Applied Sports Science newsletter – December 18, 2020

Applied Sports Science news articles, blog posts and research papers for December 18, 2020

 

Sierzputowski: Swiatek Opened Door to Future Success at Roland Garros

Tennis Now, Chris Oddo from

Piotr Sierzputowski is a humble, no-nonsense coach, and when it comes to his work with 2020 Roland Garros champion Iga Swiatek, he’s more about continuing on a path of steady improvement than receiving praise for what’s in the past. Asked how he felt to be named the WTA’s coach of the year in 2020 last week, he reacted like someone who has a bigger mission in mind.

“Normal,” he answers. “I don’t feel any difference so I hope it’s how it is supposed to be.”


Matt Milano makes impact as Bills trounce Steelers

The Buffalo News, Jason Wolf from

… Few outside the Bills’ organization know Milano – or what happens behind the team’s practice facility’s closed doors – better than [Lorenzo] Alexander, who mentored Milano from the time the Bills drafted him out of Boston College with a fifth-round pick in 2017 through last season.

Milano has missed time because of injuries in each of his four seasons and is scheduled to become an unrestricted free agent in March.

“Matt is unique in that he can cover, he can blitz, he can play the run,” Alexander said. “He’s very intelligent, very athletic. And so he’s a very versatile player as far as what you ask him to do, having a safety’s background and putting on the weight and having the strength and ability to play downhill and play in the box. So he can do a multitude of things that a lot of guys in the league can’t do at the same level as him.


Sources – G League pushing forward; eyeing reduced bubble, shortened season

ESPN NBA, Dave McMenamin from

The NBA’s G League is determined to push forward with its season despite the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic, league sources have told ESPN. In the face of health and financial concerns, a primary motivation is to not let the league-run Ignite team fall on its face in the program’s inaugural campaign. Some of the top prospects in the country are on team Ignite.

The Ignite, which became official in April as an alternative for highly touted recruits to be paid up to $500,000 their first year out of high school rather than go to college, has both Jalen Green, the No. 1 high school player in the Class of 2020 according to the ESPN 100, and Jonathan Kuminga, the No. 1 player in the Class of 2021 before he reclassified to the Class of 2020, on its roster, along with several other five-star recruits.


Still the beginning for some, NBA preseason nears its end

Associated Press from

A preseason that’s just beginning for some players is already ending for others.

James Harden suited up in Houston for only the second time, with newcomer Christian Wood getting his first — and only — action in a strong debut. The Rockets’ 128-106 victory over San Antonio on Thursday was the finale of their four-game exhibition slate, so the rest of their preparation for the regular season will have to come in practices.

That’s not ideal for a rookie coach such as Stephen Silas, but it isn’t much easier even for a veteran like the Spurs’ Gregg Popovich, whose team was playing its last of three games.

“I would think any coach would say he’s said he was more ready in the past,” Popovich said.


How Tech Trends Among Runners Help Us Envision the Future of Athletics and Society

Built In, Frank Diana from

The rapid progression of science and technology is converging with societal, economic, environmental and geopolitical shifts in ways that alter our future. As a result, people everywhere are focused on the “future of X”, where “X” increasingly represents every domain.

It is not surprising, then, to see the future of sports impacted by this convergence. There is no doubt that the future of sports — and running in particular — is changing. Tata Consultancy Services launched #ThisRun, a new worldwide community for runners, reinforcing its long-standing commitment to global marathon and running partnership platforms. In support of this initiative, TCS conducted This Run Tech Survey, which captured runners’ views of technology and its role in the sport now and in the future. It provides a glimpse into the minds of a broad spectrum of runners, giving us foresight to see across horizons. With it, we can envision the future of running and explore how it may affect societal wellness.


SwRI developing biomechanics AI system to help train military medical personnel

Southwest Research Institute, Newsroom from

Southwest Research Institute is developing a machine vision tool to help the U.S. Department of Defense assess the biomechanical movements of military medical personnel during training exercises.

