Applied Sports Science newsletter – April 7, 2020

There’s a large whiteboard calendar on a wall inside the massive gym owned by Simone Biles’ family that outlines every major gymnastics event of the year, the 2020 Olympics included.

When the Tokyo Games were officially postponed to the summer of 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic, one of the reigning Olympic champion’s coaches ran over to the calendar and erased all of it. Watching Cecile Landi wipe away all of Biles’ carefully laid plans left the 23-year-old star reeling.

While many other high-profile athletes came forward in the aftermath of the postponement, Biles needed some time to collect herself and figure out a way forward.

From the kids in football-crazed Southeast Florida to the best of the NFL present and past, Jeudy has captured the attention of great receivers. A closer look at the best wide receiver in the 2020 NFL draft, from his introduction to football, to his mastery of it at Alabama, to the real story behind his Star of David necklace.

… America, then, is playing catch-up. It has done from the start, and it should not be surprising when the U.S. Men’s National Team struggles to compete with these far more esteemed and established countries as a result.

However, there is reason for hope. First and foremost, soccer is the fastest growing sport in America. More pertinently, it is extremely popular among younger generations and has a higher participation rate than baseball among adults. The young, transient demographic of supporter and player means improvement.

This evidenced by Emerson Hyndman’s story. The Atlanta United midfielder’s development was covered by mlssoccer.com this weekend and the details of his early years and his subsequent growth were extremely interesting.

Watching Alexis Lafrenière hit the ice, there’s a lot that stands out about his game.

For Emilie Castonguay, two qualities top the list and separate him from the rest of the 2020 prospect class:

“His compete level. And his I.Q.,” she told Sportsnet earlier this year. As Lafrenière’s agent, Castonguay knows the top prospect better than most, helping guide the highly touted franchise talent through a crucial draft year.

“I think he makes players around him so much better. He would anticipate plays that would always lead to scoring chances no matter what,” she said, thinking back to the early days of watching him play. “I think that was a big thing, for us, that we saw very early on … his I.Q. and his compete level were what stood out the most with him.”

At the highest level, elite clubs incorporate sports science and statistical analysis.

< They employ specialised coaches, psychologists, physiotherapists and nutritionists among an army of staff working towards a common goal – the betterment of their team. And even all of that can only take a player, as an individual, so far. For a footballer to make the most of his talent he must push himself beyond his limits and aspire to a higher standard. That’s why many today, including those among the very best like Cristiano Ronaldo, are turning to personal trainers to help them excel.

Teams are being advised the first phase of the offseason program, which includes rookie minicamps after the NFL draft, will be delayed by at least one week, NFL Network reported.

Team facilities remain closed for all non-essential — primarily healthcare — employees. Coaches, general managers and scouts are meeting via video conference and will conduct their entire draft not from the typical team facility “war room” but remote locations that follow national social distancing guidelines prohibiting more than 10 people from being assembled.

Monday was the scheduled start date of offseason programs for teams with new coaches, such as Mike McCarthy with the Dallas Cowboys and Matt Rhule with the Carolina Panthers. The New York Giants (Joe Judge), Cleveland Browns (Kevin Stefanski) and Washington Redskins (Ron Rivera) are the other coaches impacted by the first-year rule.

… In Lincoln, Husker sophomore linebacker Luke Reimer would be halfway through spring ball with Nebraska. Also a second-year player in his program — and, like Gifford, a city high school graduate — Reimer would be nearly halfway through spring ball and trying to crack Barrett Ruud’s inside linebacker rotation.

Instead, of course, that is not nearly the situation either finds himself in. Gifford, Reimer and several others are instead training with Chris Slatt, the former Nebraska track coach who now runs a speed training facility in town and is keeping busy training a group of football players during a prolonged period of no football.

Veteran NFL agent Joe Linta recently told a few of his draft prospects they should order a white dry-erase board.

With the coronavirus pandemic shutting down nearly everything, this is not part of normal preparation for the NFL draft, but this is a draft that is different than any of us have ever seen. Linta wants his players to be able to draw plays during virtual pre-draft interviews with teams. Each day NFL teams are interviewing prospects through video conferencing technology. Part of those interviews is sometimes being asked about a play. Hence, the dry-erase boards.

