Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 14, 2018

… Nowitzki had left ankle surgery on April 5. Mavericks training camp begins Sept. 22. Nowitzki said Wednesday that he hasn’t yet been cleared to do stringent lateral-movement work, but he said he ran sprints Wednesday morning and later told The News: “I’ll definitely be ready for camp.”

Not that rehabbing the ankle has been easy for a player of Nowitzki’s, uh, advanced age.

“Obviously you don’t heal like you’re 20, so there were some frustrating weeks where I’m partying up at Cuban’s 60th and next thing you know my ankle is swollen,” Nowitzki said.

Ledecky will keep training at Stanford even though she is no longer eligible for college swimming, and she plans to work in the university’s Mind and Body Lab as she seeks a psychology degree.

… As the couple’s relationship progressed, Verlander’s body began to show signs of wear. His arm started hurting during the 2013 season, and although he managed to perform at a high level—he earned an All-Star spot and pitched well throughout the playoffs—the pain steadily grew. Then, during the offseason—a time in which rest and training should render one renewed—Verlander hurt his groin while doing a squat.

It was a freak injury—one that can happen but typically does not without some sort of slow erosion or mounting pressure being put on the body. An MRI revealed that, in addition to separating the tendon from the bone, Verlander also had an undiagnosed core muscle injury in his rectus abdominis (abdominal muscles). His adductors (hip muscles), doctors explained, had finally given out after having compensated for a weakened core for some time. “It had slowly started peeling away,” Verlander says. “Something’s gotta take the brunt of it, right?”

Verlander needed bilateral sports hernia repair surgery. So he went to a top surgeon in Philadelphia and afterward recovered in a nearby hotel. Upton—living in New York at the time—was the first person to visit him. They watched TV and played board games in their pajamas. Lots of Yahtzee. Both Upton and Verlander, it turned out, were fiercely competitive; upon losing, they cursed and threw things. “That’s probably where I’m most comfortable,” Upton says. “Playing board games and joking around and just hanging out is kind of what I love doing.”

Five conference championships, five national titles, an average of 12.5 wins per season: Nick Saban’s past decade at Alabama lives among sports’ all-time great dynasties. It also begs imitation. Piece by piece, fallen rival by fallen rival, the tendrils of Saban’s “process” span college football, his blueprint reshaping an entire sport.

Participation in sports offers both short-term and long-term physical and psychosocial benefits for children and adolescents. However, an overemphasis on competitive success in youth sports may limit the benefits of participation, and could increase the risk of injury, burnout, and disengagement from physical activity. The National Basketball Association and USA Basketball recently assembled a group of leading experts to share their applied research and practices to address these issues. This review includes the group’s analysis of the existing body of research regarding youth sports participation and the related health, performance, and psychosocial outcomes. Based upon this, age-specific recommendations for basketball participation are provided that aim to promote a healthy and positive experience for youth basketball players. [full text]

It’s early on a gorgeous summer Saturday morning but the steamy gym is crowded. It’s time to improve basketball skills — the hard work of personal development takes place in the off-season — and time spent around and on the court is invaluable.

But instead of kids working on ball-handling or shooting skills or doing the drills that will make them better players once the snow starts flying, the stands are full of coaches learning to be better coaches, a vital step in the progression not only of themselves but of the game in Canada as a whole.

In The Talent Lab, Owen Slot brings unique access to Team GB’s intelligence, sharing for the first time the incredible breakthroughs and insights they discovered that often extend way beyond sport. Using lessons from organisations as far afield as the Yehudi Menuhin School of Music, the NFL Draft, the Royal College of Surgeons and the SAS, it shows how talent can be discovered, created, shaped and sustained.

Charting the success of the likes of Chris Hoy, Max Whitlock, Adam Peaty, Ed Clancy, Lizzy Yarnold, Dave Henson, Tom Daley, Jessica Ennis-Hill, Katherine Grainger, the Brownlee Brothers, Helen Glover, Anthony Joshua and the women’s hockey team, The Talent Lab tells just how it was done and how any team, business or individual might learn from it.

OBJECTIVE:

To conduct a survey of parents to determine their knowledge of sport volume recommendations and examine their perceptions toward sport specialization.
DESIGN:

Cross-sectional survey.
SETTING:

Youth sport athletic tournaments, competitions, and practices.
PATIENTS OR OTHER PARTICIPANTS:

Parents (n = 1000, 614 women, age: 44.5 ± 6.7 years) of youth athletes completed the survey. Parents had to have a child between 10 and 18 years of age who participated in organized sport in the previous 12 months.
INTERVENTIONS:

The survey was anonymous and consisted of yes/no and Likert-scale questions and consisted of background of parent and child and perceptions and knowledge of safe sport recommendations. An expert panel validated the survey.
MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES:

Data were summarized by frequencies, proportions (%), and mean values and SDs, when appropriate. Chi-square analyses were used to determine if parent sex influenced distributions.
RESULTS:

Over 80% of parents had no knowledge of sport volume recommendations regarding h/wk (84.5%), mo/yr (82.2%), or simultaneous participation in multiple leagues (89.9%). Twenty-four percent of parents considered it appropriate to participate in multiple leagues in the same sport, whereas 60.5% considered it appropriate to participate in multiple leagues of a different sport. Thirty-four percent of parents indicated that they were concerned about the risk of injury in youth sports. Although 55% of parents considered sport specialization a problem in youth sports, only 43.3% thought that year-round sport participation increased the chances of sustaining an overuse injury. Female parents were more likely to be concerned about injury and believe that year-round sport participation results in overuse injury compared with men.
CONCLUSIONS:

Recommendations associated with youth sport participation are not well known. However, parents are concerned about the risk of injury and consider sport specialization a problem.

