Process. Call it the Saban Way. It’s hard to call it anything but successful.

But what is it? That’s harder to define.

Alabama defensive end Jonathan Allen thinks if Saban could bottle it up alongside all the self-help books, the famed process — the most common short-hand description for the mentality of the Crimson Tide program — would be “priceless.”

If you get injured, you must have been running too much, right? Recently, sports scientists have been rethinking this belief. In some cases, hard training may act as a “vaccine” against injuries by toughening up your body—so doing too little can be as risky as doing too much.

That doesn’t mean you should crank up your mileage immediately. Instead, focus on the balance between how much you’re running now and how much running you’ve done over the past month. By tracking this “acute-to-chronic” ratio, you guard against the twin perils of too much and too little.

… The day encapsulated a 4-8 season that several UO assistants likened to “a perfect storm” as Oregon’s poor performances on the field were compounded by a lack of discipline off it. At the heart of the unraveling was a void of leadership and commitment that fueled inconsistency and breakdowns at all levels, from players who brushed off teammates’ critiques to coaches who failed to hold them accountable. Overseeing it all was Helfrich, a cerebral thinker without an iron fist.

Somewhere in its quest to “Win The Day,” Oregon stopped heeding the details, said a dozen players, coaches, administrators and boosters in interviews with The Oregonian/OregonLive.

2016 was a strong year for digital health, but it also created an environment for discretion and focus for founders and investors alike. There were a record number of companies funded; and while the total amount of dollars decreased from 2015, we remain optimistic in the strength of the sector and the value of the companies improving our healthcare system.

Fitbit’s already got some of the top-selling fitness trackers on the market, but as the space faces a potential over-saturation, continued success lies in partnerships. As such, the wearable maker’s been building up its Works With Fitbit ecosystem one piece at a time.

In the past year, Fitbit has added a couple of key partners, including a skill for Amazon Echo and an NBA 2K17 partnership that offers in-game bonuses for those who hit their goals. This year at CES, the company is rolling out a trio of additions, including a nutrition site and two fairly unique takes on the stationary bike.

What do a former Patriot’s player and a Harvard Business School student have in common? A startup called Impact Labs, which is developing a helmet device to reduce the forces placed on athletes’ heads during contact sports.

Impact Labs was co-founded by Benjamin Rizzo, an MBA candidate at HBS, and Zoltan Mesko, whom you may remember as a punter who played for the Patriots from 2010 to 2013. The startup’s initial product is EXO-1, a patent-pending leaf spring that attaches to the front of a football helmet. Its main goal is to reduce head impact among athletes.

“‘Concussion’ is the buzzword,” Rizzo told me, adding that head impacts may or may not equate to a concussion. “What we’re looking to reduce is the impact felt by the head.”

… he NCAA wants to use technology to improve the fan experience, both at the game and from afar, for example. But it’s also using new digital tools for something specific to student athletes who end up away from campus because of travel: “distance learning,” as Emmert described.

“You can take your class with you,” he said. “You have the ability to not miss as much class because it’s supportable now, so that helps our students a lot.”

Toolbox Genomics, a company that will soon begin to offer actionable health insights based on customers’ sequenced genomes, has raised a small round of seed funding, the company told MobiHealthNews. The exact amount of the funding was not disclosed. The company’s product will launch in mid-February for $49, CEO Didier Perez told MobiHealthNews.

“Basically what we do is based on a user’s own DNA — and currently the market is the 1.5 million 23andMe users who’ve done the test — what they do is upload that data to our website and what we provide to them based on that data is practical and actionable food and lifestyle recommendations. Currently we are looking at about 60 biomarkers with an average of about 15 recommendations.”

A next step for smart watches and fitness trackers? Wearable gadgets gave a Stanford University professor an early warning that he was getting sick before he ever felt any symptoms of Lyme disease.

Geneticist Michael Snyder never had Lyme’s characteristic bulls-eye rash. But a smart watch and other sensors charted changes in Snyder’s heart rate and oxygen levels during a family vacation. Eventually a fever struck that led to his diagnosis.

Say “wearables,” and step-counting fitness trackers spring to mind. It’s not clear if they really make a difference in users’ health. Now Snyder’s team at Stanford is starting to find out, tracking the everyday lives of several dozen volunteers wearing devices that monitor more than mere activity.

The few sensors that detect and measure molecules in the body depend on the specific chemistry of the target analyte. For example, glucose sensors quantify levels of the sugar thanks to glucose oxidase, which oxidizes glucose and nothing else.

