… About 30 international players dialed in from cities around the U.S., sharing concerns about loved ones thousands of miles away and about when and how they might be able to see them again. They asked about their ability to leave the country and come back, about their family members’ ability to leave and come back, and whether family members would be able to join a “bubble” environment if the NBA season resumes.
The call, originally scheduled for an hour, went for more than 90 minutes. For as many different languages and backgrounds as the players shared and for as much as they’ve been in isolation in recent months, they found common ground. “They discovered that everybody is in the same storm,” [Matteo] Zuretti said.
These conversations struck a chord for Zuretti, particularly his personal communications with San Antonio Spurs guard Marco Belinelli, New Orleans Pelicans rookie Nicolo Melli and Oklahoma City Thunder wing Danilo Gallinari. They are the NBA’s three active Italian players, and Zuretti too hails from Italy, specifically Rome, where his family members still live.
The changed routines and rhythms around matches have been startling for Joshua Kimmich.
Playing for Bayern Munich in vast, empty stadiums has affected not just the spectacle — or lack of — but the game itself in the coronavirus era.
“Normally you have more adrenaline and more tension inside your body when you walk in and see the 80,000 fans,” Kimmich said in a video call from Munich. “Nearly everything has changed.”
Australia fullback James Tedesco is the first player to miss a game under the National Rugby League’s new health protocols in the coronavirus pandemic because he woke up with a high temperature.
Just a week after the league restarted following a two-month shutdown, Tedesco failed a test that prohibits anyone with a temperature above 37.2 from entering a stadium on game day or for practice.
He was ruled out of the Sydney Roosters’ lineup for Thursday’s 59-0 win over the Broncos in Brisbane.
… Mastroeni: At one point, I go to tackle [Luis] Figo. As I’m sliding, he just lifts the ball up so I end up sliding under him. I remember thinking, ‘Man, I haven’t seen this in MLS’.
Donovan: The European teams were always coming off these long seasons. I looked at Figo and thought, “God, he just looks really tired”. We had a bunch of guys two or three months into MLS and we were fresh.
Sanneh: Sometimes with world-class players, they don’t want to play simple. If Figo wanted to whip in an easy cross every time, he could’ve. But I knew it wasn’t going to be enough for him. He needed to do something special.
By all accounts, Liverpool have been pretty quiet over the prospect of project restart. While calls for “null and void” of a Premier League campaign in which they had the most to lose where being led from supporters to relegation-threatened club officials, Anfield seemingly kept its collective powder dry. That was also apparently the case in early league conferences. As many fought for their voices to be heard, Liverpool let the noise happen around them and remained relatively mute.
What’s important to remember in all of this is that the Reds stood to lose just more than the title. If a Jürgen Klopp team is built on anything it is the idea of togetherness, of a group of players and with a group of supporters. In the argument of what’s fair and reasonable as the matter drags on, it shouldn’t be forgotten that Liverpool haven’t lost a Premier League home match in over three years.
Ideas discussed: Coaches having access to players for 8 hours a week starting mid-July. 1/2
That would lead to 6 weeks of camp, which has been assumed will be the recommendation. The two “extra” weeks of camp project as 20-hour weeks. Those would be followed by the typical 4-week camp. These are being added to allow players to get into shape and prevent injuries.
Baltimore Sun, The Action Network, Matt Moore from
… The month of March is a wasteland of teams that are exhausted, injured and bored trying to reach the playoffs, knowing more or less they’re in or not. Seeding has never been that important to players or coaches. April in the NBA is basically the last week before the summer break in school: mostly everyone’s watching movies and goofing off.
So why then, amidst a global pandemic, in a costly and fraught situation within a Disney World bubble, is the NBA holding regular season games before beginning the playoffs?
This has been part of the plan for some time. Once league executives and owners rejected the group play concept last week, the conversation immediately shifted to a 22-team format (because we really needed to get the Wizards and Suns involved for some reason) and a shortened finish to the NBA regular season.
While thousands of youth and local athletic leagues are sidelined this spring, a Manhattan-based sports technology company, LeagueApps, is providing relief.
Since the pandemic, LeagueApps has helped dozens of city organizations, including the Manhattan Soccer Club and the Yorkville Youth Athletic Association, deal with the logistics of lost programming and preparing to resume play once the coronavirus subsides.
Under ordinary circumstances, LeagueApps provides local sports organizations with a software platform to manage registrations, payments, schedules and communication. But since the pandemic, it has focused on refunding player fees and providing guidance on surviving the crisis.
World Economic Forum, COVID Action Platform, Xiao Liu from
In the special wards of Shanghai’s Public Health Clinical Center, nurses use smart thermometers to check the temperatures of COVID-19 patients. Each person’s temperature is recorded with a sensor, reducing the risk of infection through contact, and the data is sent to an observation dashboard. An abnormal result triggers an alert to medical staff, who can then intervene promptly. The gathered data also allows medics to analyse trends over time.
The smart thermometers are designed by VivaLNK, a Silicon-Valley based startup, and are a powerful example of the many digital products and services that are revolutionizing healthcare. After the Internet of Things, which transformed the way we live, travel and work by connecting everyday objects to the Internet, it’s now time for the Internet of Bodies. This means collecting our physical data via devices that can be implanted, swallowed or simply worn, generating huge amounts of health-related information.
Some of these solutions, such as fitness trackers, are an extension of the Internet of Things. But because the Internet of Bodies centres on the human body and health, it also raises its own specific set of opportunities and challenges, from privacy issues to legal and ethical questions.
