Ben Simmons has never done basketball the conventional way.
But then again, Simmons wasn’t your average basketball prospect. The Melbourne native attended Whitefriars Catholic College for Boys until year 9, when coach Kevin Goorjian (brother of 6x NBL Coach of the Year Brian) lured him to Box Hill Senior Secondary College. Box Hill didn’t have a year 9 basketball program, meaning Goorjian had to create one for Simmons.
By the end of the 2011 school year, this grade 9 kid was playing against seniors, in the Australian Schools Championships. Despite going up against guys three years older than him, Simmons was already producing highlight reel plays, including dunks in transition. It was only going to be a matter of time before this basketball prodigy earned an invite to the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS), and he did so ahead of the 2012 school year.
… Not long ago, Tavares’s agenda was made even busier when he accepted an invitation to serve on the NHL/NHLPA Return to Play Committee, a working group of a dozen or so players and executives—including commissioner Gary Bettman, players’ association head Donald Fehr and Oilers star Connor McDavid—tasked with mapping out scenarios for the league’s resumption … whenever that ultimately may be. Early on, Tavares reports, the committee was holding two to three Zoom meetings a week, ranging from 20-minute check-ins to wide-ranging discussions that ticked past an hour and a half. Lately, though, “the frequency of calls has certainly picked up quite a bit,” he says in an interview. “We’re getting closer to [having them] every other day now, as we try to create some clarity, as best as we can, on many fronts for everyone involved in the hockey world, which would be a really positive thing.”
On the back of last weekend’s successful resumption of the Bundesliga, the German FA (DBF) has confirmed that the women’s Bundesliga will restart later this month as well.
On Friday May 29 German champions and current league leaders VfL Wolfsburg will kick off the season again against FC Köln. The Women’s Cup final has been rescheduled to July 4, on the same day as the men’s equivalent.
“We’re delighted that we now finally have this security in our planning and can continue our preparations for the resumption of the season as planned,” said Wolfsburg director Ralf Kellerman.
The NBA has entered into exploratory conversations with The Walt Disney Company about resuming its season at Disney’s ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex in Orlando, Florida, in late July, NBA spokesperson Mike Bass said Saturday.
“The NBA, in conjunction with the National Basketball Players Association, is engaged in exploratory conversations with The Walt Disney Company about restarting the 2019-20 NBA season in late July at Disney’s ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex in Florida as a single site for an NBA campus for games, practices and housing,” Bass said. “Our priority continues to be the health and safety of all involved, and we are working with public health experts and government officials on a comprehensive set of guidelines to ensure that appropriate medical protocols and protections are in place.”
Ensuring Leicester City are agile to changing circumstances as they put measures in place to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic has been central to the Club’s approach, says Brendan Rodgers.
… The defending Major League Soccer-champion Seattle Sounders FC have returned to training, part of a sports world slowly, incrementally reopening amid the coronavirus pandemic.
And the Seahawks and entire NFL are watching. Very closely, to see if this is the way to incrementally return to training before playing.
This week Roldan, Arreaga, Lodeiro and more Sounders players have been wearing dark masks over their noses and mouths as they walk from their cars straight onto the training fields at the team’s Starfire Sports complex in Tukwila. Coaches wearing masks have stayed a long pass away from the players.
… Players have questions about coronavirus safety measures, general player safety after at least two months away from competitive team workouts, why they must resume play mostly on artificial turf that can lead to injuries, isolation from families and compensation.
The NWSL is working with 15 doctors to develop protocols, including extensive COVID-19 testing and a variety of other measures to help protect players and staff who will most likely be limited to visiting their hotel rooms, training fields and matches.
