Applied Sports Science newsletter – March 28, 2019

Applied Sports Science news articles, blog posts and research papers for March 28, 2019

 

Paul George, at Peace in Oklahoma City, Reels In a Career Year

The New York Times, Scott Cacciola from

… George made clear that he was banking on his partnership with Westbrook while offering endorsements of the organization and of Oklahoma City’s leisurely pace. He can fish. He can raise his two young children in a quiet neighborhood. And he can focus on basketball, knowing that his future is with the Thunder.

“You can give your everything to one organization, and you know the direction that you’re going,” George said in a recent interview. “There’s so much that players have to deal with that I don’t think people quite recognize. A lot of them are the same issues that everybody else deals with. But this takes a lot of the burden off my shoulders.”

There is something to be said for (relatively) stress-free living. As several other stars careen toward free agency this summer — and grapple with the accompanying distractions with varying degrees of success — George, 28, has been playing the best basketball of his life.

 

NFL Draft 2019: Andy Isabella’s unwavering belief made UMass star a fast rising prospect

masslive.com, Matt Vautour from

Television viewers learned what happened sooner than Andy Isabella did.

There was a glitch in the timing and Isabella’s 40-yard dash time at the NFL Scouting Combine was initially recorded as a mediocre 4.56. For Isabella, whose speed was at least partially what got him an invitation to the combine, that time could have been devastating to his draft stock.

In the moment, he tried not to think about it. If he hadn’t wowed them with his speed, at least he could impress them with his catching and route running. Isabella put all his focus on the receiving drill. Run the right route and catch the ball.

 

Jets’ Gase to keep close eye on Bell’s workload

ESPN NFL, Rich Cimini from

Running back Le’Veon Bell, who expressed concern about being overworked by the Pittsburgh Steelers, won’t have to worry about that on his new team.

New York Jets coach Adam Gase, commenting Tuesday on his prized free-agent addition, promised to be mindful of Bell’s workload on the practice field and in games.

“You can wear a guy out with too many rushes, too many touches, too many snaps and too many practice snaps,” Gase told reporters at the NFL owners meetings in Phoenix. “We’ll keep an eye on that. This is not going to be where we burn him out in the first six months. We’re aware of that.”

 

Stejskal: Inside the Whitecaps’ ambitious, Canada-wide academy program

MLSsoccer.com, Sam Stejskal from

Late last week, as the club’s first team was kicking off their match at the Houston Dynamo, the Vancouver Whitecaps welcomed more than 450 of Canada’s top youth players to British Columbia for their academy center combine.

One of the more unique development initiatives in MLS, the combine (pictured above) brings the best players from the Whitecaps’ nationwide system of academy centers together to show their stuff in front of the team’s main academy staff. The event is an annual culmination of sorts for the club’s youth development system, which has become the widest-ranging such setup in all of MLS.

A growing number of MLS clubs have begun recruiting players to their academies from outside their geographic territory in recent years, but Vancouver have gone several steps further. The Whitecaps don’t merely recruit players from different parts of Canada, they’re rooted across the country. Over the past seven years, the club has established 22 academy centers in eight of Canada’s 10 provinces. The centers begin training boys and girls part-time as young as age 8 and work with their specific provincial soccer association to develop full-time teams for 13- and 14-year-olds. Players from those teams end up at the academy center combine. The best then receive invites to move to Vancouver to join the full Whitecaps academy, where they can better work toward pro careers.

 

Tony Bennett and Virginia haven’t changed a year after March Madness upset

The Washington Post, Jerry Brewer from

… As the players wept their way off the court in Charlotte last year, they were as human as the scoreboard indicated. Soon after the heartbreak, Bennett started working their minds. They talked about the unforgettable early and often. Before a new season began five months ago, they watched a video of a powerful speech given by author Carmine Gallo in which he articulated the resolve his team now needed to show.

Bennett was careful with the messaging to his team. He wanted to tap into their post-UMBC emotions, but he didn’t want the entire season to be about making up for that loss. He told his players, “If you learn to use it right, it can buy you a ticket to a place you wouldn’t have gone any other way.”

 

U.S. men’s national team looks to flip the script on perception of American soccer

Los Angeles Times, Kevin Baxter from

Christian Pulisic had spent less than two days in training camp with Gregg Berhalter, new coach of the national team, when he was asked to play a game of word association. What should come to mind in the rest of the world when they think of U.S. Soccer?

“A real world force. A team that has a chance against anyone,” he said this past week. “I don’t want them to just see it as, ‘Oh, it’s just the U.S.’ I want them to fear [us] like a big team.
inRead invented by Teads

“That’s our goal. We want to be respected around the world.”

