Within a period of five days earlier this month, two women’s soccer players—Catarina Macario and Trinity Rodman—announced their respective decisions to forego the balance of their collegiate eligibility and turn pro. The news was eye-catching, given that historically speaking, few female soccer players have left school early (Mallory Pugh and Sophie Smith are among the exceptions). But a conversation with sports economist David Berri (Professor of Economics, Southern Utah University) suggested that as interest and investment in the women’s game continues to grow, the number of athletes who declare for the pros before their collegiate eligibility expires will too. “Women’s sports are only going to get bigger and bigger, so the financial [incentive to leave early] will only get bigger and bigger,” he said.
Our Take: To be clear, while it’s unusual for female athletes participating in a team sports to declare early, tennis players, swimmers, gymnasts and figure skaters have been doing it for years. We don’t see women’s basketball players leave early because WNBA bylaws prevent prospects under the age of 22 from entering the draft (and few underclassmen are 22 years old). As for women’s soccer players, turning pro early has really only become a viable option over the last couple of years. Prior to that, there was no stable domestic league to play in; at least not one with the momentum the NWSL now maintains.
Andy Murray announced Friday that he would not be playing in the upcoming Australian Open after being unable to negotiate a “workable quarantine” with Tennis Australia following his positive COVID-19 test.
The former world No. 1 and three-time major champion had been unable to fly to Melbourne last week after being diagnosed with the virus, but he had hoped to make the trip at a later date and play in the year’s first major.
“Gutted to share that I won’t be flying out to Australia to compete at the Australian Open,” he said on Friday. “We’ve been in constant dialogue with Tennis Australia to try and find a solution which would allow some form of workable quarantine, but we couldn’t make it work.”
ESPN, Women's College Basketball, D'Arcy Maine from
Every mistake, every time the ball bounced off the rim, Christyn Williams reverted deeper into her own head, plagued with self-doubt.
After an impressive freshman season with the UConn Huskies, she knew what her teammates and coaches expected from her.
“Well, dang, I’m not living up to it,” the then-sophomore thought to herself early last season.
Despite encouraging words from teammates, Williams couldn’t pull out of her funk. She worked hard at practice, hoping to rediscover her rhythm and become the player she knew she could be.
But then UConn coach Geno Auriemma pulled her aside. “You’re uncoachable,” he told Williams.
… As we should expect, the AIS does things differently now, building on its rich history. Races aren’t won by standing still. Like the pioneers of the early days, we are continually looking for ways to progress the AIS and Australian sport.
In many ways, the modern AIS is evolving to fit the long-term vision first outlined in 1981.
Prime Minister Fraser spoke of ambition to replicate a sport institute in all Australian states and territories, providing greater opportunities for young Australians.
At the opening, Don Talbot said: “It may be in the future that the concept of an Institute of Sport has to be decentralised throughout Australia to provide for everybody. I think when that comes, Australia is well on the way to being a major sporting nation.”
Torre Becton’s official title is director of football performance, but the bottom line is he’s the man new Texas head coach Steve Sarkisian is trusting to lead the strength and condition program for the Longhorns. Becton replaces Yancy McKnight, who wasn’t retained by Sarkisian following the Jan. 2 firing of Tom Herman after four seasons where he compiled a 32-18 record.
“I think our philosophies are very aligned when it comes to the type of training and regiment that we want our kids to be in during the offseason, as well as in-season to prevent injury,” Sarkisian said Friday as he formally introduced Becton and the nine on-field coaches he’s hired to this point. “But also to prepare them to play at the highest level for us that way.”
Paying attention is a fundamental brain process we all use every day. Whether keeping our eyes on the road while our cell phone rings or focusing on work while our kids yell in the background (for those of us working virtually during the pandemic), attentional control is key to healthy and successful living.
Conversely, “virtually every brain disorder has some aspect of impaired attention to it,” says Robert Desimone, director of the McGovern Institute at MIT. In depression, for example, patients often report having difficulty staying on task. And for those with autism, one prevalent view is that their ability to pay attention to certain social cues is impaired.
Understanding how people control attention at the neural level is therefore critically important to both clinical and cognitive neuroscience. And it’s an area Desimone has spent the last 4 decades studying and for which he is now receiving the CNS Distinguished Career Contributions Award.
The IU Angel Network has launched an initiative targeting entrepreneurs and startups in the sports world. The organization says the Sports Innovation Initiative will connect sports-related startups founded by Indiana University alumni and students with support and expertise in order to commercialize their ideas. The effort was created in partnership with the IU athletics department and the IUPUI Sports Innovation Institute.
In an interview with Inside INdiana Business, IU Angel Network Executive Director Jason Whitney said the initiative is two years in the making.
“It came from a relationship that we had with the athletic department as we were reviewing the different technologies that they use to help support the performance of their athletes and the challenges that come with that, and the ways that the university could then provide additional resources to create startup companies or technologies to build on top of the ones they currently have to better support the student-athletes that we have here on campus,” said Whitney.
