Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 10, 2020

The campaign for a Super Bowl begins in the summer, when players get in shape for the season to come. But this summer wasn’t like any that came before it.

The Aaronson brothers have Philadelphia Union, and U.S. Soccer fans, excited about their development and future in the sport.

Older brother Brenden, 19, is excelling with the first team and has drawn several European suitors, while 17-year-old Paxten has opened eyes in the beginning of his professional career with Philadelphia Union II in the USL. He will join the first team next season.

The brothers joined Andrew Wiebe on ExtraTime to talk about their development path and growing up in a soccer family — their father Rusty runs Real Jersey FC, a club that is part of the MLS Next academy structure.

… Conversations about racial equity and the reality of life for Black women — both on this campus and beyond — have been a constant theme in the locker room. And it’s this pursuit of true representation that motivates the Terps to keep advocating for themselves and their experiences.

You never know what little Black girl might be watching.

“We really just want to [show] … how diverse we are,” [Alexis] Hogarth said. “To show little Black girls who are interested in soccer that there is representation and that they can play.”

Winninger will replace David Tenney, who is leaving the Magic after three years to join the staff of expansion MLS franchise Austin FC, two sources told the Orlando Sentinel. Prior to joining the Magic, Tenney served eight years as high performance director for the MLS’ Seattle Sounders.

Zhongguancun Sports Sci-tech Innovation Park in Yanqing was inaugurated yesterday in Beijing’s northwestern Yanqing district, at the opening ceremony of the World Winter Sports (Beijing) Expo Yanqing Branch.

The Park, the first of its kind in Beijing that focuses on sports science and technology, has lured 32 sports enterprises to sign agreements to operate in the park.

A statewide survey of licensed athletic trainers from NJSIAA member schools that participated in voluntary workouts during the summer recess period provides the first significant data regarding COVID-19’s impact on New Jersey high school sports programs.

According to the survey of 152 athletic trainers, 51 schools (33%) identified a potential COVID-19 case and 28 schools (18%) identified a positive COVID-19 case through the NJSIAA’s mandated screening process.

In addition, the survey found 36 schools (23%) had a reason to shut down a workout pod of athletes and 19 schools (12%) shut down an individual sports team due to COVID-19 exposure.

SARS-CoV-2 is the causative virus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. This pandemic has necessitated that all professional and elite sport is either suspended, postponed or cancelled altogether to minimise the risk of viral spread. As infection rates drop and quarantine restrictions are lifted, the question how athletes can safely resume competitive sport is being asked. Given the rapidly evolving knowledge base about the virus and changing governmental and public health recommendations, a precise answer to this question is fraught with complexity and nuance. Without robust data to inform policy, return-to-play (RTP) decisions are especially difficult for elite athletes on the suspicion that the COVID-19 virus could result in significant cardiorespiratory compromise in a minority of afflicted athletes. There are now consistent reports of athletes reporting persistent and residual symptoms many weeks to months after initial COVID-19 infection. These symptoms include cough, tachycardia and extreme fatigue. To support safe RTP, we provide sport and exercise medicine physicians with practical recommendations on how to exclude cardiorespiratory complications of COVID-19 in elite athletes who place high demand on their cardiorespiratory system. As new evidence emerges, guidance for a safe RTP should be updated. [full text]

Since the pandemic began, dozens of studies have reported that many of the sickest COVID-19 patients have been people with obesity. In recent weeks, that link has come into sharper focus as large new population studies have cemented the association and demonstrated that even people who are merely overweight are at higher risk. For example, in the first metaanalysis of its kind, published on 26 August in Obesity Reviews, an international team of researchers pooled data from scores of peer-reviewed papers capturing 399,000 patients. They found that people with obesity who contracted SARS-CoV-2 were 113% more likely than people of healthy weight to land in the hospital, 74% more likely to be admitted to an ICU, and 48% more likely to die.

A constellation of physiological and social factors drives those grim numbers. The biology of obesity includes impaired immunity, chronic inflammation, and blood that’s prone to clot, all of which can worsen COVID-19. And because obesity is so stigmatized, people with obesity may avoid medical care.

PainRelief.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?

[Claire Thornton]: There is evidence that high contact athletes (i.e. rugby players, martial artists) tolerate more pain and report pain as lees intense than other athletes. Being able to cope with pain is essential in risky, painful, collision-based sports, yet there is little research into the mechanisms behind intra-athlete differences in pain responses. Use of adaptive coping styles and/or being challenged may impact upon how an athlete performs while in pain.

We wanted to examine performance during pain among different athlete groups to try to understand how pain influences performance while manipulating challenge and threat states.

