Sports Science Gym Bag - 12-8-09
The Tiger Woods Effect
Success is intimidating. When we compete against someone who's supposed to be better than us, we start to get nervous, and then we start to worry, and then we start to make stupid mistakes. That, at least, is the lesson of a new working paper by Jennifer Brown, a professor at the Kellogg school.
Brown demonstrated this psychological flaw by analyzing data from every player in every PGA tournament from 1999 to 2006. The reason she chose golf is that Tiger Woods is an undisputed superstar, the most intimidating competitor in modern sports. (In 2007, Golf Digest noted that Woods finished with 19.62 points in the World Golf Ranking, more than twice as many as his closest rival. This meant that "he had enough points to be both No. 1 and No. 2.") Brown also notes that "golf is an excellent setting in which to examine tournament theory and superstars in rank-order events, since effort relates relatively directly to scores and performance measures are not confounded by team dynamics." In other words, every golfer golfs alone...
Vince Young
The underlying assumption of the Wonderlic test is that players who are better at math and logic problems will make better decisions in the pocket. At first glance, this seems like a reasonable conjecture. No other position in sports requires such extreme cognitive talents. A successful quarterback will need to memorize hundreds of offensive plays and dozens of different defensive formations. They'll need to spend hours studying game tape of their opponents so that, when they're on the field, they can put that knowledge to use. In many instances, quarterbacks are even responsible for changing the play at the line of scrimmage. They are like a coach with shoulder pads...
UN calls for football tax to fund education for poor children
The United Nations today launches an appeal to FIFA football leagues, including the Premier League, to place a small levy on sponsorship revenues that would help get 2 million children in poor countries into school over the next five years.
LAST November, Kara Goucher ran the ING New York City Marathon, her first 26.2-mile race. Even though she was an Olympian who had placed 10th in the 10,000 meter race in 2008 in Beijing — running the equivalent of 6.2 miles — she felt fear. “I was really scared I wouldn’t be able to handle the pain for that long,” said Ms. Goucher, 31, who had never run more than 18 miles at a time before training for the marathon. “Now I was asking myself to run eight miles farther, a lot faster. It was daunting.”
Coaching and science: What's the big deal and who cares for the science?
"As promised, today begins a series of posts on coaching and science, and how the science can be, should be, and sometimes is, and often is not, applied to athlete preparation. Obviously, it comes with an endurance focus, but there's no reason why sprint coaches and team sport coaches can also not glean some information from this.
This is a series that was inspired by my visit to the US Olympic Center in Colorado Springs. I was lucky enough to be invited there by Prof Randy Wilber of the USOC, who had organized a symposium on altitude training. The symposium brought together scientists, coaches, athletes and mangers from 22 different countries, and included 32 Olympic athletes, and numerous sporting codes, Summer and Winter Olympics among them..."
Belichick had the numbers on his side
Among the countless criticisms hurled at Patriots coach Bill Belichick for his decision to go for it on fourth down Sunday night, former Colts coach Tony Dungy summed up the most popular when, speaking on NBC, he said, “You have got to play the percentages and punt the ball.’’ What Dungy did not realize, though, is that “the percentages’’ dictated that Belichick do exactly what he did...
Short Heels and Long Toes: A Surprising Recipe for Speed
Track coaches have long claimed that the best sprinters are born, not made. Now, new research on the biomechanics of sprinting suggests that at least part of elite athletes’ impressive speed comes from the natural shape of their foot and ankle bones.
Using ultrasound imaging, researchers compared the feet of 12 top college sprinters with those of 12 mere mortals. Surprisingly, the athletes had particularly short heels and longer-than-average toes — features that actually put them at a mechanical disadvantage when running.
“What we found is that sprinters actually had less mechanical advantage than the non-sprinter subjects that we tested,” said biomechanics researcher Stephen Piazza of Penn State University, co-author of the study published Friday in the Journal of Experimental Biology. “This was surprising to us because we expected that sprinters needed all the help they could get.”