The NHL’s abridged 56-game 2021 season is up and running. But there have been a few COVID-19 related speed bumps along the way, particularly with the Dallas Stars, Carolina Hurricanes and Washington Capitals.
Here’s everything you need to know about how the virus is impacting the hockey season, and what comes next.
A new study suggests that a lot of people might be going through life with symptoms that resemble concussion – a finding supporting researchers’ argument that athletes recovering from a brain injury should be assessed and treated on a highly individualized basis.
In the national study, between 11% and 27% of healthy college athletes with no history of a recent concussion reported combinations of symptoms that met criteria for post-concussion syndrome (PCS) as defined by an international classification system. Among the nearly 31,000 student-athletes surveyed, three factors stood out as the most likely to predict PCS-like symptoms: lack of sleep, pre-existing mental health problems and stress.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health from
When the NBA restarted its 2019-2020 season with playoffs in a “bubble,” UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health alumni and a current graduate student helped the league protect its players and close out its season successfully with zero cases of COVID-19.
Last August, Arsenal announced they were revamping their scouting department, leading to the departures of some big-hitters.
Out went Head of Recruitment Francis Cagigao, Head of UK Recruitment Pete Clark and top scout Brian McDermott, as well as Ty Gooden (who covered France and Belgium), Leonardo Scirpoli (Germany), Alex Stafford (Scotland), Julio de Marco (Spain) and Alessandro Sbrizzo (Italy).
Technical Director Edu later explained: “The reasons for changing our infrastructure are clear. I want to work with fewer people. I want to work a lot more with StatDNA (Arsenal’s in-house data and analytics company), it is very important.”
… Due to the limited number of senior USMNT players in this group, the plan is to move a portion of the U23 group up to the senior squad to complete the team for the match against Trinidad & Tobago. That ensures that a lot of focus will be on the younger cadre of players, including many who have played for the United States in youth national teams. As is always the case in January, there is a group of players who are brand new to the program.
A few of those new faces are the product of college soccer. The growth of the MLS academy system in recent years and the arrival of those players in first teams, a phenomenon sped up by the COVID-19-affected schedule, has diminished college soccer’s influence as a talent producer. Still, as this USMNT group proves, there are good players coming out the system. Several of them are former MLS academy players whose matriculation into the collegiate game helped smooth out some of their rough edges or allowed them to grow into their talents.
… The NFL’s final four—Rodgers’s Packers, Brady’s Bucs, Patrick Mahomes’s Kansas City Chiefs, and Josh Allen’s Buffalo Bills—is a worthwhile study in roster-building. Some GMs—Howie Roseman of the Eagles, for instance—have told me they compile the vitals of the final four teams from each season, things such as age, height, weight, draft position, etc., to make sure they aren’t missing some trend among great teams. Conference championship weekend is a good time to take stock of the league and what wins and loses football games. The most obvious through line between the remaining teams this season is the passer and, most importantly, what these teams have done to help theirs.
Sunday’s final four is about quarterbacks. This is always true, in a way, because the entire sport revolves around the position, but somehow, their importance is heightened this year. There are two things you need to know about the league in 2021: the first comes from Football Perspective’s Chase Stuart, who notes that completion percentage is at an all-time high this season, and yards per completion is at an all-time low. Completed passes are more plentiful, safer, and generally more useless. The second thing to understand is that these four teams have unsubscribed from the short completion part of this equation.
SIAM News; Austin R. Benson, David F. Gleich, and Desmond J. Higham from
In 2004, the theme of Mathematics Awareness Month was “the mathematics of networks.” A corresponding SIAM News article dubbed 2004 “The Year of the Network” and predicted that graphs would soon be everywhere. Now, networks and graphs were not new at the time. The first use of graphs in mathematics dates back to “chemicographs” in the 1800s [19], and one can trace the origins of PageRank-style linear algebra to ideas for ranking chess players [11]. Graph algorithms were common in the 1950s and served as a fascinating and fertile area in the new discipline of computer science. By 2004, their time had arrived. Innovative systems with network and graph structures—notably from biological and internet settings—suggested novel questions. In an archived SIAM News article, Fan Chung Graham made the following observation: “Many of the information networks that surround us today provide interesting motivation and suggest new and challenging research directions that will engage researchers for years to come.”
Since 2004, opportunities in what we would now call network science and data science have grown tremendously due to the power of computational techniques to tease subtle insights out of networked data. This led to more data and more questions, just as Fan Chung Graham predicted. However, researchers have been unable to easily address some of these questions with the standard representations of a complex system as a graph.
Making a distinction between the terms “network” and “graph” clarifies this point. The following framing captures the essential difference: a network is a graph that represents a complex system. Therefore, all networks are graphs, but certain graphs—such as the Petersen graph, which was constructed as a counterexample to a mathematical conjecture—are not networks. A graph consists of vertices and edges, and each edge is comprised of a pair of vertices. The fields of network analysis and network science grew around the use of graph formalism to simplify and study more complicated systems from the internet, social science, biology, neuroscience, and many other applications.