Mark Cuban had a theory, but he wanted to make sure the science backed it up.
So the Mavericks owner funded a University of Michigan study on the correlation between human growth hormone and muscle recovery after a major injury.
The results?
Michigan’s scientists found that HGH use after ACL surgery “prevents the loss of muscle strength in the knee.” In two focus groups — one using the substance and another with placebo — there wasn’t a major muscular difference, but athletes taking HGH had 29% higher knee extension strength.
Athletes who test positive for SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, should take at least two weeks off from intense or competitive exercise and even more if they show signs of myocarditis, according to two new reports.
“Unfortunately, the knowledge about medium- and long-term consequences of an infection with SARS-CoV-2 is still limited,” said Dr. Christof Burgstahler of University Hospital Tuebingen and Eberhard Karls University of Tuebingen, in Germany.
“Involvement of the heart in an asymptomatic or oligosymptomatic infection cannot always be excluded with certainty. It should, therefore, be kept in mind that cardiac complications such as myocarditis may also occur,” he told Reuters Health by email.
The first law of thermodynamics is known as the ‘Law of Conservation of Energy’ and it states that energy cannot be created or destroyed in an isolated system.
In a similar way that cars need fuel to move, the human body needs to convert nutrition into energy so we can move and function. Knowing the basics of how we generate energy can be helpful in understanding how we become fatigued and what training we can undertake to minimize fatigue. Just as you train your biceps or your hamstrings, you can train your energy systems for better conditioning and performance. Energy systems and how they work may sound like something you don’t need to take seriously unless you are an elite athlete. But how our bodies convert our fuel (nutrition) into motion is relevant to everyone. We all use the 3 different energy systems all the time and the performance of your energy system affects your health and well-being.
In order to care for your energy system, you need to engage in regular exercise and keep these systems working efficiently. This blog aims to give a high level and somewhat simplistic overview of the body’s energy system, but you can delve into more detail by checking out the references detailed at the end.
SB Nation, Beyond the Boxscore blog, Sheryl Ring from
… We started by talking about the Major League Baseball Players’ Association. “I think that there’s a couple of aspects to this,” Freedman explained. “One is what is the players association’s duty right now with respect to representing players. There is no duty to minor leaguers.” But could the MLBPA include minor leaguers, as I’ve been advocating for a while? It’s actually, as Freedman explained, not that simple.
“There are a lot of difficulties in organizing the MILB because of all the promotions,” Freedman said. “The players are not permanent employees to an extent, because they move from club to club and level to level. Because of the structure of the Nat’l Labor Relations Act, it would be hard for any union to organize them.”
… “I am excited about the group,” [Andrew] Berry said. “It was a very long process because we were diligent about a number of not only the senior-level positions but even entry-level positions. We did a lot of reference work. We did a pretty rigorous interview process and then obviously the work samples is really important for everybody that we would bring on board.
“I am excited because I think we have brought a lot of smart, talented people and put them in key roles. But also, everyone is not a carbon copy of one another – they bring different perspectives, different experiences, different viewpoints and that is what is going to push us to better decision making. We really are going to consider all the different perspectives and value them. That was a specific aiming point because I think that just helps us to be a better higher quality football operation. I think that is something that we took big strides in accomplishing this month.”
Compared to football, baseball and basketball, the “big three” American sports, soccer is a uniquely fluid game: no set possession length, a continuously running clock, a tiny number of actual scoring attempts and constant transitions that blur the line between attack and defense. That’s made it much more difficult to quantify. Lionel Messi is better than everyone else, and shots from close to the goal are better than attempts from farther away, but otherwise data-minded truths have been hard to come by. However, there are a few static aspects of the game that have proven much easier to pin down and resemble those of other major sports. One of them is substitutions.
Making Sense Of: Modern Chemistry and Sports Engineering
The physical science of chemistry could not be more different from the amorphous cohesion that gets described as “team chemistry.” Of all the scientific measurements you could take, chemistry frequently comes the closest to ground truth. As an engineering student I learned that error increases as the distance between a measuring device and the measured object increases. A chest-worn heart rate monitor is always more accurate than a wrist-worn heart rate monitor, for example. And chemistry can put you right where the action is when it comes to the ongoing work of the human neuro-muscular and musculoskeletal systems.
Nutrition is also chemistry. As life scientists gain knowledge of the systems biology of healthy exercise, some of what they learn will trace back to inputs, a/k/a food. Gatorade Sports Science Institute just published a report that connects nutrition and blood biomarkers in high-performance athletes. Other new sensor technologies measure nutrient levels in sweat and individual metabolism via carbon dioxide levels during exhalation. Supplements also count. New research at the University of Michigan shows considerable benefit from human growth hormone in athletes who are rehabilitating torn ACLs.
New wearable technology is also coming online that takes ongoing biochemical measurements. An Australian startup has been marketing a patch that monitors personal health and nutrition. In the U.S. the COVID-19 pandemic has stimulated demand for wearable sensors to monitor respiratory function (Philips, Northwestern University). It’s easy to anticipate transferring coronavirus technologies to sports applications in the future.
More basic technologies, like new materials (Toyohashi University of Technology) and bio-chips (Purdue University) will take more work to transfer to application. It would be a mistake not to add them to the list of functional chemistry advances for sports science however.
Actually, at some point technology for sports stops being sports science; it crosses over and becomes sports engineering. And chemistry is right where the action is.