Technology is often introduced into sport to facilitate it or to improve human performance within it. On occasion, some forms of novel technology require regulation or prevention entirely to ensure that a sport remains fair and accessible. Recently, the Nike Vaporfly and Alphafly shoes have received some concerns over their appropriateness for use in competitive distance running. Methods
This paper evaluates the use of these shoes against an existing framework for sports technology discourse and adopts a pragmatic approach to attempt to resolve them. Results
It is proposed that the three concerns regarding cost, access and coercion cannot be ruled out but likely remain short-term issues. As a result, it is proposed that these running shoes are acceptable forms of technology but that ongoing vigilance will be required as such technologies develop further in the future. Conclusions
The Nike Vaporfly/Alphafly shoes do push the perceived acceptability of running shoes to the limits of the current sports regulations. However, the alleged gains have not manifested themselves to a level that could be considered excessive when reviewing historical performances or when evaluated against a set of well-cited criteria. The sport will need to adopt a stance of ongoing vigilance as such technologies continue to develop or be optimised in the future. [full text]
In a paper published by Nano Energy, a team from Surrey’s Advanced Technology Institute (ATI), in partnership with Kyung Hee University in South Korea, detail how they developed a nano-biomedical motion sensor which can be paired with AI systems to recognise movements of distinct body parts.
The ATI’s technology builds on its previous work around triboelectric nanogenerators (TENG), where researchers used the technology to harness human movements and generate small amounts of electrical energy. Combining the two means self-powered sensors are possible without the need for chemical or wired power sources.
When Timberwolves president Gersson Rosas set about assembling a front-office staff in Minnesota in 2019, he was insistent that the group include a doctor who specialized in medicine and technology. Rosas was looking for someone analytical who could help the Timberwolves use data to optimize the health of players.
Rosas eventually hired Dr. Robby Sikka, who has a background in anesthesiology, sports medicine research and returning to play after injury.
“Whenever I got a job, that was the type of guy that I wanted in my front office,” Rosas said. “He allows us to attack blind spots that are critical to our players.”
At the time, Rosas could not have predicted that Sikka’s job would include combating a virus that spiraled into a global pandemic and caused the NBA to shut down. Now, Sikka and the Mayo Clinic — an academic medical center headquartered in Rochester, Minnesota — are spearheading a leaguewide study that aims to establish what percentage of NBA players, coaches, executives and staff have developed antibodies to the coronavirus.
All across America, the vision of sports returning has been explicitly tied to the notion that players and coaches would be protected by robust COVID-19 testing to identify and isolate positive cases before they become outbreaks.
For pro athletes, in fact, frequent testing is one of the few non-negotiable areas. Without testing, you won’t have pro sports.
But at the college level, Friday’s announcement by the Southeastern Conference that so-called “voluntary” workouts (let’s be real, there’s no such thing) can resume on campus as early as June 8 came with a pretty significant hint about how college football programs are not going to meet the
Research into the return of professional sport in Europe is leading to fears of an AFL injury plague just weeks out from the season relaunch.
An investigation by Australian-raised sports scientist Dr Joel Mason, reported by AFL Media, found the top German soccer league – the Bundesliga – saw its injury rate spike by more than three times the usual number since returning.
Dr Mason’s report found the pre-lockdown injury rate of German players was 0.27 per game, but that figure climbed to 0.88 in the first phase of the return, in an admittedly small sample size.
… What had to excite general manager Howie Roseman and company were the teams that ranked second and fifth on the opposite end of that ledger: the Vikings and the Los Angeles Rams. The Eagles were likely aware of their standing as two of the healthier teams in the NFL; otherwise they wouldn’t have hired Tom Hunkele from the Vikings or Ted Rath from the Rams.
The rankings, though, further verified the offseason additions of Hunkele as director of sports medicine and Rath as director of sports performance, and confirmed what Roseman said in January: that the Eagles aren’t downplaying the impact injuries had on their last two seasons.
… Proactive recovery nutrition is especially important if you complete two or more training sessions in one day or two sessions in close succession (e.g. evening session followed by early morning session the next day). However, if you’re exercising once a day or a couple of times a week, recovery nutrition is still important but you may be able to meet your nutrition goals from your usual meals or snacks than adding in extra food.