Over the past couple of years, Mateos Kekatos reinvented himself as a pitcher with the University of Toronto Varsity Blues. He put in hours upon hours of work to refine his delivery, to better understand his repertoire, to hone the quality of his pitches and the results showed on the mound, with a couple of seasons that positioned him to become the second player ever selected in the June draft out of Ontario University Athletics.
On the cusp of achieving a lifelong dream, the 22-year-old is instead among the thousands of young players left in limbo by the COVID-19 pandemic and Major League Baseball’s decision to run a five-round draft next month as a result.
Canadians eligible this year will be hit particularly hard by the fallout, although the country’s top prospects of the 2020 class – outfielders Owen Caissie of Burlington, Ont., David Calabrese of Maple, Ont., and Jordan Nwogu of Ottawa – may avoid the collateral damage.
Those further down the draft lists, though, are going to be adversely impacted, especially someone like Kekatos, who has already overcome extreme odds in emerging from a rarely travelled pathway.
This paper reviews a series of sport biomechanics research projects with long-term support of the Japan Association of Athletic Federations (JAAF) on the feedback loop of sport biomechanics. The JAAF supported these studies focusing on providing feedback to athletes and coaches based on biomechanical data. The primary topics of discussion are the standard motion model for teaching and coaching, inter-individual motion variation and deviation, and classification of athletes’ motions. Additionally, a comment is presented on motion-decision criterion, or objective function for body segment recruitment with examples of running and jumping. This paper concludes with remarks on how to expand the research in sport biomechanics and how to bridge the gap between researchers and practitioners. It is advisable for sport biomechanists to further explore biomechanical principles of human movement from the viewpoint of sports, to mutually understand features of research and practice sides and to be more involved in performance analysis and improvement in sports techniques. [full text]
The youth soccer landscape in Charlotte is changing.
Offerings have expanded over the last five years at every level. With the addition of a Major League Soccer franchise that starts play in 2021 comes a club-connected academy. Charlotte Soccer Academy has grown from roughly 200 players to over 6,500 through multiple mergers and a name change from South Charlotte Soccer Association. The Charlotte Independence Soccer Club celebrated a year since Carolina Rapids, Lake Norman and Discoveries SC merged to form a mega club under the USL Championship side’s umbrella. Youth soccer is exploding as quickly as the region’s population.
“Statistics show there’s more children between the age of 6-16 playing now than any other sport in the country,” said CSA Executive Director Brad Wylde, a Catawba alumnus who played professionally with the Charlotte Eagles.
… “Open businesses, open gyms, open the outdoors! Let people do what makes them healthy and happy!” tweeted International Health, Racquet & Sportsclub Association (IHRSA) VP of communications Meredith Poppler on May 12. The IHRSA has contacted state governors across the United States, asking them to reopen fitness clubs, and stressing that club operators are “ready, willing, and proactively wanting to work in partnership with state officials on reopening plans.” (Poppler declined my phone interview request.)
Not so fast, say public health experts. “It doesn’t make sense that indoor gyms are included in the first round of reopening,” says Leana Wen, MD, an ER physician, visiting professor of public health at George Washington University, and former Baltimore city health commissioner. The risks from heavy breathing in a confined space are simply too great right now, she adds.
Tournament organizers were committed to hosting their annual volleyball event in Orlando in June, the largest of its kind and what would have been the nation’s first major youth sporting event in more than two months. But even after the Amateur Athletic Union announced additional precautions last week to account for risks associated with the novel coronavirus, teams across the country kept dropping out. For them, it was just too early, and the AAU belatedly came to the same conclusion and postponed the event.
“We thought we had our i’s dotted and t’s crossed, but then it came along that there were concerns we may be a little bit early doing that,” AAU President Roger Goudy said. “Not for a second did anybody think it was unsafe. But if it was questionable, then it just wasn’t worth doing it. I would never be able to live with myself if anybody got sick as a result of something we did.”
Youth sports in the age of the coronavirus is a murky swamp of questions with no simple answers. As states start relaxing restrictions, many leagues and organizers are optimistic kids will be playing games and participating in organized activities soon.
The British Psychological Society, Research Digest, Emma Young from
We all know that too little sleep is bad for us. Matthew Walker, a UC Berkeley sleep scientist and author of the best-selling Why We Sleep, has gone so far as to declare: “The shorter you sleep, the shorter your life.” However, some researchers fear that our concerns about not getting enough sleep are becoming overblown — and that, ironically, they could be making the problem worse. In this feature, we take a look at evidence that “too little” sleep isn’t always the disaster that it’s held up to be.
It’s not always about a lack of sleep
You’ll be familiar with the chronotype concepts of larks (early to bed and early to rise) and owls (late to bed, and late to rise). Most kids start out as larks, but during adolescence, many shift to becoming owls. Waking up late is fine for teenagers at the weekends, but not during the school week. Unsurprisingly, then, various studies have found that delaying the time school starts improves academic results for this age-group, and many sleep scientists and paediatricians support such a policy. It’s been assumed that this is because it allows teens to get a decent night’s sleep. But there’s some evidence that this may not be the reason. A recent study of Dutch secondary school pupils, published in Scientific Reports, found that owls did get poorer exam grades, but this effect was largely independent of sleep duration.