This season, Eredivisie CV and the 18 Eredivisie (Dutch Premier League) clubs will start collectively gathering and sharing sports data on all matches in the Eredivisie. The Eredivisie stadiums are equipped with ultra-modern cameras that register the movements of all the players and the ball, automatically converting these images into data. The statistics are used to analyse and develop the players’ and the team’s performance.

My research has found that the risk of exercise addiction in ultra-endurance athletes (marathon runners, long distance cyclists, half / full Ironman triathletes) is 44.7%. This figure is higher than has previously been reported in other sports.

My research also found that endurance athletes using connected health technologies (such as fitness trackers) and social media in their training are increasing their risk of becoming addicted to exercise.

Athletes who use lots of technology and are at risk of exercise addiction are often using technology to seek out an online community to cope with the loneliness of their training. These online communities support athletes, but also facilitate them in extensively comparing themselves against other athletes which can cause them stress, increase injury risk, lower potential performance and reduce enjoyment in their sport.

It’s little secret NFL teams often turn to science to gain an edge for their players, from sleep monitoring and movement trackers to smoothie ingredients.

The New York Giants, in tandem with their training camp sponsor, Quest Diagnostics, are now focusing on another one: collecting and testing players’ sweat to create hydration plans for each player.

Last month at the start of training camp, each Giants player wore sweat absorption patches that were then chemically analyzed in the following days.

Three years ago, their players wore gloves provided by Gatorade’s scientific institute, and the sweat was literally squeezed into test tubes. That experiment tested how much the players sweat and not the composition of the secretion, said Ronnie Barnes, the Giants’ head athletic trainer. The Quest test analyzes what chemicals a player might be losing and prescribes the hydration necessary.

… While former NFL head coach and analyst Tony Dungy doesn’t love to see players holding out, he does understand why players do it. Dungy said he thinks the physical nature of the sport and the risk of it plays a big part.

“In the NFL, the short careers, you want to take advantage of it when you can,” Dungy told Business Insider from the NFL Experience in New York City, where he and his wife, Lauren, were promoting their new children’s books.

… As their rivals like to point out City have spent a lot of money but they have, at least recently, spent it well. There is no waste there, no £30m embarrassment shunted out of sight – which is what happens when a club has a coherent vision from top to bottom, when players are signed to a plan rather than dashing about in the hours before the transfer window closes, shouting the names of centre-backs and prices into the air in the hope something will stick.

What hope, then, for the rest of the league? There is the obvious caveat that, for all the ease of City’s win, this was one league game. Guardiola’s first season in England began with 10 successive victories. The assumption then was City were strolling to the title only for rhythm to be lost in six winless games that began with a 3-3 draw against Celtic. Mood and morale can change quickly and perhaps particularly so at a club like City in which the system is king.

It is one of the fascinations of football that what is ostensibly a strength – the philosophy that imbues the club with coherence – can under pressure become a weakness, personality sublimated to the system so that when a leader is needed nobody any longer has the individuality to grab a game and wrench it back to order.

What began as a series of quiet, scattered rumours has grown into a loud drum beat: John Gibbons might be on his way out as manager of the Toronto Blue Jays.

As you might expect, reactions to this potential move vary wildly. On one side, you have the #gibbythebest crowd, Gibbons fans who appreciate his amiable demeanor and also the fact that he is most definitely not John Farrell.

Beyond those initial feelings, broader questions emerge. Is John Gibbons a good manager? If he isn’t, who is? And in an era in which we can seemingly quantify everything, do we even know what makes a good manager? Is there any reliable way to measure it?

Alexander Zverev is winning Masters titles. Stefanos Tsitsipas is beating top ten players. Denis Shapovalov, Frances Tiafoe, and even Alex De Minaur are making life more difficult for ATP veterans.

For most of the last decade, the story of men’s tennis has been the degree to which the game is getting older. Even now, thirty-somethings hold half of the places in the top ten. Wave after wave of hyped prospects have failed to take over the sport, settling in for a long fight to the top. On Monday, Juan Martin del Potro, once hailed as the man who would topple the Big Four, will reach a new career-best ranking of No. 3 … six weeks away from his 30th birthday.

At last, though, men’s tennis appears to be getting younger. Teenagers Shapovalov, Tiafoe, and De Minaur are rising just as some of the game’s crustiest vets are on their way out: 36-year-olds David Ferrer and Julien Benneteau are calling it quits this year, tumbling in the rankings alongside the likes of Feliciano Lopez and Ivo Karlovic.

The result is that the average age of the ATP top 50 is falling–something it hasn’t done for a really, really long time.