But what about the vast range of metabolites, drugs, and other molecules that a doctor or patient might want to measure? “What we really want is a generic platform that works in vivo, something that can detect any molecule irrespective of its chemistry,” says Kevin W. Plaxco, a chemist at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

In athletes who suffered a concussion, a protein in their blood may be able to predict when they can return to action. A new study finds that those who took longer to return to play had higher levels of a protein known as tau in their blood in the 6 hours following the trauma than players who were cleared to return to the field sooner. Tau blood testing isn’t ready for prime time, but experts say that if it pans out it would become an invaluable tool for coaches and physicians alike.

When high school athletes think about sports safety, many are probably more concerned about a concussion or ACL tear than a dental injury. However, much like other types of injuries, those that are dental-related can affect an athlete physically and emotionally, and can be costly financially.

A properly fitted mouthguard is a relatively inexpensive and effective way to help prevent dental and oral injuries. While the National Federation of State High School Associations mandates the use of mouthguards in field hockey, football, ice hockey and lacrosse as well as wrestling, if the athlete wears braces or an orthodontic device, athletes in other sports have reason to consider mouthguards as well.

CONTEXT:

 Neurocognitive test scores are often considered an important aspect of concussion management. To best use these data, clinicians must understand potential factors that may influence baseline performance on these tests.
OBJECTIVE:

 To determine preexisting factors that may influence performance on the Immediate Post-Concussion Assessment and Cognitive Test (ImPACT).
DESIGN:

 Cross-sectional study.
SETTING:

 Research laboratory.
PATIENTS OR OTHER PARTICIPANTS:

 A total of 486 National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I collegiate student-athletes.
MAIN OUTCOME MEASURE(S):

 To determine neurocognitive functioning and total symptom score at baseline, ImPACT was administered. Outcomes were verbal memory, visual memory, visual motor speed, reaction time, and total symptom score. A self-report demographic section at the beginning of ImPACT was used to gather information concerning previous treatment for headaches, migraines, and psychiatric conditions; diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder; and exposure to previous strenuous exercise. We conducted multivariate analyses of variance to determine if the ImPACT composite and total symptom scores differed according to preexisting factors (P < .0083). RESULTS:

 Sex showed an effect on verbal memory (P = .001), visual motor speed (P < .001), and reaction time (P = .006), with women performing better than men. A previous diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder affected visual motor speed (P = .008). Previous treatment for headaches (P < .001), migraines (P = .001), a psychiatric condition (P < .001), and a diagnosis of attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (P < .001) all showed effects on the total symptom score. Strenuous exercise did not affect neurocogntive performance or total symptom score. CONCLUSIONS:

 Based on our findings and the previous literature, we suggest that many preexisting factors influence baseline neurocognitive data. Baseline testing is an important aspect of concussion management. Sports medicine professionals should be cognizant of these factors when developing concussion-management protocols.

Athletes who have sustained an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury often opt for an ACL reconstruction (ACLR) with the goal and expectation to resume sports. Unfortunately, the proportion of athletes successfully returning to sport is relatively low, while the rate of second ACL injury has been reported to exceed 20% after clearance to return to sport, especially within younger athletic populations. Despite the development of return-to-sport guidelines over recent years, there are still more questions than answers on the most optimal return-to-sport criteria after ACLR. The primary purpose of this review was to provide a critical appraisal of the current return-to-sport criteria and decision-making processes after ACLR. Traditional return-to-sport criteria mainly focus on time after injury and impairments of the injured knee joint. The return-to-sport decision making is only made at the hypothetical ‘end’ of the rehabilitation. We propose an optimized criterion-based multifactorial return-to-sport approach based on shared decision making within a broad biopsychosocial framework. A wide spectrum of sensorimotor and biomechanical outcomes should be assessed comprehensively, while the interactions of an individual athlete with the tasks being performed and the environment in which the tasks are executed are taken into account. A layered approach within a smooth continuum with repeated athletic evaluations throughout rehabilitation followed by a gradual periodized reintegration into sport with adequate follow-up may help to guide an individual athlete toward a successful return to sport.

