Winning the Numbers Game

Basketball season is now in full swing. But here at Popular Science, we’re ahead of the game. We’re looking beyond 2015 to see what sports will look like 10, 20, or even 30 years down the road. In this episode of the podcast, we talk to Marcus Elliott, founder of the Peak Performance Project, or P3. The company uses a slew of data to build better athletes. And we hear from Ryan Warkins, who works at Catapult Sports, a company that tracks athletes with all kinds of sensors. We discuss how to keep star players injury-free and playing at their best. To figure out how to put together a team that works like a well-oiled machine, we talk to Dean Oliver, vice president of data science at TruMedia Networks. He says that numbers have a huge amount of power in sports but that it all comes down to how they’re analyzed. Looking back into the PopSci archives also brings up some painful (if hilarious) memories about how we used to train elite players back in the day. Take, for example, the basketball “bumpers” from April 1941, designed to protect your fragile eyeglasses. Or how about a high-tech training exercise using action figures from March, 1940? The ways we play (and watch) sports have come a long way in the past 75 years, and they’ll be changing even more going forward. Tune in to find out how. Futuropolis is a biweekly podcast on the Panoply network. This week's episode is sponsored by Braintree—code for easy online payments. If you're working on a mobile app and need a simple payments solution, check out Braintree. For your first $50,000 in transactions fee-free, go you braintreepayments.com/future. This episode is also sponsored by The Message, a new podcast from GE Podcast Theater. Host Nicki Tomlin follows a team of elite cryptographers as they decode a highly classified radio transmission. To sum it up: extraterrestrials. Check out The Message, on iTunes.