Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 20, 2019

Through a frustrating process that has featured multiple setbacks, Mark Trumbo has tried to maintain a positive attitude as he worked his way back to the Orioles.

But after a platelet-rich plasma injection Thursday put his rehabilitation on hiatus, Trumbo recognizes that if an evaluation in the next couple of weeks doesn’t show progress on his surgically repaired right knee, he’ll have to consider alternatives for his baseball future.

“You want to remain optimistic as long as you can until things just tell you that it’s not in the cards, but I’m hopeful that the PRP shot will provide some of the relief we’re looking for,” Trumbo said Friday. “Some of the things are unknowns, and they can trend in the right direction pretty quickly. Sometimes they don’t, though. I’m gonna anticipate some sort of return in the near future, and we’ll deal with whatever else happens.”

The goal hasn’t changed for Washington Redskins running back Adrian Peterson, not even at age 34 and possibly entering an unaccustomed role. He has ascended all-time lists for a reason — because he hasn’t placed limits on himself. Not after a torn ACL and certainly not now, just because he is a little older.

Second-year back Derrius Guice returns to the Redskins — healthy, they hope. Yet Peterson’s mindset hasn’t changed when discussing his rushing goals.

“It’s like 2,000 yards,” he said. “That’s something I always set my bar at. I look at last year and thought, ‘If this didn’t happen or that didn’t happen, I could have reached 1,500, easy.’ This year, I’m coming in with the same mindset.”

When Carli Lloyd was in college, she was supremely talented, exceptionally athletic and, her coach remembers, super lazy.

“Everything she did as a youth player came pretty easily to her,” said Glenn Crooks, who coached Lloyd at Rutgers. “The fitness aspect of it is something she lacked. It was a challenge to get her to work as hard on the defensive side of the ball.”

Then Lloyd found James Galanis, who broke her down, then built her back up again. Galanis didn’t just work on her body, he worked on her mind. And that may have been the most important step in Lloyd’s transition from undisciplined college athlete to one of the most clutch players in women’s soccer.

“I would spend time after sessions to take Carli into the mind of the some of the greatest athletes that ever lived — Michael Jordan, Muhammad Ali, Wayne Gretzky, Diego Maradona,” Galanis said. “I would make the connection that these athletes loved pressure and thrived in it. When pressure surfaced, their game went to the next level and [they] kept breaking barriers until they won.”

… We always start our own Discovery Meetings with a Simon Sinek, “Finding your Why” video. Thinking about the Golden Circle gets you to shift your mindset. We want you to go beyond thinking about What you do and dive deep into the gooey good stuff of How and Why you do it.

When you make your messaging come from the inside out, you go beyond the basics and create something unique and powerful. As Sinek says, “People don’t buy what you do, they buy why you do it.”**

A few years ago, the world of sport grew enamored with Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle. The Why smacked people in the face because it was at once so obvious and so insightful. Understanding Why we do the things we do is important but getting to Why is tough.

We help clubs craft innovation concepts and cultures. Getting a club to Why is always hard but always rewarding. Sport is a unique beast where one’s Why fails to connect with another’s.

But there are some universal Why’s that we’ve noticed over the past few years of working with some of the best sport innovators in the world. Here they are (and no, this is not exhaustive):

1/ Learn Faster

You may think your childhood was normal: you had friends your age, attended school to learn from teachers, and maybe even slept in your own bedroom. Evolutionary anthropologist Dorsa Amir shows that these everyday occurrences in Western cultures are actually strange new experiences in human history that may have significant consequences for child development. [video, 11:41]

Purpose

This study investigates the effect of a mentally demanding response inhibitory task on time trial performance in sub-elite under 23 cyclists.
Methods

Ten under 23 road cyclists completed two separate testing sessions during which they performed two different cognitive tasks before completing a 30-min time trial on the cycle ergometer. In the experimental condition, 30 min of a standard cognitive task (Stroop task) was used to elicit mental fatigue; in the control condition, a non-demanding activity was carried out. Subjective workload and mood were measured before and after the treatments, and motivation was recorded before the time-trial. During the time trial, power, cadence, heart rate, and rate of perceived exertion were assessed. Blood lactate concentrations and heart rate variability (using the root mean square of the successive differences) were measured before and after the time trial.
Results

