Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 18, 2019

Tres Barrera can’t remember what he did for his 24th birthday last September. He may have been back home in Texas, or in Florida for Instructional League. “I think I was in Florida,” Barrera says, sounding slightly unconvinced. He believes he was somewhere honing his baseball skills in the offseason with hopes of one day playing Major League Baseball.

Being a minor league baseball player means a lot of repetitive days that blend into each other. Any celebrations he may have had didn’t leave much of an impression. He needed to get back to work.

“It’s a grind, man,” Barrera says.

This year, he once again failed to plan anything special, but he insists he doesn’t mind.

… Sinkers are no longer in vogue in today’s game, as discussed here in detail by FanGraphs’ Ben Clemens. The Astros, for example, are well known for getting their pitchers to ditch them. As much as I would like to say that deGrom’s change in repertoire was the result of sound analysis from the front offices that expertly communicated to him, there was no way that was going to be the case because this is the Mets we are talking about.

deGrom came to this decision on his own. As much as this numbers guy would love to tell you that analytics were the driving choice behind his decision making, that does not appear to be the case. It was still logical, though, just more qualitative than quantitative. He concluded that with the launch angle revolution of recent years, it did not make sense to throw a pitch that has movement that would complement swings that have more upper trajectories.

… In the strength and conditioning community, it’s common to talk about how much our athletes have improved. “When my guy came in freshman year he couldn’t lift the bar and now look at him!” It’s OK to improve peak power and the 1-rep max squat (if those are needed KPIs) but it’s not what will impress (your boss) at the end of the day – Allowing that athlete to play their sport every day with little or no physical limitation, will. “How am I evaluated?” you ask… by measuring and tracking outcomes that truly matter.

Outcomes are NOT forces, speeds, jump heights, etc. Outcomes ARE injuries, missed time, minutes played, pitches thrown, etc. While it can be incredibly satisfying to draw up complex periodization models in hopes to improve the size, strength, and speed of our athletes, we must remember that’s not always the end goal – Being healthy to play the sport IS! Talking about bar speed and tapering methods has its place, but it’s not what makes a good coach. At the end of the day, you’re doing the athlete a disservice if they aren’t healthy enough to go out and do what they love.

My interest in speed development started over 20 years ago while working with a college football player that was incredibly fast (4.29 sec 40 yd) but fairly weak. He was wide receiver weighing 175 lbs with a back squat 1RM of 205 lbs. He could barely powerclean 145 lbs and the heaviest I ever saw him deadlift was 225 lbs. At that time I started wondering about the real influence of strength on speed. And, I started studying aspects other than force production for speed development. That line of research started with power as a differentiating factor in speed but quickly led me to neuromuscular coordination as the preeminent driver/governor of speed and resulted in the creation of an individualized system for speed training.

The first conclusion I came to long ago was that maximum strength has very little to do with speed.

Sian Beilock, President of Barnard College –

Most students are motivated to perform at their best in school. But with this motivation can come pressure to excel – from parents, teachers, peers and students themselves. Why do poor performances occur in those very situations where students are set on doing their best? What happens in the brain and body when the pressure is high? And, why do some students thrive while others fail in high-stakes situations? In this discussion, Sian Beilock will discuss how current research in psychology and neuroscience can be used by parents, teachers and students themselves to enhance learning and performance in school – especially for students who are chronically anxious about taking tests. [video, livestream Scheduled for Sep 19, 2019, 6:30 EDT]

“It’s hard.” Centro says after putting in 70 minutes on the dust filled turns of Jeremy Ranch Road. “Everyone out here is fucking fast. And this time we don’t have an acclimation period. Coach is up to the intensity and we were out of altitude just long enough to feel it. The second day back we hit a workout like we were at sea level.”

The Bowerman Track Club has 9 athletes residing under one roof at 8,170 ft in Park City, Utah. After 9 weeks of altitude training in PC leading up to the National Championships in Des Moines, Iowa, athletes Moh Ahmed, Matthew Centrowitz, Woody Kincaid, Lopez Lomong, Courtney Frerichs, Marielle Hall, Shelby Houlihan, Karissa Schweizer, and Colleen Quigley had just days at home before they packed their bags and headed back up again.

Rather than echoing the countless blogs we’ve all read about oxygen absorption and endurance performance, I wanted to spend some time diving into the experiences and lifestyle of altitude training from an athlete perspective.

All it took was four months this year for Houston Deck’s life to change completely.

After traveling to Park City from Auburndale, Florida, where he grew up, Deck took an internship with U.S. Ski and Snowboard in late April. Four months later, after the end of his internship, U.S. Ski and Snowboard offered him the full-time position of Athletic Development Coach for aerials and freeski.