 

An Aussie in the MLS: Zlatan, LA Galaxy and me

FTBL magazine (AU), Aidan Ormond from

Adam Waterson is yet another example of talented Australians on the international sports scene. The one-time Western Sydney Wanderers strength and conditioning coach moved stateside to Zlatan Ibrahimovic’s MLS outfit LA Galaxy.

 

Question for my fellow S&C coaches: How many of you legitimately get an all out effort with CMJ testing in season?

Twitter, Matt Johnson from

Love this Matt- elephant in the room. My opinion is that if motivation/intent is not present with max effort tests, results are almost obsolete. And yes with sports like hockey & basketball where game frequency is high there can naturally be a difference in intent compared to off-season.

 

Stress and Adaptation: Everything You Need to Know

Steve Magness, Science of Running blog from

… what does stress mean? The reality is it can be all of these concepts and it can be none. It’s a complicated word that keeps collecting a variety of meanings as we grow to understand the concept. The problem is these meanings get lodged in our minds as truths, regardless of whether they have validity or not. We carry around these concepts, likely because of their popularity, and we have a hard time dispensing of them. If they are overturned or changed, the original popularized concept sticks in our mind.

The concept of stress, through its meandering journey towards understanding, is one ripe with misunderstanding. The impact is we have been left with a word, that carries an abundance of context on it’s back, which has shackled us from utilizing the concept of stress as the body and mind intended. To elucidate where we went wrong, we need to go back to the start.

 

Being one of us: Translating expertise into performance benefits following perceived failure

Psychology of Sport and Exercise journal from

… Is feedback delivered by an expert sufficient to improve performance? In two studies, we tested, following failure, the influence of group membership (ingroup/outgroup) and source expertise (high/low) on the effectiveness of attributional feedback on performance. Results revealed a significant interactive effect, showing an increase of performance only when the source was an expert ingroup member (Study 1). This interaction was replicated on performance and success expectations in Study 2, which were significantly higher for high compared to low expertise ingroup sources. These data suggest that sharing a common identity with those you lead may help convert expert performance advice into real performance benefits.

 

The Future of Statistics: Player Tracking Data in the NBA

Hudl Blog, Tony Sprangers from

… “Tracking data really catches things within the sport that coaches talk about and the way coaches think,” said [Luke] Bornn.

“Coaches don’t always talk about the outcomes that are measured at that level of data, but they do talk about movement and spacing and formations. So tracking data really allows us to measure features of the game which are much more closely aligned to the way coaches think.”

In the past teams would only measure data for in-game performance, whereas with tracking technologies NBA franchises can obtain far more data points.

Bornn explains how measuring training performance data leads to much more effective insights and a higher accuracy and understanding of shooting skills.

 

Dan Altman Interview

Paul Riley, differentgame blog from

Google ‘Dan Altman Swansea’ and you can see all kinds of speculation about when the former Harvard economist joined them, what his role was and who he helped the club sign. None of the words come from Altman himself, however.

We often get the clubs’ side of the story when things go bad or perhaps the musings of an outgoing manager who had ‘non-football people’ interfering in how he got to run the club with their use of numbers and spreadsheets.

We rarely get the story from the analyst themselves. I thought maybe it was time to change that, so I arranged to talk with Altman myself to find out what went on, and what the future now holds.

 

Using Data and Analytics to Identify High-Impact Fouls

NFL Football Operations, Michael Lopez from

As the NFL began its offseason, several club rules proposals sought to expand the use of replay to include penalties. In response, the NFL Competition Committee used data and analytics to identify fouls that have the biggest impact on game outcomes.

To assess impact, the committee used win probability, also known as game winning chance. Below is one example. The black line (New Orleans Saints) and gold line (Pittsburgh Steelers) in the animation show the game winning chance for both teams at each point in the game during their 2018 Week 16 matchup.

 

Howie Roseman explains why Eagles have added so many older players

NBC Sports Philadelphia, Dave Zangaro from

The Eagles aren’t starting a new over-30 league. They’re not building an NFL retirement community.

They’re trying to win a Super Bowl in 2019 and they think signing some aging but still productive players is the way to do it. This offseason, the Eagles have added or extended several players who are over (or nearing) the age of 30.

Typically, NFL teams try to find ways to get younger.

 

MLB’s Spring Training on Three True Outcomes: Walks, Strikeouts, Homers

The Ringer, Ben Lindbergh from

Off the field, MLB took some major steps toward change this spring. But the exhibition season showed us that fans should anticipate another year of games loaded with the three true outcomes.

 

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