The Stroop task was rated more mentally (P < 0.001) and temporally (P < 0.001) demanding, effortful (P < 0.001), and frustrating (P = 0.001) than the control task; fatigue (P = 0.002) and vigor (P = 0.018) after the cognitive tasks were respectively higher and lower than in the control task. Mean power output (P = 0.007) and cadence (P = 0.043) were negatively affected by the Stroop task, while heart rate (P = 0.349), rating of perceived exertion (P = 0.710), blood lactate concentration (P = 0.850), and root mean square of the successive differences (P = 0.355) did not differ between the two conditions. Conclusion

A mentally demanding activity reduced the subsequent physical performance in sub-elite under 23 cyclists. Thus, avoiding cognitive efforts before training and races could improve performance of high-level athletes.

Evidence-based practice (EBP) is the collated integration of practitioner expertise, athlete values and research evidence aimed to optimise the decision-making process surrounding sport performance. Despite the academic interest afforded to sport science research, our knowledge of how this research is applied in elite sport settings is limited. This current opinion examines the existing evidence of the translation of sport science research into the field, with a tailored focus on the current perceptions of practitioners, researchers and coaches. Recent studies show that practitioners and researchers report they ascertain sport science knowledge differently, with coaches preferring personal interactions compared with coaching courses or scientific journals. The limited peer-reviewed research shows that coaches perceive their knowledge is greater in fields such as tactical/technical areas, rather than physical fitness or general conditioning. This likely explains coaches’ greater perceived value in research dedicated to technical and tactical expertise, as well as mental training and skill acquisition. Practitioners place a large emphasis on the need for research in physical fitness areas, which is likely due to their occupational focus. There are many perceived barriers of sport science research application, including funding, time, coach/player/staff ‘buy in’ and research questions that may not apply to the setting. We contend that researchers and practitioners may benefit in producing research, ascertaining knowledge and disseminating findings in alternative methods that better align with coaches’ needs. In addition, educational strategies that focus on real-world context and promote social interaction between coaches, practitioners, organisational personnel and researchers would likely benefit all stakeholders.

… The evolution of pitching technology

One aspect of the game that’s been greatly affected by technology is pitching. [Matt] Brand says that pitching coach, Brent Strom, is better able to do his job nowadays that there’s better quality video and monitoring technologies. Brand cited the transformations of former pitcher Charlie Morton and current pitcher Ryan Pressly. Both saw impressive transformations in their pitching ability thanks to Strom and his technology.

“Brent has the ability to take technology and blend it with the craft,” Brand says.

The players as industrial machines

One way the franchise thinks about its players is as machines — in the least objectifying way, surely. But Brand compares baseball players to major, expensive oil and gas machines, and in heavy industry, it’s very common for a company to drop $30 million or more on a machine. Of course the company would schedule preventative maintenance and service appointments to protect their investments.

Five years in, the virtual cycling and running game has acquired massive investment capital, thousands of daily players, and a professional bike-racing league. The platform has changed the way we run and ride.

Tracking sports players is a widely challenging scenario, specially in single-feed videos recorded in tight courts, where cluttering and occlusions cannot be avoided. This paper presents an analysis of several geometric and semantic visual features to detect and track basketball players. An ablation study is carried out and then used to remark that a robust tracker can be built with Deep Learning features, without the need of extracting contextual ones, such as proximity or color similarity, nor applying camera stabilization techniques. The presented tracker consists of: (1) a detection step, which uses a pretrained deep learning model to estimate the players pose, followed by (2) a tracking step, which leverages pose and semantic information from the output of a convolutional layer in a VGG network. Its performance is analyzed in terms of MOTA over a basketball dataset with more than 10k instances.

