Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 24, 2018

… Cornerback Sidney Jones was asked what he’s seen out of Wentz recently.

“I’ve seen greatness, man,” he replied.

Wentz ran the scout team in practice during the first two weeks of the regular season while awaiting medical clearance. It was a way to get work against the first-team defense while providing Jim Schwartz’s unit with optimal looks.

… Kovalchuk has been away from North American rinks since 2013. That’s when he retired from the NHL, leaving 12 years and $77 million on the table from his New Jersey Devils contract, and departed for Russia’s Kontinental Hockey League, where he played the past six seasons.

He decided to return to the NHL this year, signing a three-year contract with the Kings with an annual salary-cap hit of $6.25 million. Then came the questions: What did he have left? What player could he be in a younger, faster league than the one he left for his homeland? These questions will be answered during the grinding NHL regular season. But there’s one question that Los Angeles coach John Stevens feels Kovalchuk has already answered in the preseason: whether he’s still deadly on the power play.

The answer? He definitely is.

Kristaps Porzingis is back with his teammates, though the New York Knicks don’t know when he’ll be back on the court.

Joakim Noah won’t be back, though the terms of his departure still are being negotiated.

So while there are questions, the Knicks also feel they have certainty with the way they are building their team.

They insist their future first-round draft picks will be used to select players for their own team, not to be dangled in trades that could land them an established player.

The North Carolina Courage are not about to sneak up on anybody. Not after setting league records for wins (17), goals (53), points (57), goals against (17), and losses (1). Their roster is stocked with top players, including former MVPs Lynn Williams and Crystal Dunn, 2018 MVP candidate McCall Zerboni, plus last year’s Defender of the Year, Abby Dahlkemper.

There is one player, however, who does not get the accolades of her teammates, even though she wears the captain’s armband and never came off the field in 2018. That player is Abby Erceg.

“Every thing she does are things that a leader should do,” goalkeeper Katelyn Rowland says of Erceg, who is referred to almost exclusively around the team as “Kiwi.”

Approaches to quantify decrement in change-of-direction speed during repeated sprints in basketball players have traditionally used total performance time, which is strongly influenced by linear speed. The purpose of this study was to compare performance decrement across change-of-direction sprints using total performance time and a novel approach that better isolates change-of-direction speed, termed change-of-direction deficit (CODD). Semiprofessional basketball players (N = 8; 19.9 ± 1.5 years; 183.0 ± 9.6 cm; 77.7 ± 16.9 kg) completed 12 × 20-m change-of-direction sprints (Agility 5-0-5 trials) with 20-second recoveries between each sprint. Agility 5-0-5 performance time was taken as the duration to cover 5 m immediately before and after (10 m in total) a 180° directional change. Change-of-direction deficit was calculated as the difference between mean 10- and 20-m split time determined during reference 20-m linear sprints in a separate session and Agility 5-0-5 time in each sprint. Performance decrement was calculated for each approach as: ([total time/ideal time] × 100) − 100. Comparisons between approaches were made using a paired-sample t-test, effect size analyses, and magnitude-based inferences. A significantly greater (P < 0.001; effect size = 2.16, very large; almost certainly higher) performance decrement was apparent using CODD (5.99 ± 1.88%) than Agility 5-0-5 performance time (2.84 ± 0.84%). The present findings indicate that change-of-direction speed measured with CODD shows promise in providing different insight and deteriorates more than total performance time during repeated sprints in basketball players. Change-of-direction deficit has potential to better isolate decrements in change-of-direction speed across repeated sprints compared with total performance time.

… It seems practically impossible to recruit this many subjects for something like a multi-month weight training study. Should I then conclude that doing statistically rigorous exercise science—on the kinds of non-tautological effects that people actually care about—is impossible?

(And then on top of this, there are concerns about noisy measurements, ecological validity, and so on. It seems that the rot that infects other high noise, small sample disciplines, also infects exercise science, to an even greater degree.)

When teenagers seem to be experiencing conflicting emotions at the same time and struggling to make sense of them all, it may be because they are.

That’s the finding of a new study by Leah Somerville and Erik Nook, a graduate student working in her lab. Other co-authors were Katie McLaughlin, now an assistant professor of psychology; Psychology Department researcher Stephanie Sasse; and Hilary Lambert of the University of Washington. The research was described in a paper in Psychological Science.

“In particular, what we wanted to look at is how people can take the messy mix of feelings we have at any moment and try to make sense of them by giving them specific labels … and how that process changes,” Nook said. “Because some people are very specific in making sense of what they’re feeling, whereas other people might just say they feel bad, but can’t be more specific than that.” This ability to specifically identify one’s emotions is called emotion differentiation or emotion granularity.

Purpose:

Poor athlete buy-in and adherence to training monitoring systems (TMS) can be problematic in elite sport. This is a significant issue, as failure to record, interpret, and respond appropriately to negative changes in athlete wellbeing and training status may result in undesirable consequences, such as maladaptation and/or underperformance. This study examined the perceptions of elite athletes to their TMS, and their primary reasons for non-completion.
Methods:

Nine national team sprint athletes participated in semi-structured interviews on their perceptions of their TMS. Interview data was analysed qualitatively, based on grounded theory, and TMS adherence information was collected.
Results:

Thematic analysis showed that athletes reported their main reason for poor buy-in to TMS was a lack of feedback on their monitoring data from key staff. Further, training modifications made in response to meaningful changes in monitoring data were sometimes perceived to be disproportionate, resulting in dishonest reporting practices.
Conclusions:

Perceptions of opaque or unfair decision-making on training programme modifications and insufficient feedback were the primary causes for poor athlete TMS adherence. Supporting TMS implementation with a behavioural change model that targets problem areas could improve buy-in and enable limited resources to be appropriately directed.

