Applied Sports Science newsletter – February 6, 2017

Applied Sports Science news articles, blog posts and research papers for February 6, 2017

 

Playing through pain: 6 sluggers hoping for better health

MLB.com, Mike Petriello from

The legendary Ted Williams once said that squarely hitting a round baseball with a round bat is the hardest thing to do in all of sports, and he said that before the age of one-inning relievers and sliders that have velocity and movement. Now, imagine trying to hit Andrew Miller or Clayton Kershaw or Noah Syndergaard while also dealing with an ache or pain that prevents you from being at your best.

Yet, we know that hitters are trying to do this all the time. And while there’s a certain virtue to showing up every day and trying to play through pain, particularly in terms of gaining clubhouse respect, players can hurt their teams when they’re so limited that they just can’t play to their usual potential.

We saw this in 2015 with Yasmani Grandal (shoulder), Hanley Ramirez (shoulder), and Mike Trout (wrist), among others. Can we identify hitters who had seasons in 2016 that were limited by injury, and who might be expected to do more in 2017 if healthy?

 

Ian Mahinmi returns to practice: ‘I feel like I’m fixed’

The Washington Post, Candace Buckner from

Ian Mahinmi has been here before, standing in front of assembled media members after sweating through a Washington Wizards practice. At various points through this season, Mahinmi has been optimistic that he’d soon return to the court on a full-time basis. Each time his knees forced a detour back to a specialist’s office and trainer’s room. While the Wizards have played 49 games, Mahinmi has made just one appearance.

On Friday, Mahinmi, 30, was back at the familiar position — fresh off his first live action since undergoing platelet-rich plasma on both knees more than a month ago. Mahinmi practiced with no limitations and even played halfcourt five-on-five. This time, unlike the other false starts, Mahinmi feels more confident about his return to the lineup.

“We’re getting really close,” Mahinmi said, though the team offered no timeline for return. “I might need more than one time going five-on-five to play but this is definitely the closest I’ve been in a minute now. It feels really good. I’m just happy to be back.”

 

MLS Vancouver Whitecaps draft Lawrence’s Nerwinski as 7th overall pick

MercerSpace.com, Rich Fisher from

… Nerwinski was offered partial scholarships to several mid-level Division I programs, including his dad’s alma mater at Rider. His lone offer from a major school came from the University of Connecticut, but only as a non-scholarship player. Coach Ray Reid laid it out honestly to Nerwinski that he would be a practice player, Nerwinski had enough faith in himself to take his chances with one of the nation’s premier programs.

“When they initially contacted me, they were No. 1 in the country the past four years, so I just thought it was unbelievable,” he said. “They weren’t offering me anything, they just kind of said ‘Yeah, you can be on our team.’”

Faced with the biggest decision of his life, Nerwinski sat down with Kevin and his mom, Judith, to discuss the options: get scholarship money and likely guaranteed playing time at a lesser-known program, or try to buck the odds in the big time.

 

Alex Mack sees work pay off with Falcons Super Bowl

SI.com, Michael Rosenberg from

Watch Alex Mack run. You won’t do this, of course, because the Super Bowl features Tom Brady and Matt Ryan and so many other great players, and anyway, Mack is a center. Nobody watches the center. Who watches a center run?

The Falcons watch Mack run all the time. They noticed it right away, when Mack signed with them last off-season, after seven years with the Browns. Julio Jones would catch a Ryan pass 25 yards downfield, and there was 311 pounds worth of Alex Mack, running toward Jones.

“He finishes, especially running downfield, better than anybody I have ever seen,” Falcons left tackle Jake Matthews said Wednesday. And the Falcons’ other starting tackle Ryan Schraeder said: “It’s pretty special, man. Linemen just don’t run as much as he runs.”

 

How Sports Science Helps Athletes Improve

YouTube, Gillette World Sport from

P3 Peak Performance Project is a state of the art performance facility, dedicated to using a data driven approach to carefully analyse athlete performance and help them improve. World Sport joined Dr. Marcus Elliott and Luke Storey to see how, and why they do it.