Football had a complex relationship with social media even before the coronavirus pandemic struck. Its biggest strength is its biggest weakness: the real time, almost entirely unfiltered interaction between anyone, anywhere in the world. The likes of Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat theoretically offer an endless stream of opinion to simultaneously inspire, reinforce, undermine and exasperate its users.
Instant accessibility to this Pandora’s box presents an ongoing problem to managers and players, one that will be heightened if and when the Premier League returns to complete the 2019-20 campaign — estimates suggest that it could be anywhere from six to 12 months — social media will be the only way players and fans can interact. This could intensify an issue Watford goalkeeper Ben Foster has witnessed in many locker rooms over the years as players get consumed by the feedback loop online.
As part of a new series of ‘inside the news’ video interviews, endurancebusiness.com spoke with Dan Eisenhardt, founder and CEO of FORM.
Dan established FORM, the sports technology and smart swim goggles brand, in 2016 with the first product launch in summer of 2019. Prior to FORM, he set-up Recon Instruments and sold the smart eyewear business to Intel in 2015. Dan also runs a venture fund from his base in Canada and oversees a number of investment start-ups. [video, 13:57]
Smart devices that measure electrical signals from your skin have the potential to tell you about your stress levels, help your sports performances and allow you to track your emotions.
An international team of researchers from Sweden and Lancaster University have developed an innovative way of interpreting biological signals produced by the conductance of our skin. Using data obtained using a Philips wrist-worn wearable sensor device that also include an accelerometer to measure movement, the researchers’ system displays information in the form of colourful spiral graphics in real time on a smart phone, as well as a recording of data, for the wearer to interpret and reflect on.
arXiv, Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition; Yifu Zhang, Chunyu Wang, Xinggang Wang, Wenjun Zeng, Wenyu Liu from
There has been remarkable progress on object detection and re-identification in recent years which are the core components for multi-object tracking. However, little attention has been focused on accomplishing the two tasks in a single network to improve the inference speed. The initial attempts along this path ended up with degraded results mainly because the re-identification branch is not appropriately learned. In this work, we study the essential reasons behind the failure, and accordingly present a simple baseline to addresses the problem. It remarkably outperforms the state-of-the-arts on the public datasets at 30 fps. We hope this baseline could inspire and help evaluate new ideas in this field.
A College World Series in mid-July. An NCAA tournament beginning in early July. A college baseball season beginning the third weekend of March.
Those are all things that will happen beginning with the 2022 season if a set of recommendations assembled by a five-coach panel of Power Five coaches gets approval from other Division I coaches and passes at the highest levels of the NCAA in the coming months. The panel who put together the proposed “New Baseball Model” includes Michigan head coach Erik Bakich as the headliner and a host of other Power Five head coaches. There also have been Zoom discussions with plenty of other coaches, including Big Ten coaches, Virginia’s Brian O’Connor, Ole Miss’ Mike Bianco, Cal Poly’s Larry Lee, East Carolina’s Cliff Godwin, Oklahoma State’s Josh Holliday, UC Irvine’s Ben Orloff and Sacramento State’s Reggie Christiansen. The group also has included world-renowned orthopedic surgeon, Dr. James Andrews, on some of their calls.
… And ultimately, the guys who will have the most eyes on them are the young guns who (a) play for Canadian teams and (b) are so youthful and talented that they have no excuses in the eyes of hockey fans for not being ready to tear things up right away when the league reopens. It’s one thing if a team like the Pittsburgh Penguins falters in this new format; on a macro level, the franchise doesn’t have much left to prove. The same is not true for the assumed next generation of hockey’s top talent, from whom much will be expected.
The Edmonton Oilers, who feature Connor McDavid and Leon Draisaitl, had finally found their groove when the season was suspended. Now, they’ll play the Chicago Blackhawks, who have experienced weapons in players like Patrick Kane and Jonathan Toews. This kind of star-on-star matchup could be a dream for a league, and a chance for the Oilers to quickly right their ship.
… With cities around the country loosening stay-at-home restrictions, MLS is now thinking of having teams remain in their home markets until around June 21, at which point the teams would decamp for Walt Disney World’s Wide World of Sports complex in Orlando (ESPN is owned by the Walt Disney Co.) and stay there for a little more than a month.
The teams would then take part in a group stage comprised of five matches, followed by a knockout stage. The group-stage games would count in the regular-season standings.
ESPN College Sports, Mark Schlabach and Paula Lavigne from
As more and more college athletic departments cut sports programs, the financial wreckage due to the coronavirus pandemic is becoming devastatingly clear — and that’s without factoring in a $4 billion loss if the 2020 football season is canceled, a development that would forever alter college-level sports.
University systems have suffered hundreds of millions of dollars in losses thus far, which could grow significantly as decisions are made about whether to return students to campuses this fall.
An array of cost-saving measures have been implemented 100 days from the scheduled start of the college football season: The Mid-American Conference announced multiple scheduling changes, including plans to eliminate conference tournaments in eight sports; Cincinnati dropped its men’s soccer program; Old Dominion cut its wrestling program; Furman shut down baseball and men’s lacrosse; Bowling Green cut baseball; Central Michigan terminated men’s track and field; and Akron announced it is eliminating men’s cross country, men’s golf and women’s tennis.