Recently, there has been growing interest in injury prevention for football and other team sports, including the development of models and frameworks to guide injury prevention efforts. However, many existing models are geared towards the conduct of injury prevention research and do not reflect the everyday injury prevention approach of sports medicine and sports science practitioners working in professional teams. Here, we present a new model, the Team-sport Injury Prevention (TIP) cycle, specifically aimed at the sports team medicine/science practitioner. It involves a simple continual cycle with three key phases: (Re) evaluate, Identify and Intervene. These phases incorporate key aspects of previous models, along with important implementation aspects. By progressing through the model’s three phases, team medicine/science practitioners can develop a context-specific and dynamic injury prevention strategy.

… it will be months before we know whether the NFL’s 2018 “call to action” on concussions will produce a tangible result. What is clear, however, is that the league will press on with a new process that has dramatically altered its football decision-making, a method that has set the stage for further changes at a pace unheard of for an otherwise plodding league monolith.

The 2018 kickoff and use of helmet rule changes were based on data gathered as part of a $60 million partnership with biomechanical engineers who presented what the league’s competition committee considered incontrovertible and objective justification for action.

“The kickoff rule and the lowering of the helmet rule are changes made by the competition committee because they were infused by a level of data and a level of expertise that it didn’t have available before,” said Jeff Miller, the NFL’s executive vice president for health and safety. “It was heartening that the committee accepted it so openly. It said, ‘This is very important information and let’s do something with it.’ It’s a process we’ll continue to use moving forward.”

… While sport activities amplify opportunities to develop character, confidence, relationships and so on, research examining the impact of sport on mental health appears to indicate athletes may have similar or higher rates of psychological disorders as their non-athlete peers, but perhaps with special considerations.

Six years ago, my research team initiated the first clinical trial involving collegiate athletes who were formally assessed for mental health conditions. Funded by the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the study was conducted to examine the effectiveness of two very different approaches to improving mental health in collegiate athletes. Specifically, we studied traditional counseling and psychological services compared with an experimental optimization program that emphasized performance, family inclusion and sport culture. We wanted to learn whether there might be more effective ways to reach college athletes and help improve all aspects of their mental health.

… more than a decade and a half of anti-carb messaging in diet books and online has had a significant impact on our attitudes and behaviors with respect to carbohydrates. In a 2018 survey conducted by the International Food Information Council Foundation, 24 percent of respondents reported that they were currently on some form of carbohydrate-restricted diet, and an almost equal percentage fingered carbs as the primary culprit in weight gain (with another 33 percent blaming sugar, a form of carbohydrate).

To be fair, persuasive gurus and clickbaity headlines have mislead people into trying all kinds of radical diets, not just carb-cutting. And low-carb diet defenders will be quick to point out that prior research has demonstrated that low-carb diets can actually be beneficial. To give just one example, a 2005 study by researchers at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine found that a period of reduced carbohydrate consumption lowered blood pressure and reduced LDL “bad” cholesterol in a group of 164 adults with prehypertension and hypertension. But in the long run, as the new ARIC study suggests, it’s the boring answer — eat in moderation — that always wins out.

… “There’s absolutely nothing more important for our health than what we eat each and every day,” Sara Seidelmann, a cardiologist and nutrition researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, told Business Insider.

Seidelmann recently published a massive, blockbuster global study of the eating patterns of more than 447,000 people around the world. What she discovered — and what is probably not a huge surprise — is that no matter where you live or what your daily diet is like, banning entire food groups and thinking you can cheat your way into good health might work for a while, but it could also send you into an early grave.

… “Culture was something we could control,” Marks says of his initial days on the job. “We were going to try to have a lot of fun along the way. That was going to be a priority. We knew there were going to be dark days. If we lost five games in a row, how are we controlling this? What’s the perception? What are we giving off? For two years, we were navigating that. It may not be stuff in the public eye, but we celebrated small wins along the way.”

For Marks, small wins were more than just proving he had more swag than a minivan dad. His biggest goal in the office was to foster a collaborative culture. That buzzword—culture—is a nebulous term thrown out by rebuilding teams to cover up for the losses on the court. For Marks, culture is something he paid special attention to during his 12-year playing career.

“I was fortunate to be coached by Pat Riley in Miami, and see how he motivates a team, the stories he tells, the player care in Miami,” Marks says. “In San Antonio, Pop was an iconic coach and leader, who kept everything in perspective. He’d always say, ‘This is just a game of basketball, I’m here to develop you as young men and women.’ I like to tell stories from where I was and give that little bit of perspective on why I think certain things will work.”

… Across the country, over 2,000 boys and girls’ matches are being captured at youth level. For the first time, U.S. Soccer can quantify what is happening on the pitch.

This innovation better connects U.S. Soccer with player performance across the country, providing fresh, objective insights on how the game is played at this level.

Discussing this initiative, Moses said: “Providing data up and down the country gives us not only a better understanding of how the game is played at this level, but also creates a feedback loop back to scouts and the clubs, which can inform coaching decisions.”

As well as near-immediate player development, the initiative will also inform U.S. Soccer’s player pathway strategy.

“In the long term we’re excited about this coming to life. We’ll be looking at national team players and understanding what a typical national team player looks like and what they can do at a positional level. Here’s what they tend to look like at 15, 16, 17, and we can build out a literal profile of players we should be looking at within this age group. It will have significant payoff in terms of our scouting efficiency given the size of the youth soccer population in the U.S.”