 

Tom Brady sees teamwide health benefit to increased focus on recovery

ESPN, New England Patriots Blog from

New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady embraced a variety of topics in a memorable four-day stretch at Super Bowl LI, and one that seemed to hit a sweet spot for him was how the team enters Sunday as arguably the healthiest it has ever been at this point of a season.

Yes, the Patriots lost tight end Rob Gronkowski to season-ending back surgery in late November, and that’s a biggie. And fellow tight end Martellus Bennett has been playing through a significant ankle injury that could require attention in the offseason, with the odds high that he’s not the only player who falls into that type of category.

So it’s not a 100 percent clean sheet (it never is at this point), but when considering the Patriots have placed just four players on IR all season (last year: 15) and might not have a single injured player to declare inactive Sunday, it highlights one of the keys to the team’s season.

 

Jurgen Klopp has to adapt or Liverpool players could be pushed beyond limit

The Telegraph (UK), Michael Davison from

In German football, they have a phrase to describe a period in which a club are forced to play three games in seven days: “eine Englische Woche” – ‘an English week’.

England might be renowned – or perhaps notorious – for the sheer quantity of football it inflicts on its elite players, but Jürgen Klopp is probably only now beginning to understand the toll it can take. Back in his native country, clubs have to contend with an Englische Woche around three times per season; at Liverpool, Klopp has already had 10 to contend with and now finds himself in the middle of another ahead of Tuesday night’s match with Chelsea.

Last year, the first attempt by Klopp to deal with an English footballing winter cost Liverpool dear. Without a pre-season to adapt to his brand of ‘heavy metal’ football, the regular diet of double training sessions and longer days at the training ground for nutritional and tactical interventions, a group of players who were undercooked in terms of match fitness crumpled. They suffered a raft of soft tissue, non-contact injuries including seven hamstring problems.

 

A Mindful Approach to Time Management

Heleo, Laura Vanderkam and Leah Weiss from

Laura: Could you talk a little bit about what you mean by mindfulness and purpose?

Leah: Mindfulness is a term that is being thrown around in a lot of different contexts. My favorite definition is a combination of intention—setting intention for your attention—with an attitude of curiosity or non-judgment. If you use this definition, then the intention maps onto purpose really nicely. When people start practicing, it brings them back to what their purpose is in a really direct way.

Laura: People’s attention is all over the place these days. We have a tendency to get distracted. What is the upside of bringing more intention to our attention? What does that do for us?
Want more conversations with the world’s great thinkers? Click the shiny blue button!

Leah: When we are clear about what we’re intending to pay attention to, then we’re able to have our actions map onto our larger purpose. For a lot of us, there’s a challenge between what we want our life to look like—and what it actually looks like, in the day to day. When we get this clarity in, “What do I want from my career? What do I want from my home life?” then we are able to think about, “Well, what am I actually doing?”

 

Data Science How-To: Using Apache Spark for Sports Analytics

Pivotal, Chris Rawles from

Apache Spark has become a common tool in the data scientist’s toolbox, and in this post we show how to use the recently released Spark 2.1 for data analysis using data from the National Basketball Association (NBA). All code and examples from this blog post are available on GitHub.

Analytics have become a major tool in the sports world, and in the NBA in particular analytics have shaped how the sport is played. The league has skewed towards taking more 3-point shots due to their high efficiency as measured by points per field goal attempt. In this post we evaluate and analyze this trend in the NBA using season statistics data going back to 1979 along with geospatial shot chart data. The concepts in this post — data cleansing, visualization, and modeling in Spark — are general data science concepts and are applicable for other tasks beyond analyzing sports data. The post concludes with the author’s general impressions about using Spark and with tips and suggestions for new users.

 

Researchers Develop Wearable, Low-Cost Sensor to Measure Skin Hydration

North Carolina State University, NC State News from

Researchers from North Carolina State University have developed a wearable, wireless sensor that can monitor a person’s skin hydration for use in applications that need to detect dehydration before it poses a health problem. The device is lightweight, flexible and stretchable and has already been incorporated into prototype devices that can be worn on the wrist or as a chest patch.
The hydration sensors consist of two electrodes made of an elastic polymer composite that contains conductive silver nanowires. Click to enlarge.