The simulation-based training system will compare medical trainee performance to that of experts whose physical motions, or kinematics, have been pre-recorded and analyzed in 3D with artificial intelligence.


Bosch’s New Fitness Tracker Sensor Can Learn and Recognize Almost Any Activity

Gizmodo, Andrew Liszewski from

… If you’ve got a couch on the sidelines it’s not a problem, but most swimmers don’t, which has led Bosch Sensortec to develop a new motion sensor for fitness trackers that uses artificial intelligence to learn very specific motions and automatically recognize them later.

The BHI260AP self-learning AI sensor might not sound very motivational (remember the cooler sounding Nike Fuelband?) but it promises to make fitness trackers an even more useful tool during training. It’s small enough to incorporate into wearables and even wireless headphones, and out of the box Bosch includes a set of more than 15 different pre-learned fitness activities. That’s a good start, meaning many athletes can just jump right into a workout, but adding to that database of recognizable activities is as easy as putting a device into a learning routine and going through the repetitive motions a handful of times. Those pre-learned activities can also be tweaked for a user’s given technique or style, which ensures that the data collected, and other metrics calculated, like calories burned, are more accurate.


Predicting soccer goals in near real time using computer vision

Amazon, AWS Machine Learning Blog from

In a soccer game, fans get excited seeing a player sprint down the sideline during a counterattack or when a team is controlling the ball in the 18-yard box because those actions could lead to goals. However, it is difficult for human eyes to fully capture such fast movements, let alone predict goals. With machine learning (ML), we can incorporate more fine-grained information at the pixel level to develop a solution that predicts goals with high confidence before they happen.

Sportradar, a leading real-time sports data provider that collects and analyzes sports data, and the Amazon ML Solutions Lab collaborated to develop a computer vision-based Soccer Goal Predictor to detect exciting moments that lead to goals, thereby increasing fan engagement and helping broadcasters provide viewers an enhanced experience. Most action recognition models are used to identify events when they occur, but Amazon ML Solutions Lab developed a novel computer vision-based Soccer Goal Predictor that can predict future soccer goals 2 seconds in advance of the event.

“We deliberately threw one of the hardest possible computer vision problems at the Amazon ML Solutions Lab team to see what the art of the possible could do, and I am very impressed with the results,” says Ben Burdsall, Group CTO at Sportradar.


Premier League approves permanent concussion substitutes

BBC Sport from

The Premier League has said it hopes to start permanent concussion substitution trials from January.

It follows football’s lawmakers, the International Football Association Board (Ifab), approving trials in 2021.

The new rule means permanent substitutions can be made if a player suffers a head injury, even if all replacements have already been used.


Ultra-processed foods and the corporate capture of nutrition—an essay by Gyorgy Scrinis

The BMJ, Gyorgy Scrinis from

Food corporations have exploited the dominant model in nutrition science to shape the way their ultra-processed products are defended, promoted, and regulated. Gyorgy Scrinis examines their scientific strategies and suggests ways to reframe the debate


NBA Teams Can No Longer Tank Their Way to the Top

The Ringer, Jonathan Tjarks from

You can’t just “Trust the Process” anymore. With new draft lottery odds, rebuilding NBA teams are finding out they have to do a lot more than just lose to ultimately win.


Could hundreds of college football players be left stranded by NCAA apathy?

Yahoo Sports, Pete Thamel from

… An unprecedented confluence of events — the bloated NCAA transfer portal, a blanket extra year granted because of COVID-19 and the expected one-time transfer rule — threatens scholarship opportunities for football players and will eventually undermine the ability for coaches to keep full rosters.

“We’re going to see a situation this year where there could be up to 1,000 players in the portal with nowhere to go,” said South Florida coach Jeff Scott.

