Applied Sports Science newsletter – February 26, 2021

Applied Sports Science news articles, blog posts and research papers for February 26, 2021

 

Herculez Gomez: US-Mexico race for “special” Efrain Alvarez is a game-changer

MLSsoccer.com, Charles Boehm from

… “With Jonathan Gonzalez and past players this had happened to, it was like, ‘Well, yeah, but what happened? They weren’t very good.’ That always seems to be the mindset, or the excuse,” the ESPN pundit and retired USMNT striker told MLSsoccer.com on Wednesday.

“For the first time in its history, you’ve had something like this happen, you have two national teams who are openly fighting for [Alvarez]. You have Gregg Berhalter, who has mentioned him more than once, who invited him to camp for the December camp [and] El Salvador game. You have a Mexican national team that is openly recruiting players in your own country, who are very keen on retaining said player and future players like him. So this is a game-changer.”


Player-run U.S. pro volleyball league set to debut in Dallas

Associated Press, Schuyler Dixon from

Karsta Lowe loves the idea of playing professional indoor volleyball in her home country.

The Californian’s first opportunity to do so, in a unique player-controlled league set to debut in Dallas, also comes at an interesting time in her Olympic career.

Lowe is playing her first competitive matches in a year amid continuing uncertainty over whether the Tokyo Games will happen this summer after they were postponed because of the pandemic.

“Every practice, I’m thinking about how I’m going to return to form for the national team,” the 28-year-old Lowe said. “I think the coaches, especially at the national team, are looking for me in particular, they’re looking at this league, with high levels of scrutiny because they haven’t seen me play in a year — a year and a half with national team activities.”


Does Mindfulness Make You More Rational, or Just Happier?

Nautilus, Jim Davies from

Would you like to be more rational? Of course you would. Who doesn’t want to behave and think more reasonably? Good news: New research, from Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, suggests mindfulness, or at least an aspect of it, can help. By “mindfulness”—a feature of Buddhism for thousands of years, and a subject of scientific investigation for a few decades—most people mean a mental state you can be in. Let’s try.

Pay attention to your current sensations—the feeling of your back against a chair, or the weight of your phone in your hand. Pay attention to the thoughts and feelings flitting in your mind. Don’t “judge” them. Merely notice that they’re there. If you find yourself bringing past or possible future events into your imagination, let those drift off, and attend again to your present sensations, thoughts, and feelings. Not too difficult, right? Being mindful for a few seconds is easy. Being mindful for an hour is very difficult.


BYU football taking new approaches to improve heading into spring camp

Daily Herald (Provo, UT), Jared Lloyd from

After a 11-1 season that ended being ranked No. 11 in the country, it might be easy for a college football team to believe it has things figured out and to maintain the status quo.

BYU head football coach Kalani Sitake, however, doesn’t think that way.

“This year we’re doing some things way differently than we did last year,” Sitake said in a teleconference on Thursday. “We have to because I want to be able to keep pushing and keep building on what we already have gotten done. We want to build on the depth and the experience that we have and also be sure the newcomers that are coming in be given an opportunity to perform.”


New Experiences Enhance Learning by Resetting Key Brain Circuit

National Institutes of Health (NIH), National Institute of Mental Health from

A study of spatial learning in mice shows that exposure to new experiences dampens established representations in the brain’s hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, allowing the mice to learn new navigation strategies. The study, published in Nature, was supported by the National Institutes of Health.

“The ability to flexibly learn in new situations makes it possible to adapt to an ever-changing world,” noted Joshua A. Gordon, M.D., Ph.D., a senior author on the study and director of the National Institute of Mental Health, part of NIH. “Understanding the neural basis of this flexible learning in animals gives us insight into how this type of learning may become disrupted in humans.”


Mueller Sports Medicine Introduces RecoveryTub™ Inflatable Ice Tub

PR Newswire, Mueller Sports Medicine from

Mueller Sports Medicine, a trusted leader in sports medicine for more than 60 years, has acquired worldwide rights to the RecoveryTubTM inflatable ice tubs product line from RP-X/UK Sports Products Ltd. and is proud to offer RecoveryTubTM inflatable ice tubs as a portable solution for cold water baths for all types of athletes. It is available in the U.S. and globally.


The future of electronics is stretchy

Yale University, YaleNews from

Stretchable electronic circuits are critical for soft robotics, wearable technologies, and biomedical applications. The current ways of making them, though, have limited their potential.

A team of researchers in the Yale lab of Rebecca Kramer-Bottiglio, the John J. Lee Assistant Professor of Mechanical Engineering & Materials Science, has developed a material and fabrication process that can rapidly make these devices stretchier, more durable, and closer to being ready for mass manufacturing. The results are published in the journal Nature Materials.