“It’s difficult to measure a person’s hydration quantitatively, which is relevant for everyone from military personnel to athletes to firefighters, who are at risk of health problems related to heat stress when training or in the field,” says John Muth, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at NC State and co-corresponding author of a paper describing the work.

 

How Arsenal and Arsène Wenger Bought Into Analytics – The New York Times

The New York Times, Rory Smith from

… Toward the end of Park’s first season at Arsenal, the 2011-12 campaign, two of the club’s executives approached Wenger, the team’s seemingly immovable manager, with a proposal.

Throughout that year, Arsenal had engaged the services of StatDNA, a sports analytics company based in Chicago. The arrangement was based on exclusivity; Arsenal had paid around $250,000 to ensure that StatDNA would not provide insights for any of its rivals.

There had been some skepticism among Wenger’s back-room staff about the value of that deal. Now Ivan Gazidis, Arsenal’s chief executive, and its head of business development, Hendrik Almstadt, wanted to do something even more radical.

With the use of and belief in analytics growing at many Premier League clubs, a number of Arsenal’s peers had approached StatDNA, looking to employ its services. Gazidis and Almstadt were determined not to let that happen. To thwart their rivals, they proposed buying StatDNA outright, for a fee around $4 million.

 

Shallow MLS player pool continues to hamper national team

Los Angeles Times, Kevin Baxter from

… The challenge now is to develop an environment in which U.S. players can stay here and develop. The league and its teams have spent millions on academy programs stretching down to the U-12 level while U.S. Soccer, under Klinsmann, overhauled its coaching-education program at the youth level to improve both the level of play and instruction.

Those are innovations that could eventually pay huge dividends for both the league and the national team — just as Klinsmann’s decision to accelerate the restructuring of Germany’s youth programs when he coached the national team there paid off with a World Cup title in Brazil.

“The real foundations for growth are going to be in the development of American players, the domestic talent,” Ivan Gazidis, chief executive for EPL club Arsenal and a MLS executive at the league’s founding, told ESPN last summer. “MLS is doing the right thing in investing in youth development, the academy system.

 

What College Recruiters Really Look For In A Player

Hockey Player Development | Prodigy Hockey from

… It’s the 5 S’s: Speed, Skill, Smarts, Size, and Spirit.

Although true, these components of your talent only tell half the story of the process that coaches go through in their decision to recruit a player. What I’d like to do is take you inside that process through the lens of a college hockey coach. Through this lens you will get a better understanding of what many coaches are looking for, and how to go about putting yourself in the best position to succeed and be recruited.

1. Play for a Good Coach

 

Data, Analytics, Probabilities and the Super Bowl

The Next Platform, Jeffrey Burt from

Data is quickly becoming the coin of the realm in most aspects of the business world, and analytics the best way for organizations to cash in on it. It’s easy to be taken in by the systems and devices – much of the discussion around the Internet of Things tends to be around the things themselves, whether small sensors, mobile devices, self-driving cars or huge manufacturing systems. But the real value is in the data generated by these machines, and the ability to extract that data, analyze it and make decisions based on it in as close to real-time as possible.

There are few areas in this world where stats and data are discussed more than in sports, and few sporting events that are more watched than the Super Bowl. The 51st edition of the game is this Sunday in Houston, when the New England Patriots take on the Atlanta Falcons. Jessie Piburn, research scientist in the Geographic Data Sciences department of the Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) in Tennessee, shifted the focus of his data science expertise onto the game.

In a panel discussion called “The Science of the Super Bowl” put on by Newswise and later in talking with The Next Platform, Piburn talked about how the NFL and its teams – particularly the Patriots and Falcons – are rapidly growing their use data analytics, how what they’re doing translates over into the world of enterprises and how human input is still important to the process. It’s gotten so important for the Patriots and team owner Robert Kraft that he spun out a new business called KAGR (Kraft Analytics Group) to not only leverage the data they were getting to better engage fans but also to offer technology to other companies for their own data science efforts.

 

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