Applied Sports Science newsletter – October 30, 2019

… Seven athletes who ran for the Nike Oregon Project (NOP) will continue to train together in a new group led by former NOP assistant coach Pete Julian.

Nike announced it was shutting down the NOP on October 10 after the group’s head coach, Alberto Salazar, was suspended for four years for anti-doping violations.

In addition to Engels, the new group will include U.S. runners Donavan Brazier, who holds the American record in the 800 meters, Shannon Rowbury, and Eric Jenkins, as well as Konstanze Klosterhalfen of Germany, who won bronze in the 5,000 meters at worlds, Suguru Osako of Japan, and Jessica Hull of Australia. Those seven runners were training primarily under Julian before Salazar’s ban.

… Shortly after graduating from college, she signed her first professional contract with the Beauts on Aug. 6, 2019. MacPherson has played in all five regular season games for Buffalo, and the team’s lone exhibition game against Brock University. In total, she has played 225 games out of a possible 228 across seven seasons, including this present NWHL one.

Asked how she has managed to assemble such a lengthy streak of action, MacPherson responded:

“I would say the big thing is probably strength and conditioning. During the summers and at Providence, the strength coaches I had were great. They really helped us work out to prevent injury from even happening in the first place. I have also been lucky enough to not have any freak accidents.”

… Going by the numbers, Shattenkirk was one of the Rangers top two defensemen last season, which made the heavy-handed approach head coach David Quinn took with him rather surprising. Jeff Gorton’s decision to buyout his contract and take on a $6,083,333 penalty for the 2020-21 season was perhaps even more surprising.

With all of that being said, it has come as little surprise to see Shattenkirk flourish in his first month with Tampa Bay. To say that the Lightning got a bargain when they signed him to a one-year, $1.75 million contract would be an understatement.

Tampa’s head coach Jon Cooper has not hesitated to feed Shattenkirk prime minutes at 5-on-5 this season and he’s been rewarded for it. Thus far, Shattenkirk’s most frequent defensive partners at evens have been Victor Hedman and Ryan McDonagh. In fact, Shattenkirk and McDonagh have already played together more in Tampa than they did as Rangers in the 2017-18 season before Gorton dealt McDonagh.

Load management guru Alex McKechnie was given a new title, and Norman Powell detailed his importance to the Raptors organization. [video, pre-roll + 6:30]

Whatever your sport, it’s likely that you’re becoming stronger with every practice and competition. Since muscle growth involves tiny tears in the tissue followed by repairs that result in the addition of muscle cells, the rest and recovery phase is as important as the actual activity itself. Translation? Sleep and athletic performance go hand in hand, and time spent asleep is just as important as time spent working out.

Since fatigue has an adverse impact on your immune system, sleep for athletes is essential to good health. Essentially, not getting enough sleep means that you’re at a higher risk for catching common bugs such as cold and flu whenever they’re making the rounds. When your immune system suffers, so do your stats.

Most team sports matches include two time periods (usually 30 or 45 minutes long) separated by a break in the middle of the game (10-20 minutes). During this half-time break, players try to rest mentally and physically, rehydrate, use ergogenic aids, listen to their coach’s technical instructions and receive medical treatment or change their equipment1. However, this protocol, so widely accepted by players and coaches, may not be the best to follow. Some studies have shown that in football, there is a decrease in physical2 and cognitive3 performance and an increase in injury risk4 at the beginning of the second half. It appears that the decrease in body temperature due to excessive passive recovery in the changing room may be behind this decline in the player’s performance.

A recent study5 suggests the use of a different intervention model during half-time in order to reduce the possible negative effects of the break in the match.

It is a common practice to assess football players through a battery of tests covering all aspects of sporting performance. Practitioners may find the performance outcome measures valuable for athlete monitoring and talent identification purposes, while some scientists may have a further interest in investigating the underlying mechanisms that lead to better performance in those tests. Within these testing batteries, there are often assessments implemented to measure an athlete’s sport-specific skill, as this is one of the relevant constructs for sport performance alongside tactical and physical performance.

When using any tool to measure an athlete’s sport-specific skill, it is important to consider two major concepts: Is the assessment task reliable and does it hold various forms of validity (Franks et al. 1986)? First, it is important that the test is able to consistently measure what it is designed to measure, across multiple testing trials. Assessment tasks should not only be reproducible between players, but a player should be able to consistently demonstrate similar performances across several sessions to demonstrate its stability. Second, we also must ensure the test design will actually measure what it is designed to measure, known as construct validity. [full text]

David Hachuel wants pictures of your poop — for science.

The computer scientist-turned-entrepreneur is working to build the world’s largest database of human stool photos — up to 100,000 in all. The images will be used to teach an artificial intelligence to tell the difference between stool that’s consistent with good health and stool that could be evidence of gastrointestinal ailments like irritable bowel syndrome or Crohn’s disease.

