Athletes Unlimited announced on Tuesday that its third professional sports league will be women’s lacrosse. The new league will be played from July 19-August 22 following the 2021 World Cup at a site to be determined.
Athletes Unlimited Lacrosse will play a short-form, fast-paced format consisting of eight-minute quarters, 9-v-9 gameplay and a 60-second shot clock, all housed on an 80-yard-by-50-yard playing field. Athletes Unlimited Lacrosse will be comprised of 56 players who will roster four teams of 14 players each. Play will begin with draws at the beginning of each quarter and after every goal.
… “We’re really excited, and I’m excited to be a part of the new league,” [Kayla] Treanor said in a phone interview from Chestnut Hill, Mass., where she is now associate head women’s lacrosse coach at Boston College.
The structure of the league and games will be unlike traditional women’s lacrosse.
“It’s about fan engagement,” Treanor said. “It’s a new style of play. The field is smaller, there will be less people on the field, which actually makes it a little bit more like the men’s game. It won’t look like the collegiate game, it will be a new model for a professional league.”
No Grass in the Clouds newsletter, Ryan O'Hanlon from
… While traditional xG only calculates a number of factors leading up to right when the shot is taken — type of pass, body part, and most importantly field location — xG On Target (xGOT) also looks at where the shot ended up on the goal frame to give a finer picture of the probability of a shot ending up in the back of the net. In other words, if you completely miss the goal frame despite an empty net from three yards away, you get a big ol’ zero. In his two Championship seasons with Leeds, Bamford’s xGOT trailed his xG by 9.99 goals. Put another way: his wayward finishing cost his team an expectation of about 10 goals. That’s the most missed goals by a single player in the same two-year dataset mentioned above.
That brings up two questions: First off, does it even matter? Leeds have rotated in a cast of potential replacements for Bamford over the past two seasons, and none of them have stuck. Over the past two years, Bamford got on the end of an elite-level of quality chances. Given their financial standing, it’s pretty much impossible for Leeds to find a player who’s as good as Bamford at getting on the ball in dangerous areas. Would they really be better off with someone who’s not as good at finding space but converts their chances more frequently? Would that actually lead to Leeds scoring more goals? Even with all those misses, Bamford is still in the top 30 of the xGOT chart — right behind Sergio Aguero and right ahead of Romelu Lukaku.
The ability to find lots of good shots is the main skill that defines a good goal-scorer. Finishing ability only helps on the margins.
England and Manchester City star Steph Houghton MBE has hailed as “truly game-changing” The FA’s new women’s and girls’ football strategy.
Speaking following the launchof Inspiring Positive Change, in which The FA pledges to create a sustainable future for women’s and girls’ football in England, Steph said, “When I and many of my teammates were girls, opportunities to play the game were few and far between.
“To see the breadth and scale of The FA’s ambitions in the next four years is extremely exciting.
“From the incredible pledge to provide equal access to football for primary-aged girls, to the pathway created for the country’s best talent to fulfil their potential – this strategy is truly game-changing.
Real-time human movement inertial measurement unit (IMU) signals are central to many emerging medical and technological applications, yet few techniques have been proposed to process and represent this information modality in an efficient manner. In this paper, we explore methods for the lossless compression of human movement IMU data and compute compression ratios as compared with traditional representation formats on a public corpus of human movement IMU signals for walking, running, sitting, standing, and biking human movement activities. Delta coding was the highest performing compression method which compressed walking, running, and biking data by a factor of 10 and compressed sitting and standing data by a factor of 18 relative to the original CSV formats. Furthermore, delta encoding was shown to approach the a posteriori optimal linear compression level. All methods were implemented and released as open source C code using fixed point computation which can be integrated into a variety of computational platforms. These results could serve to inform and enable human movement data compression in a variety of emerging medical and technological applications. [full text]
There is an increased interest in using wearable inertial measurement units (IMUs) in clinical contexts for the diagnosis and rehabilitation of gait pathologies. Despite this interest, there is a lack of research regarding optimal sensor placement when measuring joint kinematics and few studies which examine functionally relevant motions other than straight level walking. The goal of this clinical measurement research study was to investigate how the location of IMU sensors on the lower body impact the accuracy of IMU-based hip, knee, and ankle angular kinematics. IMUs were placed on 11 different locations on the body to measure lower limb joint angles in seven participants performing the timed-up-and-go (TUG) test. Angles were determined using different combinations of IMUs and the TUG was segmented into different functional movements. Mean bias and root mean square error values were computed using generalized estimating equations comparing IMU-derived angles to a reference optical motion capture system. Bias and RMSE values vary with the sensor position. This effect is partially dependent on the functional movement analyzed and the joint angle measured. However, certain combinations of sensors produce lower bias and RMSE more often than others. The data presented here can inform clinicians and researchers of placement of IMUs on the body that will produce lower error when measuring joint kinematics for multiple functionally relevant motions. Optimization of IMU-based kinematic measurements is important because of increased interest in the use of IMUs to inform diagnose and rehabilitation in clinical settings and at home. [full text]
Medidata (a subsidiary of Dassault Systèmes) said the purchase will allow it to add biometric data and new analytics capabilities to its Patient Cloud platform, particularly to the benefit of patient-reported outcomes, clinical outcome assessments and novel biomarker discovery.
