The Effects of Game Day on Sleep

Do Student-Athletes Sleep More Before or After Competitions?

Introduction:

Student-athletes are often running on very tight, and exhausting schedules. According to
NCAA Bylaw 17.1.5.1, during the season, student-athletes are limited to a maximum of 20 hours
of practice time, with practices running up to four hours long. While 20 hours of practice time
does not sound like a long time, this bylaw does not calculate strength and conditioning training,
locker room time, and study halls. The bylaw definitely does not factor in class time, homework,
and other daily necessities. Regardless, for any student-athlete, the most important days of the
season are game days, where all the hard work and preparation will show. Being a student-
athlete, I was interested in the effects of game day on sleep. My prediction was that a student-
athlete would sleep more after game day, because of all of the hard work and adrenaline from the
day before. While this study only applies to a few student-athletes at Nichols College, many
student-athletes have similar time restrictions during their days, and probably have very similar
sleep (or lack of sleep) schedules.

Method:

Participants:
The participants used in this study were three student-athletes from Nichols College, a
small rural primarily business school located in Dudley, Massachusetts. They were between the
ages of 18 and 21 years old, and participated in a spring sport.

Materials:
Materials used in this study were FitBit Charge 2 fitness trackers. The FitBit application
was used to obtain data. Sleep was listed on the tracker as hours and minutes of quality sleep,
which is how sleep will be defined in this study. Quality sleep is when the subject is in bed,
sleeping, without being either awake or experiencing restlessness. An example of quality sleep is
shown below.
In order to run the data, the StatCrunch application was used.

Procedure:
To run this study, the participants were told to continue on with their schedules as usual,
but to wear their FitBits all the time, in order to gather as much data as possible. At the end of
the allotted data gathering period, which was April 23rd, the subjects sent over their data, which
showed the amount of sleep, in hours and minutes, both before and after game days, which were
prerecorded. Sleep before and sleep after game days were entered into StatCrunch, and a 2
sample T-test was run. Summary statistics were also computed, listing the number of data points,
the mean, standard deviation, and the median.

One set of data was delved into deeper, looking into quality of sleep before a game,
versus the outcome of the games. For this, the hours and minutes of sleep recorded under the
Before Sleep category was divided over the total hours in bed for the night. That was then
compared to the outcome of the games the next day, whether that be zero, one or two wins.

Results:

The summary statistics for the original hypothesis, Sleep Before a game and Sleep After a game,
are shown below.

Summary statistics:
Column n Mean Std. dev. Median
Sleep Before 39 6.0761538 1.907711 5.77
Sleep After 39 5.9705128 1.6600871 5.88

The test run was a two sample T-test, comparing the means of Sleep Before a game, and Sleep
After a game. With a p value of .7949, we fail to reject the null hypothesis, as there is no
statistically significant difference in average of Sleep Before (m=6.07) and Sleep After (m=5.97)
games.

Two sample T hypothesis test:

1 : Mean of Sleep Before
2 : Mean of Sleep After
1 - 2 : Difference between two means
H0 : 1 - 2 = 0
HA : 1 - 2 0
(with pooled variances)

Hypothesis test results:

Difference Sample Diff. Std. Err. DF T-Stat P-value
1 - 2 0.10564103 0.4049454 76 0.26087721 0.7949
Here is a boxplot, showing the hours of sleep before and after game days, with the green (or top
most line) representing the average hours of sleep, and the red (or lower line) representing the
median.

A secondary hypothesis was tested, which looked into the percentage of quality of sleep on the
outcome of the days games. This was determined using a Pearson Correlation.

Correlation between Percent of Quality Sleep Before and Outcome is:

0.38754534(0.171)

The correlation between percent of quality sleep and game outcome is .3875, which is a positive
correlation showing a weak connection between increased amount of quality of sleep and game
day wins. This was also depicted in a scatter plot, which shows the weak correlation between the
two variables.
Overall, while the correlation showed a slight trend, the percentage of quality sleep received the
night before would probably not accurately represent the outcome of games won.

Discussion:

To recap, the original hypothesis predicted that there would be more hours slept after
game days due to the energy and effort exerted during the competition. This testing did not show
any significant findings, and found that there tended to be such a small difference in the average
of Sleep Before a game and Sleep After a game. This may be explained by the fact that the
subjects were student-athletes, and had more obligations than purely competing in sports. The
homework that these subjects were assigned, as well as their own personal time management was
not controlled for. In fact, there was not much control in the experiment, for fear that explaining
the hypothesis would have an impact on the final result. That being said, subjects were not told
the hypothesis of the experiment beforehand, just to wear their FitBits consistently.

In this study, 39 data points were recorded and examined from three student-athletes.
While 39 is a great start for data points, getting upwards of 100 would have been ideal. Other
potential subjects were included originally in this study, however they experienced technical
difficulties with their app, or just failed to reveal that they were not consistently wearing their
FitBit. However, there is speculation that additional data points would actually change the
findings of this experiment.

This study also only took into account female student-athletes. There tends to be a culture
difference in male and female collegiate sports, which may lead to male student athletes getting
more sleep before a game. However, this was not tested, and would be a good future direction to
include if the study was repeated with more data.

The secondary hypothesis was that there would be a significant correlation between
percentage of quality sleep, and game outcome. Based off of above results, outcome cannot be
easily or accurately predicted by percentage of quality sleep. Based off of inconsistent data
reporting from other subjects, only one subject, and 14 data points were used to test this
hypothesis. While this hypothesis seems sound in theory, the hypothesis does not look into
performance of the player, just of the team. The player may not have entered the competition that
game, which would have made less of an impact on the overall results. This study is difficult to
control, as many student-athletes do not wish to deprive themselves of sleep to risk poor
performance before a game, making a more controlled version of this experiment overall
unethical.

Having an increased amount of data points would help come to a sounder conclusion,
however once again, there is speculation that adding data points would actually make this study
more significant. Testing an important player, such as the pitcher, would be interesting, yet
overall, unethical.

While there was only a small group of subjects, this study seems representative of
Division III athletes, due to the crazy amount of balancing they have to do in their lives. Student-
athletes at Nichols are unable to only dedicate their days to collegiate competitions, which may
leave their sleep schedule inconsistent. Another way to perhaps reevaluate the study with more
data would be to group by class, to see if freshmen got more sleep after games than seniors, or
other comparative measures similar.

To recap, the findings were not significant, and there was no conclusion supporting that
student-athletes got more sleep after game days than before game days. With additional data,
more diverse tests could be run, blocking by sex, class, and even potentially sport. However,
there would need to be at least five times as many data points. There was also a lack of internal
control, which was supposed to not compromise the hypothesis, however that resulted in a lack
of data due to trusting the wearing regulations to the subjects, instead of checking in periodically.
This experiment had good potential and produced findings, however those findings would have
been much more reputable had there been an increased number of data points.
Sources:

Daily and Weekly Hour Limitations. , National Collegiate Athletic Association. Accessed 23
Apr. 2017

Daily Sleep Log. FitBit, FitBit, 23 Apr. 2017. Accessed 23 Apr. 2017.