The color, shape and consistency of stool hold important clues that help doctors make diagnoses. Hachuel thinks the photos can form the basis of an app that nonphysicians can use to obtain such information on their own. We’re already tracking our steps and calories and monitoring our heart rates; he hopes to build a poop tracker reliable enough to spot gastrointestinal problems quickly, easily and with minimal embarrassment.

It is based on a so-called laser cutter and its precise, fast cuts. These are provided by easy-to-use software developed by Daniel Gröger and Professor Jürgen Steimle for designers. Since the necessary materials are available on the market, almost any person can now produce stretchable electronics for their own purposes.

A jacket that silences incoming calls when its sleeve is plucked. A bandage that sounds an alarm when the joint is bent too much. These are two of many applications that are only possible with stretchable circuits. “However, current manufacturing processes are time-consuming and very complex,” explains Daniel Gröger, a doctoral student in computer science at Saarland University. Hence, together with Professor Jürgen Steimle, Gröger has developed a process to produce stretchable circuits within a few minutes. The heart of the process is a so-called laser cutter. Its laser beam continuously removes targeted material. In this way, it makes many precise cuts in a very short time. The researchers take advantage of this by having the laser cut a certain pattern into the material, similar to a Y shape. The size of the pattern, the thickness of its lines and the distance between the cuts determine the elasticity of the material. The material consists of a conductive and a non-conductive layer. The circuit is created by the laser ablating the conductive layer at pre-defined points during cutting.

… So what is it about soda — both regular and diet — that makes it so addictive?

According to Gary Wenk, director of neuroscience undergraduate programs at the Ohio State University and author of “Your Brain on Food,” it’s all in the beverage’s design. Your favorite brand of soft drink is engineered with just the right amount of sweetener, caffeine and carbonation to make you continuously want to grab and gulp.

The selection of foods made by athletes during competition can impact performance, yet to date, the quality of their food choices has not been investigated. The aim of this study was to describe the food selection of athletes in a buffet-style dining hall setting in terms of diet quality, food variety, and volume of food and compare to their self-rating of their meal, reasons for the choosing the food items, access to previous nutrition advice, and use of nutrition labelling. A total of 81 athletes (42 females, 39 males) from 24 sports across 58 countries at the 2018 Commonwealth Games (Qld, Australia) participated in this study. A digital photograph was taken of the athletes’ meal after selection from the buffet and prior to consumption. Each participant was asked a series of questions in relation to their food selection. The photographs were coded into recommended serves of food groups based on the Australian Guide to Healthy Eating. The nutritional analysis and photograph of a standard serve size were used to quantify the energy and nutrients for the meal. Most athletes chose adequate quantities of macronutrients, which agreed with their reasons for the food choice, but the majority did not include fruit (80.2%) or dairy (65.4%) in their food selection, while 54% of males included discretionary foods (0.25-7.0 serves). The median self-rating for food choice was 8/10. Most reasons for food choices were nutritional attributes, sensory factors, performance, usual eating practices and physiological factors (e.g., satiety, gut comfort). This suggests that athletes may need more education on the quality of food selected from buffet settings.

In this course, we build a neural network framework from scratch. Using native Python and the Numpy library we build test data sets and a modular framework for putting together fully connected neural networks, like multilayer perceptrons and autoencoders.

Writing the code has been broken out into 28 separate coding exercises.

Soccer analytics is attracting increasing interest in academia and industry, thanks to the availability of sensing technologies that provide high-fidelity data streams for every match. Unfortunately, these detailed data are owned by specialized companies and hence are rarely publicly available for scientific research. To fill this gap, this paper describes the largest open collection of soccer-logs ever released, containing all the spatio-temporal events (passes, shots, fouls, etc.) that occured during each match for an entire season of seven prominent soccer competitions. Each match event contains information about its position, time, outcome, player and characteristics. The nature of team sports like soccer, halfway between the abstraction of a game and the reality of complex social systems, combined with the unique size and composition of this dataset, provide an ideal ground for tackling a wide range of data science problems, including the measurement and evaluation of performance, both at individual and at collective level, and the determinants of success and failure. [full text]

… The Astros are a win away from ending the series. If the game goes into extra innings, say, or Justin Verlander gets knocked around but the offense keeps the team in it, would Houston use Zack Greinke in an attempt to end things right then and there? And should they?

While these questions are similar, they’re not identical. Does this reallocation of win probability matter? The answer, as it often is, is “it depends.” I believe the answers to these three questions are “not much,” “not at all,” and “more than you’d think,” respectively, and I’ll attempt to lay out why I think that is the case here.

There were 831 human beings in the world who could call themselves an MLB pitcher in 2019. These are the truly elite of our species at this one absurd, specific skill: throwing a baseball in an area where a batter can hit it, while still somehow preventing him from doing so. Then, for the playoffs we removed all but 105 of those pitchers, including nearly all of the weakest ones. Being able to pitch in the postseason truly means being the best of the best.

If that is true, we should see some difference in pitch quality between the regular season and the playoffs. The average velocity and movement for each pitch type should be better because the people throwing these pitches are better. We’ll take a look at some of these pitch type averages to see if that holds true.