The COVID-19 shutdown hit Emerson Hyndman a time when he was set to begin his first full season as a starter. But the Texan is taking it all in stride these days and looks forward to getting back on the field for Atlanta to help win silverware and show his ability for the frist time on a consistent basis.
Not much has changed about Caroline Silby’s day-to-day routine. As a sports psychologist based in Montgomery County who counts the U.S. Figure Skating national team and elite youth athletes across the country among her clients, Silby is used to teleworking.
Except that, now, it’s her only option. Instead of occasionally flying to Colorado Springs, Colorado, where the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee is based, for a meeting, Silby relies on video conferencing apps. Her typical week involves hours of talking on FaceTime, Skype, Zoom, or whatever telehealth platform her clients use.
Because the sports world has shut down due to the COVID-19 pandemic, athletes may not be able to physically train like they normally would. But sports psychologists like Silby believe now, perhaps more than ever, athletes can and should work on their mental fitness.
“I think everyone is trying to find their way, and certainly we’re encouraging people to talk about the worries and concerns that we all have,” she says.
Vancouver-based Form, a sport technology startup that has developed augmented reality swim goggles for athletes, has raised $12 million CAD in Series A funding.
On the heels of the Scarlet Knights’ record-setting basketball season, coupled with the return of head football coach Greg Schiano, many are anxious for the return of intercollegiate competition at Rutgers.
But in the wake of the coronavirus that has turned everyday life upside down, including college sports, there are a lot of questions about how that can happen. Rutgers is at the forefront of finding a way for colleges and universities to move forward as a member of the first Task Force for Emerging Infectious Diseases recently formed by the Big Ten Conference. With representatives from each conference institution, the task force will provide guidance and sound medical advice to ensure the health, safety and wellness of the Big Ten’s students, coaches, administrators and fans.
“We are going to do everything that we possibly can to aid the return of competition in the fall, but we are going to do it safely,” said Vicente Gracias, vice president for health affairs at Rutgers, who represents the university on the 14-member working group. “Anyone who is trying to give a defined answer right now is only guessing. We still do not know the immunology and are still determining the best testing methods for the virus. It’s our goal to get our student-athletes safely back into practice and play.”
Coronavirus could impact on the international football calendar for “two or three years”, says a member of Uefa’s executive committee.
Lars-Christer Olsson, president of European Leagues, said that it would be a case of “wait and see” to assess the disruption of the pandemic, including on the 2022 Qatar World Cup.
Uefa hopes to complete the Champions League and Europa League in August.
As Dr. Rand McClain sees it, the NBA could resume this season now, without fans, at an isolated location. It just would be an expensive venture in regard to testing.
“Price-wise I can put a number on it, even with the NBA’s bargaining power, if you will, which really doesn’t amount to much Because everyone wants a test nowadays,” McClain, the chief medical officer of LCR Health, based in Santa Monica, Calif., said Wednesday. “You are probably talking initially about $250 [each time] per individual.”
A 2019 study found that nearly one-quarter of Division I student-athlete respondents had suffered recent food insecurity. What does that mean in the age of a pandemic?
… The marijuana stigma that plagued Williams’ NFL career is eroding, if not gone entirely from an enforcement standpoint. In January, Illinois became the 11th state to legalize recreational marijuana. Now, of the 123 teams across MLB, the NBA, NHL and NFL, 50 play in states or provinces where recreational marijuana is legal (40.6%). Another 51 teams play in jurisdictions where medical marijuana is legal (41.5%). That’s 82% of teams (101 of 123) that are playing in cities where a player can walk down the street, go into a dispensary, and legally purchase either recreational or medicinal marijuana — just like they were buying a six pack of beer.
The only states in which any of the four major pro league teams play where there are no broad laws legalizing marijuana are Indiana, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wisconsin.
Introduction Athletes have attempted to glean the ergogenic benefits of recombinant human erythropoietin (rHuEPO) since it became available in the 1980s. However, there is limited consensus in the literature regarding its true performance-enhancing effects. In fact, some studies suggest there is no conclusive evidence; therefore, it is necessary to evaluate and quantify the strength of the evidence.
Objective To determine the effects of erythropoietin on enhancing athletic performance.
Design At least two independent reviewers conducted citation identification through abstract and full-text screening, and study selection, and extracted raw data on demographics, descriptions of interventions and all outcomes to predesigned abstraction forms. Outcomes were stratified by treatment periods and dosages. Study quality was assessed using the Cochrane Risk of Bias Tool and Cochrane Grading of Recommendations Assessment Development and Education (GRADE) scale. Where appropriate, quantitative analysis was performed.
Data sources EMBASE, MEDLINE and SPORTDiscus were searched from their inception to January 2020.
Eligibility criteria Trials that examined any enhancement in sport in healthy participants aged 18–65 using rHuEPO compared with placebo were included.
Results Overall, there is low-to-moderate quality evidence suggesting rHuEPO may be more beneficial than placebo in enhancing haematological parameters, pulmonary measures, maximal power output and time to exhaustion independent of dosage. However, these improvements are almost exclusively seen during maximal exercise intensities, which may be less relevant to athletic competition conditions.
Conclusion Due to heterogeneity among trials, more high-quality randomised controlled trials with larger sample sizes in conditions that mirror actual competition are needed to further elucidate these effects.
In the final days of spring training, before the abrupt closure of camps due to the coronavirus pandemic, the Tampa Bay Rays twice deployed a four-man outfield against Ozzie Albies in a game against the Atlanta Braves. That in itself isn’t remarkably unique, as the Rays used four outfielders on occasion last season. What was unusual was the player the Rays deployed it against — and especially the situation the second time they tried it.
