Applied Sports Science newsletter – May 11, 2020

… In the new season of the Olympic Channel original series Anatomy of, the 29-year-old has been pushed to the max in a sport science lab to show all her extraordinary physical qualities.

That includes a very lean body and a upper-body strength, comparable to male professional athletes.

The American sprinter might be suffering on the stamina tests, but she’s gifted with an uncommon explosive power: on a vertical jump the track and field star was able to generate over 3,700W, enough to turn on 37 light bulbs! [video, 9:10]

Klay Thompson felt he was at the peak of his powers when he tore his ACL last June. Rehabbing from the injury has required a lot of physical work, but it arguably has necessitated even more mentally.

“I’ve been so used to playing 78-plus games a year,” the Warriors star said in the recently released “Above the Waves,” a short documentary about his rehab. “With playoffs, 100. But you can either, you know, feel sorry for yourself, or you can work even harder. It’s not just about getting your hours in the gym or your rehab. The psychological hurdles are probably the biggest things I need to overcome.”

… Leading age-group, academy and school rugby coaches say blinkered management, flawed decision-making and petty jealousies have negatively affected the development of England’s next generation of young players. Despite boasting the world’s largest pool of registered youngsters, the Rugby Football Union stands accused of failing to maximise its resources and of allowing hundreds of potential top‑level athletes to drift out of the sport.

One experienced Premiership academy manager has said he believes up to 20% of the country’s most talented teenage players each year are being overlooked or blithely ignored and that excessive pressure on many academy youngsters is adversely affecting their exam results. There has also been an instance of disillusioned parents threatening legal action to force a Premiership club to agree to their rejected teenage son playing elsewhere and of agents targeting promising schoolboys as young as 14.

… Throughout the country and world, players, coaches and parents involved in youth sports are wondering what will happen to a billion-dollar industry, that, if taken away, could change the landscape of the sports industry and alter futures for thousands of families.

Subtle features of common language can imply to young children that scientists are a special and distinct kind of person—a way of thinking that can interfere with the development of children’s own engagement with science. We conducted a large field experiment (involving 45 prekindergarten schools, 130 teachers, and over 1,100 children) to test if targeting subtle properties of language can increase science engagement in children’s daily lives. Despite strong tendencies to describe scientists as a special kind of person (in a baseline control condition), brief video-based training changed the language that teachers used to introduce science to their students. These changes in language were powerful enough to predict children’s science interest and behavior days later. Thus, subtle features of language shape children’s beliefs and behaviors as they unfold in real world environments. Harnessing these mechanisms could promote science engagement in early childhood.

At OSAI we develop AI systems for sports analytics. We present Deep Learning-based method for real-time analysis of high frame rate table tennis videos. Video contains results of work of production ready system using TTNet as a DL backbone trained on over 20 hours of table tennis videos [video, 0:41]

… My article in the print magazine focused on how the latest Stryd devices can now measure and account for wind conditions, which is a pretty cool new feature that doesn’t make it into this study. The other devices and algorithms continue to evolve too, so this isn’t the final word on the topic. But for now, if you’re in the market for a running power device—and if what you really mean by that is a consistently repeatable estimate of oxygen consumption—this data suggests that Stryd is your best bet.

NBA commissioner Adam Silver prepared players for a potentially grim landscape amid the coronavirus pandemic, suggesting there are no guarantees when fans could fully return to NBA arenas next season.

Silver said that 40% of the league’s revenue comes from money built around game nights in arenas.

“This could turn out to be the single greatest challenge of all our lives,” Silver told the players.

… The AIS played a central role in the development of the Return to Sport National Guiding Principles endorsed by National Cabinet last Friday, which is in step with The AIS Framework for Rebooting Sport in a COVID-19 Environment.

The AIS team, led by AIS Chief Medical Officer (CMO), Dr David Hughes, developed the Framework in collaboration with sport CMOs around Australia, in consultation with the Federal Government’s CMOs and the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee (AHPPC), as the guide for the reintroduction of sport and recreation in Australia following the COVID-19 pandemic.

… “We have seen some research that athletes may be particularly vulnerable to serious symptoms,” said [Brendan] Schwab, whose union represents around 85,000 athletes, including many who play in the NBA, MLB, NHL, NFL, rugby, European soccer and Australian Rules football.

“The virus may get deep into the lungs, it is a virus that can cause severe damage not only to the lungs but other organs and athletes need to be at a very high level of health and fitness in order to be able to preserve their careers.”

In municipalities where coronavirus testing has become readily available to at-risk health care workers, NBA teams opening facilities for voluntary workouts will be allowed to administer tests to asymptomatic players and staff, sources told ESPN.

The Orlando Magic have been approved and plan to administer testing to players prior to a Tuesday reopening, and the LA Clippers and Los Angeles Lakers are among the teams expected to be allowed to conduct coronavirus tests of all players and staff members entering facilities for individual workouts — regardless of whether they are experiencing symptoms.

Sixty of the 5,754 people in a study of the Major League Baseball employee population tested positive for coronavirus antibodies, a rate lower than what similar studies run in California found, the studies’ authors said Sunday.

“I was expecting a larger number,” said Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, a professor of medicine at Stanford University, which ran the study. “It shows the value of doing the science as opposed to guessing.”

The results of the study, which was held in mid-April, revealed a prevalence of COVID-19 antibodies in the MLB employee population of 0.7 percent — a number adjusted to reflect testing accuracy. The survey showed that about 70% of those who tested positive for COVID-19 antibodies had been asymptomatic.

… In last season’s European campaign, PSG were knocked out in spectacular fashion by Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s Manchester United. It was an embarrassing defeat that suggested things haven’t changed under the German’s stewardship, but fast forward 14 months later, and something feels different for this team now.

There are clear ideas that are being put into practice and executed to near perfection; not only did PSG win the league at a canter, they also erased a 1-goal deficit and pulled off an unforgettable comeback to defeat Borussia Dortmund in the Champions League, and they did so without their captain Thiago Silva and star midfielder Marco Verratti.

During this tactical analysis, we will inspect how it’s not superstar ball in the French capital, but instead a football team being engineered by one of Europe’s top tacticians, as he looks to challenge for the UEFA Champions League.

In an unprecedented time, NBA executives are hard at work preparing for a draft with an unknown date.

Draft preparation is an ongoing and year-round effort in the NBA and it hasn’t stopped just because the NBA season has been suspended.

Under the guidance of Utah Jazz vice president of player personnel Walt Perrin, the Jazz brass is attempting to look at this hiatus from the season as an opportunity rather than a hinderance.

“The health performance group provides physical assessments and our scouting consultants, led by Walt Perrin, have been doing a bunch of very interesting projects,” Dennis Lindsey, Jazz executive vice president of basketball operations, said Tuesday. “Now that we have a little bit more time it’s been neat to participate in a few of those Zoom calls and read their notes.”