Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 16, 2020

Applied Sports Science news articles, blog posts and research papers for June 16, 2020

 

New NBA coalition voicing concerns of players

ESPN NBA, Adrian Wojnarowski and Malika Andrews from

As a growing faction of NBA players remains uncertain about committing to the league’s plan for restarting the season in an Orlando bubble environment, a coalition of players including Brooklyn Nets All-Star Kyrie Irving and the Los Angeles Lakers’ Avery Bradley believes it has a responsibility to take on a leading role in exploring answers and solutions for fellow players the group believes to be justifiably reluctant to speak for themselves, sources told ESPN.

The coalition of players pursuing a further examination of the NBA’s plan to restart the season in Orlando delivered a statement to ESPN on Monday describing its thought processes and motivations.


Not fade away: Venus Williams still dreaming at 40

Yahoo Sports, AFP from

… The former world number one, however, says there is no prospect of her quietly drawing a line under a career which has yielded seven Grand Slam singles titles, four Olympic gold medals and dozens of tournament wins.

So, despite the march of time and a recent record of futility — her last singles title came in a WTA Tour event in Taiwan in 2016 – Williams won’t be hanging up her racquet just yet.

“You always have to have dreams, so I keep having them,” Williams told the Tennis Majors website in an interview earlier this month, revealing that she still wants to challenge for the French and Australian Opens, the two Grand Slams that have eluded her.


Tua Tagovailoa’s physical therapist says Dolphins QB is ‘doing miraculously well’

CBSSports.com, Tyler Sullivan from

Tua Tagovailoa is making rather significant strides as he continues to recover from that devastating hip injury that cut his final season at Alabama short. The Dolphins quarterback, who was selected No. 5 overall at the 2020 NFL Draft, is in the process of moving to Miami to begin working at the team facility, which will provide Brian Flores and the rest of the Fins brass the chance to finally see their top pick up-close. When they do, it appears like they’ll see a version of Tagovailoa that is ahead of schedule in terms of his recovery.

“He’s doing miraculously well,” Kevin Wilk, Tagovailoa’s physical therapist at the Champion Sports Medicine facility in Birmingham, Alabama, told Safid Deen of the South Flordia Sun Sentinel. “The miraculous part is that he healed so well. The second part is, he’s been so well at getting his strength back, which usually takes a long time after something like this.”


Amid nationwide protests, Black NWSL players train with feelings many teammates are only just beginning to understand

Equalizer Soccer, Jeff Kassouf from

“If I could say one thing,” OL Reign forward Jasmyne Spencer begins, “it would just be that we are very much impacted by these events directly. I feel like sometimes, because we are in this very white community like the soccer world in America, we kind of get lost as if like, ‘oh, they’re different; they wouldn’t be caught up in that.’ No. We’ve all experienced racism. We’ve all been called racial slurs. Like, this hits home. We are directly impacted by that, and so when you see what’s going on, think of us, because that’s who’s hurting; we’re who’s hurting. And when you join the fight, you’re fighting for us directly.”

Spencer is speaking at the beginning of a third week of protests across the United States centered around racial injustice and police brutality, following the death of another Black man by the force of a white police officer. George Floyd was killed by police during an arrest in Minneapolis, Minnesota, on May 25, 2020. Floyd’s death was another in a line of Black lives taken by police officers, including Breonna Taylor earlier this year.


Performance specialist Adam Owen has head start at Seattle Sounders after long and fascinating road

MLSsoccer.com from

On Thursday, the Seattle Sounders unveiled Adam Owen as the club’s new high performance director and technical advisor, adding over a decade of experience working at the intersection of sports science and tactics to their club staff.

The 39-year-old Owen boasts a fascinating resume that includes working in dual fitness and coaching roles for famed soccer institutions like Scotland’s Celtic FC and Rangers, England’s Sheffield Wednesday and Sheffield United, among others. He was most recently with Hebei Fortune of the Chinese Super League.

At the Sounders, he expects to have a bit of a head start.


Iowa football: Kirk Ferentz wants coaches to be demanding, not demeaning

Des Moines Register, Mark Emmert from

… What went on in [Chris] Doyle’s strength and conditioning room was kept from public view. Fans and the media are not allowed to see that part of the football operation.

But it is true that football workouts are typically more demanding than those for other sports, said Joel Seedman, who trains high-level athletes at his Advanced Human Performance facility, including NFL players.

“There kind of is that mental toughness component that goes with football,” Seedman said. “A lot of that toughness factor is built into the football practices themselves, so during training and conditioning it’s not absolutely essential to beat them up. But they still need to get high-intensity training. I think the mentality that’s followed football for all these decades, there’s kind of a tradition behind it. Football athletes, they’re kind of expected to give a certain level of effort.”