In the first inning with one out and nobody on, Albies, a switch-hitter batting from the left side, came up, and second baseman Mike Brosseau moved into right field, with the four outfielders fanned out across the grass. Albies lined out to left-center, an easy play for Randy Arozarena, whereas in a traditional three-outfielder alignment, the ball might have dropped in for a hit. In the third inning, Albies batted with two outs — but this time with a runner on first base. Albies showed bunt on the first pitch, then fouled off several pitches down the left-field line, trying to hit the ball the opposite way, before eventually striking out.
… There’s a common line of thinking college soccer doesn’t matter anymore, that its demise might actually help North American soccer overall. This ignores not only how many MLS, US and Canadian national team players past and present have benefited from NCAA stints, but also how important it is to have soccer represented in every possible sector of our society and culture.
Even if MLS academies continue their positive trajectory, prospects treading less-conventional pathways – consider the cases of Chris Wondolowski, Jay DeMerit and Jackson Yueill, for example – will continue to fall through the cracks because of the realities of geography, timing and individual development. College ball gives them a place to keep playing and growing. Its health cannot be divorced from that of the wider ecosystem.
… In 2014, FiveThirtyEight’s Benjamin Morris investigated whether the “Bad Boys” were really that bad. It turns out they were, committing more technical fouls relative to their opponents than any other team in NBA history. Morris also realized that, in general, technical fouls correlate with victory. “Teams tend to win 1.4 percent more often when their players get a tech, and a whopping 5.5 percent more often when their coaches do,” he wrote. The punishment — likely giving up a free point at the free-throw line — isn’t strong enough to supersede the intimidation and intensity one might associate with teams that commit a lot of technical fouls. “While technical fouls can’t lead directly to winning, the types of behavior that lead to technical fouls just may,” he concludes.
The Pistons strategy wasn’t born from mining a market inefficiency, but they did make an intuitive calculation that the consequences of the fouls, both technical and personal, would not be enough to mitigate the advantage of their bruising style.
As we head into May, which starts Friday, the uncertain completion of the NHL regular season and playoffs continues to be explored at the league level and debated by media and fans. Everyone agrees: Any resumption of the chase for Stanley Cup will adhere to all safety measures for players, coaches and relevant staff while honoring the public health edicts of local authorities in potential NHL rinks and practice for play.
It’s all highly tentative with a tremendous amount of work and due diligence required. While we hockey fans await May and possible clarity, here’s a “Hockey Analytics Starter Kit,” for any fans who want to know more about how advanced statistics or “metrics” are influencing how NHL front offices build a team.
More than half of the world’s top female footballers believe their clubs do not have enough backroom staff to support them, according to the 2020 women’s football report by the global players’ union, Fifpro.
The report targeted players from the 24 nations at the 2019 World Cup as well as five other countries. The “reality” of the conditions that players are competing under – behind the “glossy pictures of a World Cup” – were stark, said the Fifpro general secretary Jonas Baer-Hoffmann, and “far from the standards we would expect for people on that level, or people in general in professional football, to be working in”.
The four positions that the 186 senior internationals have highlighted in the Raising Our Game report as woefully lacking at their clubs were physiotherapists, team doctors, massage therapists and assistant coaches.
Making Sense Of: Experts and Expertise
Many things are set to change as a result of the current pandemic. One of them is journalism. You can see it in the work of Ed Yong, who’s providing lengthy reports on COVID-19 for The Atlantic. There’s a section near the end of his most recent article where Yong quotes NYU Journalism professor Jay Rosen, “Journalists still think of their job as producing new content, but if your goal is public understanding of COVID-19, one piece of new content after another doesn’t get you there.” Yong goes for public understanding. And he gets there.
Complexity has often been something to simplify, but as the world stops and a virus spreads, simple explanations aren’t enough. What’s needed is to communicate the complexity head on, in full, using all of the tools at hand: narrative, animation, visualization, statistics, computer interaction, whatever it takes. Sports science is often eager for simplified explanations and the field, like many, needs to realize that simple doesn’t go far enough.
It’s an epistemological crisis, according to Yong, “We hunger for information, but lack the know-how to evaluate it or the sources that provide it.” It’s normal to seek answers to questions among peers, even though peers aren’t going to be sufficiently expert.
“Skin in the Game” is Nassim Taleb’s first book. Normally the term references stakeholding, but there’s more, writes Conor Dewey, “In systems that require skin in the game, bad performers are naturally eliminated from the system.” What’s left are “the most effective people.”
Earlier this week the HBO Real Sports program discussed the slow acceptance of social distancing by professional sports. The Golden State Warriors ignored public health warnings and played a home game against the Los Angeles Clippers on Tuesday, March 10. Fans coming to the arena read the signs on the door saying that, if they passed through the gates and watched the game, they could not sue the Warriors if they became sick. Decision-makers working for the Golden State Warriors did not have “skin in the game.”
Analysts of all stripes, including those who work for sports teams, have technical barriers the keep them from getting skin in the game. The work is often individual and even though the computer code should be straightforward to automate, it’s difficult to create production platforms for data analysts. Sports data analysts, like many analysts, aren’t set up for full-blown teamwork.
The world’s expertise tends to be “deep, but narrow” according to Yong, but “pandemics demand both depth and breadth of expertise.” Complex explanations need input from groups of people, combining and organizing their collective knowledge and insight. Taleb’s “skin in the game” is collaboration at its core.