One of the biggest challenges for this area of electronics is to reliably connect stretchable conductors with the rigid materials used in commercially available electronics components, such as resistors, capacitors, and light-emitting diodes (LEDs).

“The problem is that it’s difficult to connect something soft with something rigid,” said Shanliangzi Liu, lead author of the paper and a former Ph.D. student in Kramer-Bottiiglio’s lab. When the stretchable materials bend and elongate, a large shear force develops at the interface and often rips apart the connection to make the circuit unusable.


‘State of the art in sport science innovation, technology’

Atlanta Falcons from

Emory Healthcare and the Atlanta Falcons held a ribbon cutting on Thursday, officially opening the doors to a new musculoskeletal and sports medicine clinic, located at the IBM Performance Fields, home of the Atlanta Falcons. The Emory Orthopaedics & Spine Center at Flowery Branch will provide a new location for patients in surrounding communities, while also being an access point for the Falcons organization and players who may need diagnostic imaging or to be seen by a sports medicine expert.


NBA Sacramento Kings access sport technology advances through partnership with Australian Catholic University

Australasian Leisure Management from

A partnership between Australian Catholic University and the NBA Sacramento Kings will see the NBA club access world leading researchers and timely advances in performance, recovery and sports technology.

The agreement will give the Kings’ Health and Performance Team access to Australian Catholic University (ACU)’s respected Sports Performance, Recovery, Injury and New Technologies (SPRINT) Research Centre as they apply sport science to the risk and performance management on the basketball court.

Kings Vice President of Health and Performance Teena Murray notes “ACU is a world leader in the high performance sport movement.

“We are excited to grow our relationship with the world renowned ACU faculty, including Dr Grant Duthie, Dr Shona Halson and Dr Stu Cormack, and the SPRINT Centre.


How Machine Learning and Data Science Can Advance Nutrition Research

insideBIGDATA, Kyle Dardashti from

… Machine learning and data science bring exciting potential to the world of personalized nutrition. Combining these two technologies together on a cohesive platform that supports continuous tracking would allow for real-time validated nutrition recommendations tailored to an individual’s lifestyle. In other words, collecting data on an individual’s meal habits, symptom patterns, physical activity, and lab values can be compiled and analyzed to produce personalized suggestions on what to eat, when to eat, and why. For example, this platform could identify individual foods or ingredients that trigger specific symptoms and suggest a dietary pattern that is supported to reduce these symptoms.


Major League Soccer’s next geography lesson

US Soccer Players, J Hutcherson from

… Last season, the league made the interesting choice to put Nashville in the Western Conference. That ability to ignore geography is nothing new in American pro sports, with MLS wanting to split the expansion teams. The pandemic hiatus and restart moved Nashville to the East in a revamped setup where geographical closeness mattered most. Conference imbalance led the league to add a four-team play-in round in the East. Add to that points-per-game to determine the final tables, and the conferences were close to an afterthought to get to the playoffs.

What that means for 2021 isn’t obvious. The league is back to a regular 34-game schedule with limited fans in some markets. We’ve already seen in Europe what the absence of fans does for home-field advantage. The league has unbalanced conferences this season, 14 teams in the East and 13 teams in the West. The play-in round is the same in both, a life-preserver for those finishing 6th and 7th. The West gets this season’s expansion team while the East contends with the reloaded version of FC Cincinnati and the revamped Inter Miami.

MLS hasn’t announced the club schedules, but the expectation is that, like last season, the conference takes precedence. The league’s schedule highlights conference play for the bulk of the season. Whether or not that’s what the league should want is certainly worth asking.


The Lowdown: Meet Racing Louisville’s director of player experience

The Equalizer, Dan Lauletta from

Brynn Sebring’s first call to Racing Louisville FC management was just to say hi and to tell them how impressed she was with how the club was putting itself together.

“I was so impressed,” Sebring told me last week. “Honestly, I just reached out to be like ‘Hey, I just want you to know I’m impressed, this is cool. Here’s something else: Would you want to have a conversation about this?’ And they did.”

The ‘something else’ turned into a new role for Sebring with the first-year expansion side in the National Women’s Soccer League. Her title is director of player experience and operations. Sebring performed similar functions during a four-year tenure at the Reign, but in Louisville is able to dedicate her whole self to making every players’ experience in the city and at the club the very best it can be.

“Basically, I manage every single thing that touches the players when they’re here,” she said. “From how they get picked up at the airport, to what they’re living in, to how we communicate our schedule, to how we prepare and support them off the field. It’s a large scope.”