“Medidata is excited to add the pioneering work at MC10 to our ongoing efforts in building a new platform for ingestion and analytics across a wide array of mobile sensors,” Anthony Costello, senior vice president of mobile health at Medidata, said in a statement. “Incorporating remote biometric data capture and analysis that includes the MC10 nPoint BioStamp, alongside other leading mobile devices, will further strengthen the Medidata platform and help propel the digital transformation of life sciences.”
… The disagreement between schools expected to participate in the Orlando bubble and ESPN came over how stringent the protocols would be, according to CBS Sports’ Matt Norlander. The Athletic reported that ESPN put forth guidelines that fall in line with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the NCAA, which are “more restrictive than the protocols many conferences are planning to implement.” There was also disagreement on how to handle COVID-19 positive players and how frequently players who recovered from the virus must be tested.
Whether or not some of these events get rescheduled or not, though, the fact that multi-team events — a month out from the start of the season — are being canceled or pushed elsewhere is not a good sign. Schools planning to play in the events now canceled must scramble to fill schedules elsewhere on short notice, and there’s at least some behind-the-scenes momentum to move to a conference-only schedule for this season amidst last-minute chaos.
Seven months after the coronavirus pandemic shut down Cal men’s basketball practice, the team was thrilled to restart full indoor practice again this week. The restart was short-lived, though.
On Tuesday, the program announced it was hitting pause for up to two weeks after a student-athlete tested positive for the coronavirus.
“This marks the first positive test within Cal Athletics since the start of daily testing at the beginning of October,” the team said in a statement.
… The aim of this first study was to assess how body composition and resting metabolic rate (the amount of energy required at rest to maintain normal bodily functions) changed throughout the different Academy age groups in 99 Premier League Academy players.
Fat mass did not change between the age groups, with increases in weight driven primarily by increases in fat-free mass (ie organs and muscle). However, fat-free mass increased from 31 kg in the U12 age group to 63 kg in the U23 age group.
Similarly, resting metabolic rate increased from approximately 1655 kcal per day in the U12 age group to 2042 in the U16s and 1941 kcal per day in the U23s.
There were large inter-individual differences between players – even between those within the same age-group – highlighting the need to adopt an individualised approach to player development and nutrition strategies.
Los Angeles Times, Nathan Fenno and David Wharton from
… Under coach Chip Kelly, who sees nutrition as key to the making of a football player, the fare has gotten decidedly better — and decidedly more expensive. In 2018, his first year at UCLA, the budget for non-travel meals more than doubled to $2.6 million. The following year, the tab grew to $5.4 million, dwarfing spending at higher-profile programs and raising questions about a UCLA athletic department that reported an $18.9-million deficit for last year.
Through a public records request, The Times obtained more than 500 pages of invoices and receipts that shed light on food costs. Among the menu selections: Guajillo chili chicken, coffee-braised brisket, and pork chops smothered in candied apples and onions. During off-season workouts last year, UCLA spent more than $40,000 to import five barbecue meals from an Arizona-based restaurant. On other occasions, the program ordered hundreds of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches from a Los Angeles caterer at $4.95 each.
As open as Jurgen Klopp is, and as enthusiastically as he will talk about the principles of his football idea, there is one area the German remains completely guarded on. That is about the specifics of Liverpool’s supreme pressing: how it is co-ordinated, how it is drilled.
“Klopp won’t let anyone watch the sessions,” one source close to the club says. This may, in quite a literal sense, be the secret to success at the very top end of the game.
A huge improvement in pressing is widely seen by figures around Bayern Munich as the major reason the German club won the Champions League. A drastic drop-off is meanwhile viewed as one of the major reasons that Manchester City again failed in the competition.
Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (Germany), Press Releases from
“Quality Wins Games” – this is the conclusion drawn by scientists of Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in their study “Success Factors in Football: An Analysis of the German Bundesliga.” The most important success criteria they identified is avoiding errors in the defense and efficiency in scoring goals especially after counter-attacks. In addition, the study empirically confirms that the market value of the team significantly affects win or loss. The study is based on data from 918 games of the Bundesliga.
… Teams take great pains to try to quantify prospects’ general athleticism each year at the combine in Indianapolis. That Jackson’s obvious athleticism was held against him as a QB prospect and Allen’s relative athleticism compared to Darnold was missed entirely suggests that even the most straightforward evaluations of QB play are fraught with error.
But the most common fault scouts and coaches found with these QBs was their accuracy. One coordinator summed up the feeling of many in the draft analytics community when he pointed out that you can’t teach accuracy, and this truism was especially damning for Allen’s pro prospects. “You’re not going to fix that in 10 weeks or two years,” the coordinator said of Allen. “If you’re not accurate, you’re not accurate. There’s an element of processing and anticipation that I think he lacks. But I think he’s got a big arm and somebody’s going to over-draft the guy because of that.”
Every bit of evidence-based analysis we have about pro football supports that notion.