The current best defender on the U.S. national team wasn’t even a defender five years ago and was instead a central midfielder struggling to get his professional career going. Five years later, Aaron Long is starring for the U.S. national team and stands as the best defender in Major League Soccer.
So much has changed for Long in the past five years, when, as an MLS rookie, he was cut by the Portland Timbers, leaving him briefly unemployed and as far away as you could imagine from where he will be on Sunday, starting as the defensive leader for the U.S. national team in the Gold Cup final against Mexico.
The New York Red Bulls defender began his journey to the national team as a kid growing up in Southern California in the same area that produced such standouts as former USMNT captain Carlos Bocanegra and MLS legend Nick Rimando. Long attended camps held by Bocanegra when he was a youth player, and neither could have known that Long would one day fill the same role as defensive leader for the USMNT that Bocanegra filled for more than a decade.
… “We still want to sit outside and hang out at night and have a chat and banter and spend time together,” Kelley O’Hara said on the eve of the final. “It’s very refreshing to be a part of a group that, what we show on the field — having each other’s backs, taking care of each other, doing whatever we need to win for each other — is really felt off the field, as well.”
Edelman had big plans for his career both on and off the field, but it was all put on hold when he tore his ACL in August 2017. Nearly two years later, with his injury and suspension behind him, the Patriots’ wide receiver has come full circle, winning a Super Bowl MVP award and producing a documentary on Showtime—and he still wants more.
Before Bundesliga players can start their preseason they have to go through intensive testing. At Bayer Leverkusen, the health and fitness examinations take more than three hours to complete.
England veteran goal shooter Rachel Dunn has urged female athletes to be more “aware” of the link between anterior cruciate ligament injuries and menstrual cycles.
At 36, Dunn is the oldest player in Tracey Neville’s 12-strong squad for the Netball World Cup in Liverpool, which begins on Friday – a startling achievement given she has twice had to come back from ACL injuries. Research has shown that the injury is more prevalent in women due to fluctuations of oestrogen, the female hormone, during the menstrual cycle.
One theory is that peaks in oestrogen levels decreases the elasticity of major joints, making them more injury prone.
“I think it’s something to be aware of,” Dunn said. “More research needs to be done. I’m aware that to help out all your ligaments you need to have strong hamstrings and glutes – you need to be well coordinated and controlled as possible. Don’t miss leg day in the gym.
Boredom is one of the most common human experiences, yet it seems continually to defy complete understanding. We all know what it is to feel bored, but what exactly prompts, constitutes, or follows from the condition of boredom is far less obvious. Is boredom a function of leisure? Does boredom tangle desire or personal conditions, or both? That is, when I stare at the full refrigerator and complain that there is nothing to eat, or when I scan 100 cable channels and find nothing to watch, who or what, exactly, is to blame?
A century ago, modernist poets and artists worked to illustrate the disintegrated selfhood of twentieth-century humanity, the way a coherent individuality was being torn apart by new social and political conditions such that we were left with, at best, fragments shored against our ruin. Today, the challenge is urgent in a new fashion, since our selves are deliberately scattered data fragments—Twitter feeds, Instagram posts, shopping preferences, and text trends captured by algorithms that seem to know us better than we know ourselves. What hope is there for integration and stability under such conditions?
As technology continues to change how we communicate and train, athletes have access to an unprecedented number of motivating and demotivating factors. Social media, instantaneous coach feedback, and various new platforms for performance and competition have all changed the landscape of sports, along with athletes’ reasons for doing them. Motivation is defined on a global level as the direction and intensity of effort (Sage, 1977), and no matter the platform, it’s essential to an athlete’s perceived reason and self-determination. Therefore it needs to be both understood and balanced for success in sport.
Recent explorations of knee biomechanics have benefited from computational modeling, specifically leveraging advancements in finite element analysis and rigid body dynamics of joint and tissue mechanics. A large number of models have emerged with different levels of fidelity in anatomical and mechanical representation. Adapted modeling and simulation processes vary widely, based on justifiable choices in relation to anticipated use of the model. However, there are situations where modelers’ decisions seem to be subjective, arbitrary, and difficult to rationalize. Regardless of the basis, these decisions form the “art” of modeling, which impact the conclusions of simulation-based studies on knee function. These decisions may also hinder the reproducibility of models and simulations, impeding their broader use in areas such as clinical decision making and personalized medicine. This document summarizes an ongoing project that aims to capture the modeling and simulation workflow in its entirety—operation procedures, deviations, models, by-products of modeling, simulation results, and comparative evaluations of case studies and applications. The ultimate goal of the project is to delineate the art of a cohort of knee modeling teams through a publicly accessible, transparent approach and begin to unravel the complex array of factors that may lead to a lack of reproducibility. This manuscript outlines our approach along with progress made so far. Potential implications on reproducibility, on science, engineering, and training of modeling and simulation, on modeling standards, and on regulatory affairs are also noted.
Two sports technology companies are teaming up to make tracking and collection of data a bit easier. Catapult and ShotTracker have entered into a partnership that centers around the way that professional and collegiate basketball teams organize and analyze key data points.