Study: college sports still trail pros in diversity hiring

Associated Press, Aaron Beard from

A diversity study for racial and gender hiring across college sports found little change in scores that continue to lag behind the professional ranks.

Wednesday’s report card from The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) at Central Florida assigned an overall C-plus grade, a B for racial hiring and a C-plus for gender hiring for the 2019-20 sports season. Those were the same grades from last year in the report, which examines a range of positions including leadership at the NCAA headquarters, conference commissioners, athletics directors and head coaches across Divisions I, II and III.


Riske: A new look at historical draft success for all 32 NFL teams

Pro Football Focus, Timo Riske from

… We want to examine recent draft success, but players drafted in 2018 or later haven’t yet played four years. Luckily, WAR after four years is highly correlated to WAR after three or even two years, with R^2 values of 0.96 and 0.87, respectively. Therefore, we can assess each team’s 2018 and 2019 draft success by predicting the WAR numbers after four years with a high degree of accuracy.

It even makes sense to include the 2020 draft, as rookie WAR and draft position predict the WAR after four years with an R^2 value of 0.60 (the draft position adds 0.05 compared to only using rookie WAR).

Using the projected four-year WAR for each draft pick from 2018 through 2020, along with the actual four-year WAR for the 2017 draft class, we can compute the draft success of each NFL team by adding the difference between the outcome and the expectation for each draft pick.

This is a measure of the magnitude of the surplus value a team enjoyed from their draft picks during the 2020 season since these were the players on a rookie contract.


We’re just getting started’: At women in NFL forum, Buccaneers show why they’re pioneers in championing diversity – The

The Boston Globe, Nicole Yang from

Twenty-five years ago, when Jason Licht started working in the NFL, a woman walking through the football offices was more often than not an administrative assistant.

Now, Licht is the general manager of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who just won Super Bowl LV with two women on their coaching staff. Assistant defensive line coach Lori Locust and assistant strength and conditioning coach Maral Javadifar, both in their second seasons with the team, became the first female coaches to ever win a Super Bowl.

“How far we’ve come is great,” Licht said. “We have a long ways to go.”

Locust and Javadifar are the lone women on Tampa Bay’s coaching staff, but Licht made sure to give shoutouts to others involved in the operation, such as director of football research Jacqueline Davidson, director of performance nutrition Stephanie Kolloff O’Neill, and scouting assistant Carly Helfand.


Making Sense Of: AI Ethics

I also produce a widely read newsletter that focuses on academic data science. Ethics is a bigger issue there than it is in academic sports science, or even sports science in general.

I recently wrote this analysis for the other newsletter … The New Yorker magazine has a longread article that raises lots of issues, and at times lacks for sensitivity. The author, Matthew Hutson, provides a tourist’s overview of the current state of ethical AI in practice, reporting from multiple conferences (NeurIPS, AAAI, CHI, EMLNP) and interviewing leading researchers (Michael Kearns, Alex Hanna, Katie Shilton, Eric Horvitz, Brent Hecht). Hutson hits big questions (cultural stereotypes, biased outcomes, ethics training, peer review, institutional review, commercialization, personal impact statements, regulation). These are powerful forces at work, some pushing while others pull. Lowest common denominators (training data sets, user populations, interface affordances) push the work forward broadly. The pull toward what’s exceptional is a result of peer review and social backlash, sometimes both. The hassle that comes with navigating the push-pull is discouraging researchers. It’s putting off companies from developing products and it’s disincentivizing government from gaining the necessary expertise for effective regulation. Medical companies were hoping to incorporate AI into useful tools against COVID but the real world impact has been marginal at best, according to POLITICO’s Mohana Ravindranath. It’s both healthy and sucky to have all of the dirty laundry on display, but let’s keep hope alive. There’s money from National Science Foundation and Amazon for new research into Fair & Trustworthy systems. “We need to understand the different aspects of fairness,” NSF program director Henry Kautz told Nextgov, “so that we can in turn understand how we can design our systems with ‘fairness’ built into them.”

The ethical discussion is more intense in data science than in sports science because the stakes are higher in data science. Scientific discoveries, in most cases, happen just once, and there are major advances occurring in data science, as well as major advances in many fields that increasingly rely on data science. The intellectual competition is fierce. The esteem and the career benefits are more than substantial, they’re enormous.

The health regulations that apply to sports science make it less of an ethical wild west than data science. Still, bias, trust and fairness are terms that get used much less frequently in sports science than in data science. The stakes are higher than many people realize for sports science research, and the links to data science run deeper than what gets acknowledged. Ethics should be more visible, especially as data and analysis plays larger roles in all of the talent evaluation and identification that goes on in sports.

Thank you for reading. I really appreciate your time and attention.
-Brad

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