“It’s exciting for sure, kind of a no-brainer for me when I was offered the job,” Deck said. “I was originally looking at positions in Florida following the finish of the internship, but they had a job open up and I went for it. I had to do an interview and presentation but it was worth it.”

… Part of the preparation for the season includes athletic and performance testing at the program’s exclusive “K Lab”, or Michael W. Krzyzewski Human Performance Laboratory (K-Lab). Nick Potter, the program’s Director of High Performance and Sports Science, plays a big role in making sure the basketball players are operating at their highest level. TheDevilsDen.com conducted an in-depth interview with Potter during the offseason that highlights the lengths that the program goes to making sure they fulfill their athletic potential in every way possible.

“The main thing is we have the K Lab where we’re doing a lot of pre-season testing type stuff,” Potter told TDD’s Steve Clark. “And there’s a program that deals with force plates so right now we’re monitoring the load that our guys are doing with lifting and other stuff and seeing how their bodies are responding to various kinds of loads that we can simulate with the force plates and then we can also monitor how are they doing the next day and have they recovered from what we did in the last few days.

Wearable sensors such as smartwatches have become a popular motivational tool for fitness enthusiasts, but gadgets don’t sense all exercises equally. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University have found that a stationary camera is a better choice for gym exercises.

The vision-based system, called GymCam, detects repetitive motions. By doing so, Rushil Khurana and Karan Ahuja, both Ph.D. students in CMU’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), found that they could detect exercises in a gym. Moreover, they could recognize the type of exercise and reliably count repetitions.

… If Sunderland are successful in their claim, which relates to the medical of injury-prone midfielder Ricardo Alvarez, it will have far reaching effects for every medic working in sport.

This extraordinary allegation, which is lodged in great detail over 13 pages with the High Court, is for breach of contract and negligence.

Dr Rehman first came to public prominence when he “resigned” after David Moyes pulled Patrick van Aanholt out of a game against Spurs half an hour before kick-off in 2016 over a cardiac issue.

At Driveline, Bauer Units have been used as a reference during pitch design since the pitch tracking technology such as the Rapsodo started to appear in 2016. We introduced Bauer Units in our original piece on spin rate and followed up with another article to define them more clearly. In this piece, we’ll explain Bauer Units even more specifically because the metric can be misunderstood in the context where it is most valuable.

Bauer Units = Spin Rate (RPM) / Velocity (MPH)

As a quick refresher, Bauer Units are intended to control for velocity when looking at spin rate.

… So much for amateur athletics—the sport’s 25 most valuable programs combine to earn an average of $1.5 billion in profit on annual revenues of $2.7 billion.

Box score statistics are the baseline measures of performance for National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) basketball. Between the 2011-2012 and 2015-2016 seasons, NCAA teams performed better at home compared to on the road in nearly all box score statistics across both genders and all three divisions. Using box score data from over 100,000 games spanning the three divisions for both women and men, we examine the factors underlying this discrepancy. The prevalence of neutral location games in the NCAA provides an additional angle through which to examine the gaps in box score statistic performance, which we believe has been underutilized in existing literature. We also estimate a regression model to quantify the home court advantages for box score statistics and compare the magnitudes to other factors such as increased number of possessions, and team strength. Additionally, we examine the biases of scorekeepers and referees. We present evidence that scorekeepers tend to have greater home team biases when observing men compared to women, higher divisions compared to lower divisions, and stronger teams compared to weaker teams. Finally, we present statistically significant results indicating referee decisions are impacted by attendance, with larger crowds resulting in greater bias in favor of the home team.

Succeeding as a professional women’s basketball player requires that players overburden their bodies, resulting in an ever-rising number of injuries. How would the 2019 playoffs be different if players remained healthy? What can be done to prevent this injury epidemic?

… The Rangers? They are playing catch-up. The Rangers only three weeks ago announced a new director of baseball innovation: Matt Blood. He left on Monday. Went to Baltimore, a team that has lost 100 games in consecutive years. He will be the director of player development for the Orioles, who, under a first-year GM, are making broad changes to the way they do business. To be fair, the Rangers had the idea with Blood first. It just didn’t work out in Texas. Communication breakdown. So, he’s off to Baltimore in the same role for which he was initially hired by the Rangers last October.

Fortunately, we are here to fill the innovation void with some simple suggestions for small innovations that just might pay long-range dividends. It’s easy to say “go get Gerrit Cole or Anthony Rendon in free agency,” but the Rangers need to find ways to also maximize players’ values without paying retail prices. A team can only afford so many $25 million guys in one year.

Here are four:

1. Hire women