Sports Psychologist: The Right Motivation for the Restart After Corona

ISPO, Sebastian Ring from

Whether a restart, a comeback or the way back – many terms describe what almost every athlete has experienced at least once: falling down and getting up again. How do you motivate yourself in a difficult times to get out of the crisis? Sports psychologist Dr. Heiko Ziemainz from the German Friedrich-Alexander University in Erlangen-Nuremberg explains how professional athletes prepare mentally for a successful comeback and gives tips on which strategies from professional sport also work in everyday and business life, especially now in the coronavirus crisis.


[SIGGRAPH 2020] Local Motion Phases for Learning Multi-Contact Character Movements

YouTube, Sebastian Starke from

Controlling characters to perform a large variety of dynamic, fast-paced and quickly changing movements is a key challenge in character animation. In this research, we present a deep learning framework to interactively synthesize such animations in high quality, both from unstructured motion data and without any manual labeling. We introduce the concept of local motion phases, and show our system being able to produce various motion skills, such as ball dribbling and professional maneuvers in basketball plays, shooting, catching, avoidance, multiple locomotion modes as well as different character and object interactions, all generated under a unified framework. [video, 7:33]


Wisconsin football players reminded often about coronavirus safety

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, Jeff Potrykus from

Having battled on the defensive line for four seasons at Wisconsin, Ross Kolodziej understands the warrior mentality most football players embrace. … “Playing through (injury) is: ‘How does it affect me?’” Kolodziej, entering his sixth season as UW’s head football strength and conditioning coach, said during a Zoom session on Monday. “As a player, you ask a doctor: ‘Can I make it worse by continuing to practice, train or play?’


How to reimagine our food systems for a post-COVID world

World Economic Forum, COVID Action Platform, Sara Farley and Sara Scherr from

For decades, thinking and strategies around food have developed in silos, with little coordination between communities working on nutrition, agriculture, food, environment, water, health, climate, employment, trade or transport. This has generated serious problems – from policies that provide cheap calories but lead to high rates of diet-related diseases, to market innovations that prioritize efficiency above all and production systems that contribute to climate change and biodiversity loss.

The pandemic has shown that sectors that seem distinct do not operate independently. Though still being investigated, COVID-19 likely originated in wild animals sold in open food markets. The virus easily jumped to humans because farmers had cleared and settled large areas of natural habitat, increasing interactions of wildlife with people, including as food. Sanitary standards at markets were poorly regulated, while rapid transport between densely populated cities spread the virus globally. Now whether infected people become seriously ill or die depends on their underlying health and nutrition, as well as their access to healthcare, sanitation and adequate housing. Indeed, COVID-19 is a story of multiple systems impacting each other, triggering a host of unintended consequences impossible to understand, let alone manage, without looking at them together.


High-Carb Diet Outperforms Low-Carb in Endurance Study

PodiumRunner, Amby Burfoot from

In an intriguing new report, Louise Burke and colleagues from the Australian Institute of Sport have replicated and extended an important previous study. They have shown, for the second time, that a Low-Carb High-Fat Ketogenic-type diet significantly reduces oxygen economy and race performance (when compared to a High-Carb diet) among world class race walkers, even as it more than doubles fat-burning among the LC walkers. Burke is widely considered a world-leading endurance nutritionist, and last fall ran 3:38:56 (at age 60) in the NYC Marathon.


Exactly How Much Does A Great Pass Rush Hurt An Offense?

FiveThirtyEight, Josh Hermsmeyer from

With the exception of the quarterback, there’s no position the NFL values more than the pass rusher. Over the past few years, teams have consistently spent high draft capital on defensive linemen who can pressure and sack the quarterback. In this year’s draft, Ohio State defensive end Chase Young was taken with the second overall pick by Washington. In 2019, defensive linemen Nick Bosa, Quinnen Williams and Clelin Ferrell went 2-3-4 in the first round. And in 2017, Texas A&M defensive end Myles Garrett was picked first overall, while Stanford’s Solomon Thomas went third.

These players are prized because they possess the ability to end drives by taking away an offense’s most dangerous weapon: the passing game. But exactly how much of an effect can a sack or pressure on the QB have on the outcome of a drive? What are the chances that a team can overcome a sack for a productive series? To find out, we looked at 126,205 regular-season plays from the past three seasons and grouped them by drive.


Behind the Badge: The physicist who leads Liverpool’s data department

Liverpool FC from

“Originally, I thought I would be a scientist,” [Ian] Graham tells Liverpoolfc.com.

“After doing my PhD, I started a two-year post-doc – which is basically your first job if you’re going to stay in the university sector – in polymer physics at Cambridge.

“I was a year into it but slowly came to the realisation that maybe that career wasn’t for me.”


[OC] Most frequent NBA shot locations

reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful from


Special report: Clubs investing more in injury prevention as worries grow over financial cost of losing players

Off the Pitch, Jonathan Dyson from

Analysis suggests Premier League clubs paid £166 million to injured players last season – 14 per cent of total fixed wage expenditure across the division.

Injury risks are now set to become even higher due to fixture congestion and short preparation periods as football resumes.

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