BACKGROUND:

Football players compete with a high risk of injury due to the sport. With the recent efforts to improve safety, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) established new terminology to clearly define exposure types and reduce the number of high contact exposures.
OBJECTIVES:

To compare football injury rates (IR) with a focus on game versus practice, time in season of injury, mechanism of injury and utilizing recent exposure types defined by the NCAA (live contact, full-pads and non-contact).
METHODS:

Licensed medical professionals monitored a college football program regular season from 2012-2015. Each injury was classified by timing of the injury, mechanism of injury, and whether it occurred in game or practice. Player attendance and type of exposure (non-contact, full-pad or live contact, which involves live tackling to the ground and/or full-speed blocking and can occur in full-pad or half-pad (“shell”) equipment) was documented. IR were calculated per 1000 athlete-exposures (AE). Mid-exact P tests compared rates between variables.
RESULTS:

The game IR was over three times as high as the practice IR (p < .001). Live contact exposures had the greatest IR of 5.702/1000 AE and were seven times more likely to produce an injury compared to non-contact exposures (p < .001); whereas, live contact exposures were about two times more likely to produce an injury compared to full-pad exposures (p = .004). The majority of injuries observed occurred from a contact mechanism (IR: 2.508/1000 AE). The highest IR during the fall football season occurred in the pre-season at 5.769/1000 AE. CONCLUSION:

Overall IR observed in this cohort were lower than prior studies published before recent NCAA rule changes and guideline implementation to improve athlete safety. Athletes in this cohort were at significantly increased risk of injury from live contact exposures.

Professional football players are enduring higher levels of force than ever, and foot and ankle injury rates are increasing as a result. Advances in surgery and rehabili­tation have helped get players back on the field more quickly, but injury prevention remains a significant challenge.

In a recent publication by Liam Anderson from Liverpool John Moores University and colleagues unique insights in English Premier League football (soccer for those across the pond) were obtained. The results of the study were also discussed in December 2016 at the ISENC Sports Nutrition conference in Newcastle (UK) by Dr James Morton. Six professional soccer players of Liverpool Football club were followed during training and matches in order to get a better insight in their energy expenditure and energy intake.

The researchers used the most accurate technique possible for free-living conditions to measure energy expenditure, an advanced technique called the doubly labelled water method. This technique uses different excretion rates of oxygen and hydrogen to calculate energy expenditure and is generally regarded as the gold standard. The investigators also obtained detailed nutrition intake information from the players on different days: match days, recovery days and training days.

Energy expenditure was on average 3566 kcal/day (but was of course higher on the match days and lower on recovery days). Energy intake on match days averaged 3789 kcal and on training days 2956 kcal. All these figures are similar to what has been reported in the literature previously

Toni Minichiello, the coach behind Jessica Ennis-Hill’s success, has called for football to do much more to catch drug cheats and said those within the sport are naive if they think there is no problem with doping.

Earlier this week Manchester City were charged by the Football Association with failing to provide accurate information about training arrangements and player whereabouts on three occasions over a 12-month period.

Minichiello, who is one of the most respected figures in British sport, told the Guardian he believes a bigger problem is the lack of testing in the game.

Shortly after the 2015 MLB amateur draft, then-assistant White Sox scouting director Nick Hostetler sat down for a conversation with general manager Rick Hahn. While amid an eventual 76-86 season and with a disappointing 2016 season in which they tried to contend still to come, they were already mapping out an overhaul for the entire baseball operations department.

“I thought we needed to a better job of communicating, we needed to do a better job of using more of our analytics, tying that into our scouting aspect and getting the full picture of who the player is,” Hostetler said in an interview last week with Dan Bernstein on 670 The Score. “I felt those were two things that we needed to tackle and do it rather quickly. We made sure that right off the start, we did that in 2016.”

Less than a decade ago, the hockey analytics community was centered on a handful of blogs and data-scraping websites. Today the field is far more diverse, with people of differing background and experience contributing new ideas and an increasing amount of overlap between the numbers people and the professional hockey men at the top of the NHL food-chain.

The explosion in the field over the last 10 years, along with the steadily increasing number of top contributors disappearing into NHL organizations make it difficult to offer a capsule summary of everything that’s going on across the league. There are, however, some broad areas where significant progress was made in 2016 and which bear watching in 2017.

… The whole process was guided by passion and nostalgia rather than logic and need. Pep and the Barcelona board tried to make Fabregas’ square peg fit into a round hole. Cesc’s homecoming didn’t have a fairytale ending, and he wound up leaving Barcelona, again.

Fernando Torres’ return to Atletico Madrid doesn’t have the forced fit of the Cesc Fabregas saga. Torres and the club seemed to come together because destiny dictated so. They’re like two high school sweethearts reuniting after years apart and falling back in love. They were always dear to one another but they needed to grow apart, to get closer.

Torres needed a new challenge and an opportunity to win titles. Atletico needed space from their boy captain to build a foundation and have a chance at breaking the Barça-Madrid dominance. For the most part, the two got what they wanted.

