Applied Sports Science newsletter – November 17, 2017

… “I wish there was a recipe to make a pro soccer player, but I don’t know,” says Jeff Sargent, with a laugh, when asked what he tells others eager to know how his son honed his gifts. “Honestly, what I tell them is, it was Josh. Josh did it. He was born with a lot of talent and developed it. He worked very hard.

“Probably more than I would even want him to – I know some parents push their kids a lot, and I never had to push him. He was always getting me off the couch and making me go out and play with him. He was just that kind of kid. That’s something that was in Josh. I didn’t give that to him. He had that.”

… at the tail end of yet another standout season with the Seattle Sounders and ahead of Tuesday’s Western Conference final first leg against Houston, it is fair to speculate just how high Roldan might still rise. Given that he hasn’t bumped up against any obstacle so far placed before him, what is his ultimate ceiling?

“The one thing that has been proven that if you surround him by any group of players, he’ll rise to them, and over time, surpass them,” said Jamie Clark, his coach at the University of Washington. “The question is how many great players do you surround him with? Will he get the chance to rise again?”

Roldan is still only 22 years old, and although it feels as though he’s been a Sounders centerpiece forever now, this is still only his third season as a pro.

Washington Nationals slugger Bryce Harper is a hot topic this winter. The five-time all-star and 2015 NL MVP — earned during a season in which he turned in one of the best performances of all time — has just one year remaining until free agency, making him the most intriguing player of the 2018 free agent class.

A talent like Harper doesn’t hit the market often. Since entering the majors as a 19-year-old in 2012, he has batted .285 with an OPS of .902, creating runs at a rate that is 41 percent higher than the league average after accounting for league and park effects (141 wRC+), placing him 11th overall in that span. His 27.7 Wins Above Replacement, as calculated by FanGraphs.com, rank 10th, and that’s why it’s going to cost a king’s ransom to keep him in a Nationals uniform.

Straight sprinting is the most frequent physical action prior
to goals for the scoring and assisting player (1). Sprinting
capacity separates soccer players of varying standards of play
(2, 3). Total sprint distance and number of sprints undertaken
during games have increased by 35% and 85% in English Premier League players from the 2006-07 to the 2012-13 season
(4). Additionally, professional players have become faster over
time (2, 3). Clearly, sprinting skills are becoming more and
more important in modern soccer.

Monitoring performance and fatigue is key in elite sports,
particularly to allow optimal loading (1) and in turn,
optimize overall players fitness, health and decrease injury risk
(2) relative usefulness. To assess true changes in performance
and thus infer on potential fatigue, practitioners need to know
the signal-to-noise ratio of their measures to make the right
decisions (3). While reliability data have been reported in the
literature for both maximal cycling performance (4) and jump-
ing performance (5), no studies have yet compared these two
test in the same population to assess their relative usefulness.

This study focuses on an injury prevention exercise programme (IPEP), Knee Control, which has been shown to reduce the incidence of acute knee injury in female adolescent football players. The aim was to explore the factors influencing coaches’ adoption and use of Knee Control within female football in Sweden. This was a qualitative study involving interviews with 20 strategically selected coaches for female football teams, predominantly adolescent teams. The semi-structured interview guide was influenced by the Health Belief Model, and an ecological perspective was adopted during the interviews. Interviews were analysed with qualitative content analysis. The results illustrate the different influences that interact on adoption and use of Knee Control by coaches. The coaches described themselves as crucial for Knee Control adoption and use, but external facilitators and barriers such as resources for training, social support from other coaches, clubs and football associations and player buy-in were also described as important. Knee Control characteristics, such as how well the programme fit the team, also influenced use of Knee Control. Many coaches modified the programme to improve player buy-in and Knee Control fit. Such modifications may risk compromising the preventive effect but may increase feasibility, i.e. the ease of using Knee Control, and thereby long-term use. These findings may guide the design and delivery of future IPEPs, and improve use of Knee Control, for example by expanding the programme to fit different target groups and supporting coaches and players in the use of Knee Control.

Objectives: (1) To objectively monitor and describe sleeping patterns of elite football players after matches during a competitive season and (2) to describe the variability in sleeping patterns between these contexts.

Methods: Actimetry was used to determine sleeping patterns of 25 elite players from 1 Portuguese First League (Liga NOS) club for at least 3 normal training days (TDs) as a baseline and then after various matches, including home (HM), away (AM), day (DM) and night (NM). Actimetry-derived sleep measures included total sleep duration (TSD), sleep onset latency, sleep efficiency (SE) and wake episode duration.

Results: On TD, both TSD (6:36 h) and SE (85%) were below recommended healthy ranges of 7–8 h and >90%, respectively. TSD was even less after NM compared to both TD (–65 min) and DM (–65 min) (P < 0.05), without differences between DM and TD (P > 0.05). Additionally, TSD was greater in AM compared to HM (+77 min, P = 0.001).

Conclusions: The primary findings of this study were the significant reduction in total sleep duration and later bedtime following (night) matches compared to normal training days.

