Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 14, 2019

Wander Franco, who at 18 years old is already the best prospect in baseball, strode into a suite at Bowling Green Ballpark. Franco smiled, which he does often, and the sunlight beaming into the room reflected off his braces. He sat on a stool in the back-left corner. Following him were his friends and roommates, Tony Pena, Osmy Gregorio and Joel Peguero. Even though Franco is at least three years younger than them, they all call him “El Patrón” — The Boss.

… The Golden State Warriors and Kevin Durant took what they believed was a medically low-risk gamble on Monday night, only to have Durant collapse in pain and anguish, to the horror of most of us watching Game 5 of the NBA finals – except for those appalling Raptors fans who actually cheered.

I wonder what Dirk Nowitzki was thinking. Why? Recall that on May 29, 2003, Nowitzki was medically cleared to play Game 6 of the Western Conference semifinals against San Antonio, eight days after spraining his left knee in Game 2.

Mavericks coach Don Nelson, however, adamantly refused to play Nowitzki in what became the series-ending Game 6 loss. Nelson told The News in 2006 that his decision “helped destroy” his relationship with Mavericks owner Mark Cuban, who cited then-Mavericks physician T.O. Souryal’s opinion that Nowitzki didn’t risk further injury by playing.

Sport England has launched a new fund aimed at diversifying the coach and volunteer workforce.

The £1m Workforce Diversity Great Ideas Fund will be open for a month and will offer grants to organisations wanting to engage women and/or BAME communities in volunteering or coaching opportunities.

According to Sport England’s head of coaching Stuart Armstrong, the grant will look to address the currently fragmented workforce – partly comprised of coaches and volunteers – that is currently “lacking diversity”.

… At the time, the appointment was viewed as a major coup for the Gunners – with Burgess lured away from Australian rules club Port Adelaide, where he had been the high performance manager

He was given a wide-ranging brief by Gazidis to oversee medical, fitness, psychology and performance analysis at the club, as well as working closely with the academy.

Burgess survived the wide-ranging cull of coaching staff last summer following Wenger’s departure and Unai Emery’s arrival, but in July it was revealed he would be working with Australian club Southern Expansion in an advisory capacity alongside the club’s head of football, Craig Foster.

Many of us, even those who aren’t professional athletes or trained commandos, walk around with some sort of wearable technology, from the Apple Watch to the Fitbit, that measures everything from our heart rate to our steps to how we sleep. But the world of wearables is much vaster, and the future of the technologies involved much brighter. The Social Brain Blog interviewed James Onate, Ph.D., a researcher at The Ohio State University who discusses how wearables are being used and the emerging ethical dilemmas.

Are you sabotaging your sleep in your quest to improve it?

Many new tools are becoming available to monitor your sleep or help you achieve better sleep: wearable watches and bands; “nearable” devices that you can place on your bed or nightstand; and apps that work by monitoring biometric data, noise and movement. They can remind you to start winding down, or generate a report on your night’s slumber.

But some sleep specialists caution that these apps and devices may provide inaccurate data and can even exacerbate symptoms of insomnia. Fiddling with your phone in bed, after all, is bad sleep hygiene. And for some, worrying about sleep goals can make bedtime anxiety even worse.

… [Joel] Embiid’s mask had been developed in the Innovation, Health & Design Lab by UD Director of Innovation Martha Hall, and John Horne, president and founder of Independence Prosthetics-Orthotics.

The mask, which Embiid wanted to resemble a Black Panther mask, was eventually disallowed by NBA officials.

“It looked too intimidating, and there weren’t any clinical trials that backed up its performance,” said Hall, who has run the lab since it launched in the fall of 2018. “That inspired me to work with John on creating basketball masks for the players [at UD]. We have the men’s and women’s basketball teams coming over to get scanned, then we’re going to prototype and test different masks shapes and design, so we have the data next time.”

Treating athletes is only one of the project types that come out of the Innovation, Health & Design Lab.

Two things to know about me – I’m not very good at resting on rest days, or sticking to a plan. In past training schedules I’ve chopped and changed sessions as I went and opted to do high intensity gym classes over letting my legs recover. It’s safe to say, I wasn’t the obvious choice for a feature on training for a marathon listening solely to a running watch. ‘You do realise, if it tells you to take 48 hours off you’ll need to’ my colleagues warned – ‘sure’ I replied, ‘how hard can it be?’

The Philadelphia Eagles are making changes at the top of their medical staff for the second straight season, following a rocky year on the injury front.

Arsh Dhanota, the medical director of non-operative sports medicine at Penn Medicine, has been named chief medical officer, according to league sources. In this newly created position, he will oversee the entire medical staff and be responsible for streamlining communication throughout all departments.

Compared with vitamins, dietary supplements for weight loss, muscle building, and energy were associated with nearly three times the risk of severe medical events in children and young adults.

Many Americans get less than the recommended amount of sleep, and many do not get the recommended amounts of important vitamins and minerals. A new study suggests the two factors may be connected.

Using data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES), a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults, the researchers discovered that people who got fewer than seven hours of sleep a night consumed lower amounts of vitamins A, D, and B1, as well as magnesium, niacin, calcium, zinc, and phosphorus.

The study also found a greater number of nutrients were associated with poor sleep in women than in men. This number was reduced if women took dietary supplements, suggesting that supplements can help fill the gaps when a person’s diet is not providing the necessary nutrients, researchers said.

… Kristin Beauparlant’s son, Cade, was captain of the hockey team until he got caught using e-cigarettes in school. He started undergoing treatment for nicotine addiction and learned he had developed a lung disease after at least four years of using nicotine products.

“He was a good kid, very smart, very athletic, kind of had everything going for him, and then things just changed,” said Beauparlant, a nurse and a mother of three from Newburyport.

Bayesian methods are becoming increasingly popular in sports analytics. Identified advantages of the Bayesian approach include the ability to model complex problems, obtain probabilistic estimates and predictions that account for uncertainty, combine information sources and update learning as new data become available. The volume and variety of data produced in sports activities over recent years and the availability of software packages for Bayesian computation have contributed significantly to this growth. This comprehensive survey reviews and characterizes the latest advances in Bayesian statistics in sports, including methods and applications. We found that a large proportion of these articles focus on modeling/predicting the outcome of sports games and on the development of statistics that provides a better picture of athletes’ performance. We provide a description of some of the advances in basketball, football and baseball. We also summarise the sources of data used for the analysis and the most commonly used software for Bayesian computation. We found a similar number of publications between 2013-2018 as compared to those published in the three previous decades, which is an indication of the growing adoption rate of Bayesian methods in sports.

Continuous-time assessments of game outcomes in sports have become increasingly common in the last decade. In American football, only discrete-time estimates of play value were possible, since the most advanced public football datasets were recorded at the play-by-play level. While measures like expected points (EP) and win probability (WP) are useful for evaluating football plays and game situations, there has been no research into how these values change throughout a play. In this work, we make two main contributions: First, we introduce a general framework for continuous-time within-play valuation in the National Football League using player-tracking data. Our modular framework incorporates several sub-models, to easily incorporate recent work involving player tracking data in football. Second, we construct a ball-carrier model to estimate how many yards the ball-carrier will gain conditional on the locations and trajectories of all players. We test several modeling approaches, and ultimately use a long short-term memory recurrent neural network to continuously update the expected end-of-play yard line. This prediction is fed into between-play EP/WP models, yielding a within-play value estimate, but is adaptable to any measure of play value. The novel fully-implemented framework allows for continuous-time player evaluation.

The NHL’s last-place team at the turn of the year, the Blues fought their way to the playoffs, where they stifled every opponent to end a 52-year championship drought