… it is worth restating how transfer rumours work in relation to the clubs they concern. While a certain proportion of stories come from genuine sources via reputable journalists, a far higher proportion are factually baseless and are disseminated by websites with lax editorial policies, often in the form of rehashed articles and indiscriminate gossip round-ups. The sheer number of stories and the frequency with which they are published creates the impression of fervent transfer activity at almost every club, while the reality is that many of them are relatively inactive, especially in the January transfer window. This gives fans a false impression of how much business their clubs are likely to do, while also building them up for constant disappointment as supposed transfer targets pass them by.

It is not difficult to see why clubs might want to take greater control of this process, and to better manage expectations. Supporters often grow increasingly frustrated as mooted transfers fail to materialise, even if the transfers in question are little more than media conjecture.

… To try to shed more light on work in tennis, the Game Insight Group at Tennis Australia has developed a work metric. Myself and the other scientists of GIG knew that work in a match is about more than the distance a player covers. It also about the speed of their movement, the direction of their movement, and the number and intensity of changes of direction. For example, moving the same distance and rate to the side requires more effort than moving forward. Changing direction after a 2 second sprint requires more energy than continuously running in the same period of time. All of these are factors that are a good measure of work should take into account.

Using tracking data of player movement during matches, we combine the speed, direction, and distance covered of athletes into a single number that encapsulates their total work during a rally in units of Joules. Figure 1 shows the average work per shot and average work per point (over all shots in a rally). Based on matches from the past 3 years at the Australian Open, Sir Andy Murray was found to have the highest work rate, expending an average of 350 Joules per shot. Because the World No. 1 also likes to rally, he had one of the three highest averages in the average work per point (which is influenced by the player’s work rate and how many shots they play in a typical rally), clustering with David Ferrer and Gilles Simon.

Hard-working Rafael Nadal is also in the top 10 workers among the men and Novak Djokovic and Roger Federer aren’t much further behind, though Djokovic had a higher average work per point among these three.

Over the past 100 years, social science has generated a tremendous number of theories on the topics of individual and collective human behaviour. However, it has been much less successful at reconciling the innumerable inconsistencies and contradictions among these competing explanations, a situation that has not been resolved by recent advances in ‘computational social science’. In this Perspective, I argue that this ‘incoherency problem’ has been perpetuated by an historical emphasis in social science on the advancement of theories over the solution of practical problems. I argue that one way for social science to make progress is to adopt a more solution-oriented approach, starting first with a practical problem and then asking what theories (and methods) must be brought to bear to solve it. Finally, I conclude with a few suggestions regarding the sort of problems on which progress might be made and how we might organize ourselves to solve them.

As a sociologist who spends a lot of time in the company of physicists, computer scientists and other outsiders to my field, I am often asked a question of the sort: “What is the social science perspective on X?”, where X is some topic of interest. To a social scientist, the question sounds hopelessly naïve: for any topic X, social science has dozens, if not hundreds, of perspectives, but no single perspective on which there is anything close to universal agreement. Nevertheless, I would argue that it is worth taking the question seriously, if only because it highlights an important difference between the social and physical/engineering sciences.

… as it turns out, a sideline bias in the NFL is real, and it’s spectacular. To prove it, we looked at the rates at which refs call the NFL’s most severe penalties, including defensive pass interference, aggressive infractions like personal fouls and unnecessary roughness, and offensive holding calls, based on where the offensive team ran its play.

For three common penalties, the direction of the play — that is, whether it’s run toward the offensive or defensive team’s sideline — makes a significant difference. In other words, refs make more defensive pass interference calls on the offensive team’s sideline but more offensive holding calls on the defensive team’s sideline. What’s more, these differences aren’t uniform across the field — the effect only shows up on plays run, roughly, between the 32-yard lines, the same space where coaches and players are allowed to stand during play.

The NCAA tournament selection committee’s reliance on the RPI as a significant metric could end soon, with officials set to consult analytics experts on Jan. 20 in Indianapolis and discuss the creation of a new standard of analysis.

According to an article posted on NCAA.com on Friday, Dan Gavitt, the NCAA’s senior vice president of basketball, and Jim Schaus, Ohio’s athletic director and a member of the NCAA tournament selection committee, will meet with Jeff Sagarin (Sagarin), Kevin Pauga (KPI), Ken Pomeroy (KenPom.com) and Ben Alamar (ESPN’s BPI) to discuss the selection process and consider a new measuring stick.