Background:

Athletes who specialize in their sport at an early age may be at risk for burnout, overuse injury, and reduced attainment of elite status. Timing of sport specialization has not been studied in elite basketball athletes.
Hypothesis:

National Basketball Association (NBA) players who played multiple sports during adolescence would be less likely to experience injury and would have higher participation rates in terms of games played and career length compared with single-sport athletes.
Study Design:

Descriptive epidemiology study.
Methods:

First-round draft picks from 2008 to 2015 in the NBA were included in the study. From publically available records from the internet, the following data were collected for each athlete: participation in high school sports, major injuries sustained in the NBA, percentage of games played in the NBA, and whether the athlete was still active in the NBA. Athletes who participated in sports in addition to basketball during high school were defined as multisport athletes and were compared with athletes who participated only in basketball in high school.
Results:

Two hundred thirty-seven athletes were included in the study, of which 36 (15%) were multisport athletes and 201 (85%) were single-sport athletes in high school. The multisport cohort played in a statistically significantly greater percentage of total games (78.4% vs 72.8%; P < .001). Participants in the multisport cohort were less likely to sustain a major injury during their career (25% vs 43%, P = .03). Finally, a greater percentage of the multisport athletes were active in the league at time of data acquisition, indicating increased longevity in the NBA (94% vs 81.1%; P = .03). Conclusion:

While a minority of professional basketball athletes participated in multiple sports in high school, those who were multisport athletes participated in more games, experienced fewer major injuries, and had longer careers than those who participated in a single sport. Further research is needed to determine the reasons behind these differences.

The aims of this review were to collate the existing literature encompassing heart rate (HR) monitoring in basketball to: (i) identify the applications of HR measurement; (ii) report HR responses in male and female players during training and game-play; (iii) evaluate use of current HR-based training load models; and (iv) provide recommendations for future research and best practice approaches for basketball practitioners. HR monitoring in basketball carries three primary applications: (i) monitoring exercise intensity; (ii) assessing player fatigue status; and (iii) quantifying internal training load. When interpreting the available training and game-play HR data in basketball players, key differences have been observed between playing positions and playing levels. Sex- and age-based differences in HR responses during basketball training and game-play are apparent across separate studies; however further research exploring HR responses in wider player groups is needed, especially in female and junior players. There is also a lack of research directly comparing player HR responses during training and game-play to ascertain the effectiveness of different drills in preparing players for competition. HR-based models have been frequently used to quantify the internal training load in basketball players, including Banister’s Training Impulse, Lucia’s Training Impulse, and Edwards’ Summated-Heart-Rate-Zones (SHRZ). The SHRZ model appears to hold practical advantages and better detect changes in player responses across training cycles compared to other approaches. Practical outcomes of this review center on recommendations for position-specific training plans, drills to promote desired cardiovascular stress, analysis of HR outcome measures, and ideal training load monitoring approaches.

… Google has struggled to make its video ads on YouTube relevant to what people are watching. Facebook has the same issue with the thousands of clips of videos uploaded from people’s phones each day. Part of the problem is their algorithms can’t see the images flashing across each video, to help it target human eyeballs more effectively.

That would need some extremely heavy computations, in real time and at a massive scale.

Such is one of the more mundane pursuits for artificial intelligence: targeting you more effectively with video ads. And to do this, Google and Facebook need more powerful chips to process all the visual data uploaded each day to their platforms.

Today they, along with Microsoft, are evaluating the latest AI-focused chip produced by U.K. startup Graphcore, two sources close to the company say.

Time for a pedograph, folks. What do we have here?

To review :

Let’s divide the foot into 3 sections: the rear foot, the mid foot and the fore foot.

First of all, are they symmetrical? Look carefully at the fore foot on each side. NO! the right foot looks different than the left, so we are looking at asymmetrical pathology.

After 20 hours of practice, 15 hours of class and a four hour game against a tough competitor, Olive Sagopolu finds he needs to just sit down and play his ukulele.

This is how senior University of Wisconsin defensive tackle Olive Sagapolu prefers to unwind when life as a student-athlete gets frantic. The native Samoan learned to play the ukulele when he was 6-years-old and has not stopped since. Most of what he plays is from his childhood in Pago Pago but sometimes he treats his roommates to more familiar selections like Celine Dion’s “My Heart Will Go On.”

College can present a variety of stressors, causing many students to experience mental health issues or disorders, and student athletes are no exception. Whether it be anxiety, work overload or depression, student athletes face many of the issues non-athlete, UW students encounter.

Take Home Message: A career-ending injury makes a professional athlete more likely to have depression symptoms during retirement. Experiencing chronic pain and maintaining a high sense of athletic identity also increase risk of depression.

Brett Brown has seen some things. But with most of the pieces now in place, can the head coach turn the Sixers’ grand vision into results?

… Spurs were the ‘hottest’ team in England for parts of the last 30 months. Rather than just judging seasons as ending in May, Spurs had won more points over 38 games than any other team in England at multiple points last season. While fixture balance may have played a part in this, our World Super League model estimates that they were actually the best team in the country for an even more significant part of last season, and have been the country’s best team in the calendar year of 2017.

It’s fair to ask why this matters – after all, it’s the final league table that determines who is champions and who is relegated. However, we also make a lot of decisions based on the league table that is printed in newspapers every week.