Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 26, 2021

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

 

The change that finally shifted Kevin Newman’s fortunes at the plate this season

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Mike Persak from

… “[I tried] too many [adjustments] to count. Too many to count,” Newman said prior to Tuesday’s game. “I seriously couldn’t tell you. I struggled for a while, and you’re constantly making changes, so I couldn’t tell you.

“… I was a in a good head space, to be honest, because I never really lost the confidence in myself. It was almost more frustration, just kind of like, ‘Shoot, man. When’s it going to show up?’ Just showing up every day, continue to do my work and do everything that I knew I needed to do to prepare for the game. Thankfully, it’s shown up in the last month or so.”

So what clicked? After all of that time, Newman gave up trying to spray the ball the other way or commit to just making contact and hoping some hits fall for him, because hits were not falling for him.


Jamie Young: the goalkeeper and PhD candidate psychoanalysing coaches

The Guardian, Emma Kemp from

The A-League player is conducting interviews with coaches, staff and players to gain insight into why each behaves the way they do in an elite environment


FA launch program to find 30,000 new female coaches and players

The Women's Game (Australia), Catherine Paquette from

Football Australia has launched a new initiative to increase the number of women in coaching after Australian numbers have remained stagnant in recent decades.

As part of its Legacy ’23 plan, developed to ensure that the benefits of the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup extend past the event, Football Australia has highlighted Leadership and Development as one it’s important pillars.

Increasing the recruitment, development and retention of women at all levels of the game is an important part of this pillar.


The MLS player development model is working for the league

US Soccer Players, Jason Davis from

Major League Soccer’s evolution as a “selling league” in the parlance of the world soccer market is a net positive. For the first time in its history, MLS is fully engaging with the international market for players. Long little more than an occasional buyer of relatively cheap and/or over-the-hill talent, MLS is now a provider of players to richer, more prestigious leagues in Europe.

“We’re in the great game now and there’s no turning back,” Seattle Sounders general manager Garth Lagerwey said earlier this month. “We’re joining the rest of the world. Buying and selling young players is part of global soccer. For a long time, MLS existed apart from the rest of the world. That is inevitably changing. We’ve really flipped to embrace that.”

Lagerwey’s comments came after the club acquired Leo Chu, a 21-year-old attacker from Gremio of Brazil. Seattle executed the kind of move that speaks to a new trend of MLS clubs spending substantial sums, a reported $2.5 million in Chu’s case) to sign precocious youngsters out of places like South America. The Sounders’ investment is about winning games in Major League Soccer, but it’s also about turning Chú into a valuable asset sellable at a profit down the road.


The science of catching up

The Hechinger Report, Jill Barshay from

… Schools are already spending big chunks of their approximately $190 billion in pandemic relief money on a range of strategies from after-school programs to cutting class size. But research shows that many of these ideas have had a spotty track record in the past and that schools will have to pay close attention to what’s worked—and what hasn’t—to maximize their odds for success with just about any strategy. There’s no silver bullet. And the pandemic’s fits and starts in instruction are unprecedented in the history of American public education and have affected students unevenly.

No catch-up strategy can possibly benefit all students. But studies do point toward which strategies are most effective, how they can best be implemented — and what approaches might be a waste of time and money. Here’s a rundown of the most relevant research.

TUTORING


The effect of nudges on autonomy in hypothetical and real life settings

PLOS One, Jonas Wachner et al. from

Nudges have repeatedly been found to be effective, however they are claimed to harm autonomy, and it has been found that laypeople expect this too. To test whether these expectations translate to actual harm to experienced autonomy, three online studies were conducted. The paradigm used in all studies was that participants were asked to voluntarily participate in a longer version of the questionnaire. This was either done in a hypothetical setting, where participants imagined they were asked this question, but did not answer it, and reported their expectations for autonomy; Or in an actual choice setting where participants answered the question and then reported their actual autonomy. The first study utilized the hypothetical setting and tried to replicate that laypeople expect nudges to harm autonomy with the current paradigm. A total of 451 participants were randomly assigned to either a control, a default nudge, or a social norm nudge condition. In the default nudge condition, the affirmative answer was pre-selected, and in the social norm nudge condition it was stated that most people answered affirmative. The results showed a trend for lower expected autonomy in nudge conditions, but did not find significant evidence. In Study 2, with a sample size of 454, the same design was used in an actual choice setting. Only the default nudge was found to be effective, and no difference in autonomy was found. In Study 3, Studies 1 and 2 were replicated. Explanation of the nudge was added as an independent variable and the social norm nudge condition was dropped, resulting in six conditions and 1322 participants. The results showed that participants indeed expected default nudges to harm their autonomy, but only if the nudge was explained. When actually nudged, no effect on autonomy was found, independent of the presence of an explanation.


Attitudes and beliefs of little league baseball parents regarding sport specialization and college scholarship availability

The Physician and Sports Medicine journal from

Objectives

Previous studies of parents of adolescent athletes identified a belief among parents of the importance of early specialization for skill development. However, it is unclear if these attitudes and beliefs are also held among parents of baseball athletes, which is the second-most popular boy’s sport in the United States. The purpose of this study was to describe the knowledge, attitudes, and beliefs of parents of Little League baseball players regarding sport specialization and college scholarships.
Methods

Two-hundred and forty-four parents of Little League baseball players (female parents: 60.7%, parent age: 41.1 ± 6.2 years old, male children: 98.0%, child age: 9.5 ± 1.6 years old) completed an anonymous online questionnaire regarding parent attitudes and beliefs on sport specialization and college scholarships.
Results

Most parents (72.4%) felt that specialization would increase their child’s baseball ability either ‘quite a bit’ or ‘a great deal.’ Fewer than half of all parents (42.0%) reported that specialization was either ‘quite a bit’ or ‘a great deal’ of a problem. Parents underestimated the availability of Division I college baseball scholarship availability (median [IQR]: 5 [4–10]), compared to the actual value of 11.7 scholarships per Division I roster. Only 10.2% of parents (N = 25) reported that they believed it was ‘somewhat’ or ‘very’ likely that their child would receive a college baseball scholarship.
Conclusion

Further efforts are needed to understand parent attitudes and beliefs regarding sport specialization and college scholarships in various sports to better understand current trends in youth sport participation.