An important element of the deal provides ShotTracker, which already delivers autonomous basketball stats and insights to sixty-one men’s and women’s college basketball programs (as well as the Mountain West conference), the ability to integrate with Catapult’s video analysis platform. The result will be a streamlined data collection, delivery and video analysis consolidated in a single solution.
At its core, the partnership combines Catapult’s performance and workload-based data with ShotTracker’s more than seventy unique tactical statistics. The information will be delivered instantaneously in game and practice settings, with sub-second latency to teams, fans and broadcast partners to further enhance the way that data is extrapolated and delivered.
Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy from
Objective
To describe the incidence, prevalence, and impact of running-related injuries (RRIs) and illness symptoms in half marathon and marathon runners during the 16-week period before the Utrecht Marathon. Methods
In this prospective cohort study, we used the Oslo Sports Trauma Research Center questionnaire to register RRIs and illness symptoms every 2 weeks during the 16-week study period. When an injury or illness occurred, questions were added regarding its nature. We calculated the incidence proportion (the number of new cases divided by the number of runners at risk) and the period prevalence (the number of existing and new cases within a 2-week period, divided by the total number of runners at risk during that period). Results
Of the 161 included runners, 9 out of 10 reported an RRI or illness symptom at some time during the study period. In any 2-week period, 5.6% to 14.8% of the runners reported a new RRI, and 6.3% to 13.8% of the runners reported a new illness symptom. The prevalence of RRIs ranged from 29.2% to 43.5%, and the prevalence of illness symptoms ranged from 28.3% to 71.2%. The most prevalent RRIs were in the lower leg (prevalence range, 5.4%–12.3%) and knee (prevalence range, 2.7%–9.3%). The most prevalent illness symptoms were rhinorrhea/sneezing (prevalence range, 3.9%–12.7%) and coughing (prevalence range, 3.9%–11.9%). The incidence and prevalence of illness symptoms peaked at the same time as the influenza-like illness epidemic of the winter of 2015–2016. Conclusion
Nine out of every 10 runners reported an RRI or illness symptom in the lead-up to a half or full marathon. In any 2-week period, up to 1 in 7 runners reported a new RRI or illness symptom.
… Experts I spoke with for this story pointed to a couple of reasons professional athletes are particularly susceptible to mental health issues.
Many “are high-achieving perfectionists,” said David Yukelson, the retired director of sports psychology services for Penn State Athletics and a past president of the Association for Applied Sports Psychology.
That’s great when it all comes together in victory or a terrific performance, but the toll of perfectionism can be tough when the results don’t match an athlete’s own expectations, Yukelson said.
The record heat wave sweeping through Europe sent daytime temperatures above 100 degrees Fahrenheit last week in France as soccer players squared off in the quarterfinals of the FIFA Women’s World Cup.
Temperatures soared even higher during the concurrent Africa Cup of Nations in Egypt.
One player for Nigeria was hospitalized and missed his team’s first game after collapsing during a training session due to “severe dehydration,” according to his former soccer club. The heat also sparked a dispute between the Moroccan coach and referees over a lack of water breaks.
NBC Sports, Football Morning in America, Chris Ballard from
… The real currency of the draft—and any player acquisition—is scouting, medical, character and analytical information. We meet with potential prospects, sometimes on multiple occasions, and conduct extensive research. We do this to make sure we are making smart picks that will be good fits for the Colts. Most importantly, we have to be more accurate than 31 other teams drafting that day.
When Frank Reich and I sat down for his coaching interview in February 2018, we spent a lot of time talking about what type of players we wanted in the locker room. We were in lock step in our philosophies on the makeup of the team. We define football character as a player’s work ethic, passion for the game, football intelligence, competitive nature, and teamness. If any of these areas are weak, the chances of the player busting and not fitting in our locker room becomes greater.
The application of artificial intelligence (AI) opens an interesting perspective for predicting injury risk and performance in team sports. A better understanding of the techniques of AI employed and of the sports that are using AI is clearly warranted. The purpose of this study is to identify which AI approaches have been applied to investigate sport performance and injury risk and to find out which AI techniques each sport has been using. Methods
Systematic searches through the PubMed, Scopus, and Web of Science online databases were conducted for articles reporting AI techniques or methods applied to team sports athletes. Results
Fifty-eight studies were included in the review with 11 AI techniques or methods being applied in 12 team sports. Pooled sample consisted of 6456 participants (97% male, 25 ± 8 years old; 3% female, 21 ± 10 years old) with 76% of them being professional athletes. The AI techniques or methods most frequently used were artificial neural networks, decision tree classifier, support vector machine, and Markov process with good performance metrics for all of them. Soccer, basketball, handball, and volleyball were the team sports with more applications of AI. Conclusions
The results of this review suggest a prevalent application of AI methods in team sports based on the number of published studies. The current state of development in the area proposes a promising future with regard to AI use in team sports. Further evaluation research based on prospective methods is warranted to establish the predictive performance of specific AI techniques and methods. [full text]