The NFL’s top medical experts are asking college football physicians and trainers to help make the game safer.

They want the NCAA to pitch in, too.

Dr. Allen Sills and Jeff Miller, the NFL’s executive vice president for health and safety initiatives, spent Monday and Tuesday in Indianapolis sharing data about their findings on the prevention and treatment of injuries. It’s the most formal presentation league executives have had with college officials, and Sills and Miller hope this presentation leads to a broader conversation that includes discussions about lower-body injuries.

… Kevin Durant’s injury came under the care of Rick Celebrini, who has a doctorate in rehabilitation sciences and whom the Warriors added as the team’s director of sports medicine and performance this past summer amid much praise. The features on Celebrini when he joined the team were hymns to his history of finding the best medical path to help a player reach the next level. The Mercury News said he’d be able to prolong the career longevity of each star; CBS San Francisco hinted that he is, in a retrospectively ironic echo of Durant, the team’s real MVP. These glowing write ups could explain, at least in part, why the reporting and commentary on Durant’s injury seems so keen to accept the team as a reliable source of unbiased information. In this report from ESPN’s Rachel Nichols after Game 5, the medical advice attributed to Steve Kerr about Durant’s injury sounds eerily similar to what Pappas told Fisk nearly 40 years ago—“the doctors told us that he couldn’t get more hurt.”

Let’s leave aside the questionable idea that an injury could ever plateau in terms of its severity, although I suppose an injury can’t get any worse if it kills you. Let’s also leave aside the conflict of interest from Nichols’s source, for the time being. That this argument continues to be used in discussing Durant’s injury is jarring and strange. And yet, after Durant suffered one of the worst injuries a basketball player can experience, while playing an NBA Finals game on a leg that was known to be injured, and mere weeks away from going through the closest thing to a true free market a player with his services could experience, much of the commentary surrounding the team’s handling of the injury was bizarrely positive.

When Derek Falvey, chief baseball officer of the Minnesota Twins, was in the Cleveland Indians’ front office in the early 2010s, he started attending college coaching clinics. He visited events like Pitch-A-Palooza and the coaching boot camp at the Texas Baseball Ranch. He would sit in the back of conference rooms and listen.

“On the pro side, we keep everything tight to the vest. We don’t want to share with the other pro teams — they are competition,” Falvey told FiveThirtyEight. “What was really interesting for me to see is a lot of coaches sharing ideas. … There were guys from very small programs that had to find a way, with very limited budgets, to compete with other D-1 programs.”

Falvey saw amateur coaches using weighted-ball training, high-speed cameras and biomechanics labs in player development before professional clubs ever did. He looked around and thought, “Why couldn’t any of these coaches be in professional or even Major League Baseball?”

“I’m probably a little naive,” Falvey said. “But if you’re coaching [basketball] at Kentucky and you go to the Chicago Bulls, no one blinks. … That’s pretty normal. In baseball, it hasn’t been.”

With such an ambitious goal, the Barça Innovation Hub has presented its research at this year’s world-renowned MIT Sloan Sports Analytics international conference. This research is based on a mathematical model that assesses the quality of the decisions made by players taking into account the position of their team mates and opponents every second within a match. The study is co-authored by Javier Fernández (head of Sports Analytics at FC Barcelona), Luke Bornn (former Harvard professor and current Vice-President and head of Strategy and Analysis for the Sacramento Kings) and Dan Cervone (Director of Quantitative Research for the Los Angeles Dodgers).

“Football is a sport that you play with your brain. You have to be in the right place at the right moment, not too early, not too late.” This is how Johan Cruyff summarised the main goal for decision-making in football, stressing that being in the right place at the right time is the cornerstone for positional play. On this basis, Cruyff insisted that “it is statistically proven that players actually have the ball for three minutes on average. So, the most important thing is: what do you do during those 87 minutes when you do not have the ball? That is what determines whether you’re a good player or not”. With this unequivocal view, Johan expressed how individual talent must also help to create the best possible context around the ball through the movements of these players who are not in control of the ball.