It is just one example of this unusual pre-draft period, during which players have been unable to participate in pro days or pre-draft visits. It is not going to affect players at the top of the draft, but agents are concerned about what it might do to the players projected as late-round picks or undrafted free agents who were not at the scouting combine in February and did not get to run and perform drills at their pro days.

Ensuring you’re well-informed before making a choice is, on the whole, a sensible thing to do. This is especially true of big decisions — just pretending you’ve read the terms and conditions of a new website might be okay, but we’re unlikely to be so lax about our health or finances.

But could too much information lead us to make worse, not better, decisions? A study published in Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications suggests that sometimes that might be the case.

Min Zheng and colleagues were motivated by advances in machine learning that have increased the information available to feed into decision-making, particularly when it comes to models of cause and effect: these algorithms can reveal potential outcomes likely to happen from certain actions or inputs

… The study found no statistically significant difference in accuracy across skin tones. In addition to skin tone, the study also investigated potential relationships between error in heart rate measurements and activity condition, type of wearable device, and wearable device category. Important findings from the study included:

All three of the other factors investigated—aside from skin tone—had a significant correlation with heart rate measurement error.

Absolute error in heart rate measurement was, on average, 30 percent higher during activity periods than at rest.

Consumer-grade wearables were found to be more accurate than research-grade wearables at rest.

… The league sources stressed that this matter is in the exploratory phase and that there is no clear timetable as to when the efficacy of any such device might be proven. They also stressed that advances in science and medicine are proceeding at a rapid pace, with collaboration across borders, which offers hope that breakthrough solutions could be possible much sooner than later.

Based on more than a dozen interviews with general managers and athletic training officials around the league in recent days, there is a collective sense that, in general, discovering effective methods for rapid-result testing is the critical hurdle that must be cleared for games of any type to take place in the coming weeks and months.

Halfway across the world, in the country that thus far has stifled the coronavirus better than any, they’re playing baseball again. The games are intrasquad scrimmages. The players sometimes wear masks on the field. It is sports with a dystopian twist. And yet South Korea has pitchers throwing pitches and hitters swinging bats and fielders gloving balls, and the rest of the world doesn’t.

The fragility of it all isn’t lost on Dan Straily. He is 31 years old, a right-hander who for eight seasons pitched in Major League Baseball. In December, he signed a one-year contract with the Lotte Giants of the Korean Baseball Organization, a 10-team league that has served as an incubator for young talent and a proving ground for veterans seeking an alternative path back to the major leagues.

… I have publicly argued that the present onus on being ‘data-driven’ is by definition illogical. The advent of big data is making this all the more problematic. The data are not sentient, so it is nonsensical that they be granted the role of driving our decisions and behaviours. Proclaiming being data-driven in our practice as a badge of honour to signal how advanced we are is frankly bizarre behaviour. … Similarly, the use of metrics that is prevalent in all sectors becomes problematic if we do not understand the nuances (and paradoxical effects) of their application. By extension we need to be very considered in our interpretation when choosing to act based on the data, and what weight we assign to particular metrics when making decisions. We need to understand the limitations and uncertainty involved with any metric we choose to employ, and take this into account in how we interpret and apply the data in our decision making process.

To get a better understanding of the potential effects of Major League Baseball’s proposed plan to cut the minor leagues to 120 full-season clubs and to reduce the draft to 20 or 25 rounds while moving the draft date back from early June, we asked MLB front office officials for their reactions to the proposals.

Everyone we asked was someone who is directly involved in scouting or player development, and thus will be directly affected by the potential changes. To ensure we were getting a wide variety of opinions, we talked to officials of small-market and low-revenue teams, mid-range teams and large-market, high-revenue clubs. All officials were granted anonymity to ensure candor because this is seen as a sensitive subject where many have not been given permission to speak publicly.

Most of the time, we think about player recruitment in terms of the positions we need to cover or the attributes we want in our team. However, during this prolonged break, there’s time to think about the principles upon which we build our squad. Here’s one example principle to consider: do we recruit to maximise performance upside, or minimise performance downside?