Objectives:

To assess the incidence and characteristics of muscle injuries in professional football players and to assess if coach dismissal may be related with muscle injuries within 1-month period from the dismissal.
Design:

Prospective cohort study during 3 consecutive seasons.
Setting:

Turkish Super League football teams.
Participants:

One hundred eighteen male football players.
Main Outcome Measures:

Data on time-loss muscle injuries confirmed using magnetic resonance imaging were recorded, including type, body part, duration, and lay-off time, and training session and match exposure times. The muscle injury rate was evaluated at 2 weeks and 30 days after coach dismissal.
Results:

In total, 124 muscle injuries were recorded, with injury incidences of 2.3 muscle injuries per 1000 hours of exposure overall, 1.2 in training sessions, and 13.6 in matches. Injury time loss ranged from 3 to 67 days (median, 13 days). Eighteen percent of the injuries (n = 23) were recurrent; no association was found between recurrence rate and the player’s age or position (P = 0.15, P = 0.27, respectively). Recurrent injuries caused more severe injuries (26.1%, P = 0.02) and longer median lay-off time (P = 0.01). During the study, teams A and B replaced 7 and 3 coaches, respectively. The injury incidence increased to 5.3 per 1000 hours of exposure in the 2 weeks after the coach dismissal, and decreased to 4.5 within 1 month of coach dismissal.
Conclusion:

Given the link between coach dismissal and increased rates of muscle strain injuries, increased attentiveness to preventing muscle injuries during coaching transitions and to the impact of new training regimens is required by trainers and medical teams.

… “Cannabis can be helpful for sports both during activity and afterward,” Dr. Jordan Tishler told me recently over email. “Its primary role is that of a pain reliever, which can be helpful in both situations.” Dr. Tishler, a Harvard-trained physician and cannabis therapeutics specialist with over 23 years experience in the field, notes that one stoner-ism does ring true regarding marijuana — it’s not a performance enhancer, and it can affect reaction time, so choose wisely when consuming for sports. “However,” he adds, “for real-world exercise, the decrease in pain, and perhaps increase in focus, can be of greater benefit than any specific detriment.”

From players to agents, teams to the media, everyone who plays a part in college prospects becoming pros will be affected by this fall’s bizarro season. What does that mean for the 2021 draft cycle? And how are those involved planning to adapt?

Adjusted plus minus (APM) measures have redefined our understanding of player value in basketball and hockey, where both are team games featuring player productivity spillovers. APM measures use seasonal play-by-play data to estimate individual player contributions. If a team’s overall score margin success is figuratively represented by a pie, APM measures are well-designed to slice the pie and attribute individual contributions accordingly. However, they do not account for the possibility that better players can increase the overall size of the pie and thus increase the size of the slice (overall APM value) for teammates. Herein, we use data from NBA player-season Real Plus Minus (RPM)—a leading APM measure—for all recorded player-seasons from 2013–19 and player lineup data to test whether RPM is related to teammate quality. We run sets of linear fixed effect regression models to explain variation in RPM across player-seasons. We also employ a two-stage least square (2-SLS) method for robustness check. Both empirical approaches address potential endogeneity in the relationship of interest. We find strong evidence that RPM is related to on-court teammate quality. Despite adjusting for teammate and opponent quality, RPM does not control for complementarity effects. As such, RPM is not suited for out-of-sample prediction.

In 2016, when Weston McKennie signed his first professional contract with Bundesliga side Schalke 04, the move was celebrated in just about every corner of the U.S. except for Dallas and MLS headquarters in New York.

McKennie had been in the youth system of FC Dallas for seven years. As such, FCD did plenty to prepare McKennie for the professional ranks. And yet when McKennie signed with the Royal Blues, what did FC Dallas get for all its hard work? Not a cent, even though FIFA’s Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players (RSTP) said FCD should have received around $250,000.

The reason why FCD was left empty handed was that for decades the U.S. Soccer Federation, for a variety of reasons, opted not to adhere to RSTP. When MLS was getting players from the college ranks, or on free transfers from abroad, this didn’t matter so much. But now that MLS was investing tens of millions of dollars every year in youth academies, it either wanted to see something in return for its investment or scare off foreign clubs from poaching their youth players and keep said prospects for themselves.

… There is one element that I think is being overlooked in this final four, and that’s in the goaltending department.

Years ago, we grew accustomed to defining starting and backup goaltenders, and then expected the starter to play the lion’s share of the minutes and own the crease in the postseason. But those workhorse goaltenders hardly exist anymore – European imports have added to the talent pool, giving organizations more options. Add the fact that teams are increasingly aware of how overworked goaltenders are vulnerable to performance degradation and injury, and you have the modern era of goaltending.