How will that happen? As of Wednesday morning, there were more than 750 FBS football players in the NCAA transfer portal. That number is increasing by dozens each day, and will only get bigger with the end of the semester. The players are looking to take advantage of the NCAA’s one-time transfer rule, which is expected to be passed early next year.


Baseball needs to figure out what it wants the game to be

ESPN MLB, Howard Bryant from

… While the validity of the Dodgers’ first championship since 1988 — won with scattered fans at a neutral site after a 60-game regular season plus 18 playoff games — might remain in question by some of us in the short term, the long game of history is cold and nonpartisan. The final out was recorded, Julio Urias caught Willy Adames looking, and there was one team left. They are your winners.

As the Dodgers took a championship team photo that included third baseman Justin Turner — the coronavirus coursing through his body as he smiled maskless next to manager Dave Roberts — the miles traveled during the tumultuous calendar felt muted, as they do after a journey. But it is worth noting that the 2020 season ended as it began, with a question for the people who run this sport: What do you want your game to be? The question hovered over the season before the pandemic shut down the game, remained throughout this unique year and will continue to be asked heading into 2021.


Blackhawks Name E15’s Jaime Faulkner to Lead Business Operations

Sportico, Scott Soshnick from

Jaime Faulkner, chief executive officer of the analytics division of food and beverage provider Levy, was named president of business operations for the Chicago Blackhawks, becoming one of the highest ranking female executives in the National Hockey League, the team said.

Faulkner has led E15 Group from its inception in 2014, overseeing a division that utilizes analytics and technology to advise sports and entertainment venues.

Her addition was part of a front-office restructuring.


Introducing Similar Team Search

StatsBomb from

Over the past few weeks we’ve highlighted the ‘Similar Player Search’ function in StatsBomb IQ and presented some use cases for the tool. Today, we’re going to look at a related feature we’ve recently added to our industry leading analysis platform: ‘Similar Team Search’.


Making Sense Of: Research Cultures in Sports

Every sport has a culture and a community, and that community has norms. Every team has a culture and a community, and that community has norms. Team culture might have subtle differences compared to the sport overall, but the part exists within the whole. Research, as practiced at top-tier universities, has a culture and community norms, and it contrasts sport culture and community norms.

The run by the Miami Heat to the NBA Finals put a spotlight on the team’s culture. More recently, reports point to the Houston Rockets’ lax team culture as the source of a rift between stars James Harden and Russell Westbrook.

The stewards of the larger sport-wide culture are players who, after playing, move into leadership roles. Billy Beane, speaking to Dan Senor on Senor’s Post Corona podcast, explained how he broke with the tradition of hiring non-athletes onto his staff. Beane’s innovation changed cultures in sports, but it didn’t make it easy to integrate research into sports.

Another podcast, One Track Mind,produced in Australia by Victoria University sports scientist, Sam Robertson, spoke to Patrick Ward and David Joyce, two athlete performance analysts working in professional sports. Ward, who directs R&D for the Seattle Seahawks, talked about U.S. university research culture, compared to where international sports science PhD programs are headed. “I think the United States PhD training is different than around the world. Like it’s a very much more, you’re almost like you’re an extension of your supervisor,” said Ward. “You research the things that they’re interested in. That’s how you pick your supervisor. Whereas I think, at least for me,” he continued, “It’s more about turning it back on the students. Saying like, well what are you interested in? Let’s figure out a way to put you on that path to study that.”

University of California-Berkeley happens to teach a course in Research Culture and Community Norms to undergraduates in electrical engineering and computer science. The Berkeley course has some how-tos but it is just as much about acquiring the confidence to be a professional expert and intellectual.

Expert advisors play a crucial role in becoming an expert. It’s a key difference from the self-training that the Seahawks’ Ward cites as his primary source of information. Sports organizations that can culturally integrate research experts and intellectuals are going to be much different from organizations who rely on mostly self-trained non-expert experts to manage new technology.

Thanks for reading. There probably won’t be another Friday essay until 2021. Enjoy the holidays!
-Brad

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