The @WuTsaiAlliance at @uoregon , based in the Knight Campus, sponsored the 2021 @kidsports4life August Pop Up Summer Camps for the Bethel and Springfield areas.

Twitter, UOKnightCampus from

200 kids took part in a range of athletic activities, encouraging activity and physical fitness.


Qualcomm Unleashes a New Era of Autonomous Drone Capabilities with World’s First 5G and AI-Enabled Drone Platform

Qualcomm Technologies, Press Note from

… The Qualcomm Flight RB5 5G Platform’s high-performance and heterogeneous computing at ultra-low power consumption provides power efficient inferencing at the edge for AI and Machine Learning (ML) enabling fully autonomous drones. Breakthrough camera capabilities deliver premium image capabilities and performance. With 5G and Wi-Fi 6 connectivity, this platform enhances critical flying abilities beyond visual line-of-sight (BVLOS) to support safer, more reliable flight. In addition, safety controls alone can no longer assure industrial and commercial drone safety, especially when scaling to Beyond Visual Line of Sight operations. The Qualcomm Flight RB5 5G Platform is equipped with a Qualcomm® Secure Processing Unit to support modern drone demands for cybersecurity protections as a key enabler of data-protection and safety requirements.

Qualcomm Technologies is working with Verizon to complete network testing of the Qualcomm Flight RB5 5G Platform for the Verizon 5G network, and expects the platform, which is 5G mmWave capable, will be offered via the Verizon Thingspace Marketplace.


Health researchers report funder pressure to suppress results

Nature, News, Clare Watson from

Small study hints that interference from bodies funding research into public-health issues such as nutrition and exercise might be more common than realized.


Some NBA Summer League Stars Look ‘Too Good’ To Be There. What Does That Mean For Their Futures?

FiveThirtyEight, Jared Dubin from

… we looked at 16 years’ worth of Summer League statistics to see if that’s actually the case. Did second-year players who appeared “too good for Summer League” show meaningful improvement the following season? Did they show more improvement than players who participated in Summer League but weren’t “too good” for it? Did they do better than players who didn’t participate in Summer League at all?

In a word, yes. But there are caveats. The first is that there’s no firm, universal definition of being “too good for Summer League.” Players can also have their Summer League stints cut short due to injury, in addition to performance. And rising second-year players can be held out of Summer League altogether for multiple reasons, including but not limited to their team considering them “too good for Summer League” already.

All of that said, we defined players who were “too good for Summer League” as second-year players who played three or fewer games and recorded an average Game Score4 of 10 or better.5 These players did indeed show meaningful improvement during their second NBA season.


James Young: The role of data in Sunderland’s brave new world

Training Ground Guru, Simon Austin from

Under the ownership of 24-year-old Kyril-Louis Dreyfus, Sunderland are now treading a different path.

Instead of putting “all their faith in one man”, as Stuart Webber succinctly put it, the North East club are trying to build a structure for success. At the top sits Sporting Director Kristjaan Speakman, who arrived from Birmingham within hours of Dreyfus’s takeover and who has overall responsibility for football operations at the Black Cats.

Head Coach (not manager) Lee Johnson is responsible for delivering success on the field, Stuart Harvey is Head of Recruitment, and Lewis Dickman has been promoted to Academy Manager.

Another newly-created position is that of Head of Data and Analysis, which is indicative of a new way of thinking at the Stadium of Light. James Young was recruited to the role in March, having previously been head of the performance analytics department at management consultants Deloitte for the previous six years, working with clients including the Football Association, Uefa and the Premier League.


What MLB players would change about their sport

ESPN MLB, Jesse Rogers from

Through annual surveys, the league has asked fans what they think of the game and how it could be changed for the better. Debates on rule changes, special events like the recent Field of Dreams game, uniform experiments and how to appeal to younger fans are a social media staple. We at ESPN have our own suggestions, too.

But what do the players think?

We polled 20 big leaguers to get their take on the prevalence of the shift, the role of analytics and baseball’s ever-slowing pace of play. A few of them agreed to play commissioner for a day, too, with results both realistic and a bit over-the-top.


Cristiano Ronaldo, Harry Kane and a football world only getting smaller

The Independent (UK), Miguel Delaney from

The very top of the football world is getting smaller and smaller, with its unique economics ensuring a tranche of elite players and managers only have a few options


Will athletes’ new college cash flow impact team chemistry?

Associated Press, Pat Eaton-Robb from

… There is some concern the sudden wealth might widen the divide between the haves and have nots and disrupt one of the most important intangles in sports: team chemistry.

“It’s not going to be all about the team or your university anymore,” said Stacy Warner, a sports management professor at East Carolina. “People are going to want the ball more. People are going to want to make those big plays to get their names in the paper and get on a highlight reel somewhere, because they see the dollar signs for doing that.”

Hall of Fame basketball coach Geno Auriemma of UConn, whose team includes Paige Bueckers, the biggest star in women’s college basketball, warns that NIL will not be equitable. He said he’s happy that athletes like his sophomore guard, who already has trademarked the name “Paige Buckets,” can make money while in school.

“But don’t be complaining when your favorite team falls apart because five guys are transferring, because they don’t like the fact that five other guys are getting a lot of money,” he said.

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