Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 23, 2021

The rear-view mirror is something Toronto stars Auston Matthews and Mitch Marner are doing their best to ignore as the season approaches.

The Maple Leafs’ latest playoff failure — a stunning first-round collapse against the Montreal Canadiens — is still a bit fresh, coming just four months ago.

“It’s pretty self explanatory,” Matthews told The Canadian Press when asked if the setback hurt more than the previous four he has endured with Toronto, a team still in search of its first series victory in the NHL’s salary cap era.

“It’s learning from what happened,” he added. “There’s nothing that we can change now.”

… The Mercer Island native tore his right ACL while playing for the Sounders in a CONCACAF Champions League match in February 2018. Morris, a high-scoring winger, missed the MLS season and all possible appearances for the U.S. men’s national team.

“The toughest part of my first injury was not knowing how I would return as a player, because I had never been through an ACL before and I didn’t know how I would come out on the other side,” said Morris, who returned in 2019 to win the MLS Comeback Player of the Year award. He totaled 13 goals and eight assists across all competitions, helping the Sounders win a second MLS Cup.

Now, seven months after suffering his second ACL injury, the only thing Morris knows about his timeline to return is that he is six months closer.

Belief that overcoming every exhausting workout, throbbing knee pain and the mind-numbing monotony of rehab will improve his performance on the field keeps Morris patient in building toward that match day when he finally slips on a Rave Green jersey again.

Mel Tucker looked back at Michigan State football’s GPS numbers from Saturday, the ones that track player speed in practice and in games.

After crunching the numbers, he realized the Spartans played faster in the fourth quarter than the first quarter of their 38-17 win at Miami (Florida). Not coincidentally, MSU pulled away with a dominating 21-3 kick in the final period.

It was a major reason why Tucker said, after the impressive win that vaulted the Spartans to No. 21 in this week’s USA Today/AFCA Coaches Poll, his players were able to “drag (the Hurricanes) into the deep water where we live.”

Georgia Tech’s basketball team has lost strength-and-conditioning coach Dan Taylor to the Charlotte Hornets.

Taylor, who has been on Pastner’s staff since his hiring in 2016, will join the Hornets as their director of applied sports science, Tech coach Josh Pastner told the AJC. Taylor’s final day at Tech was Tuesday.

… Europe’s elite are queuing up to shop at the seemingly endless talent factory that is the Primeira Liga. In addition to the conveyor belt of talent in Portugal, the country boasts three teams in the Champions League group stages for the first time since the 2016-17 season, Ronaldo has returned to the club where he became a superstar and Portugal’s new ‘Golden Generation’ recently made it to the U21 European Championships final, where they narrowly lost to Germany. We are indeed experiencing a very significant period in Portuguese football.

In the Premier League in particular, there has been an influx of players arriving from Portugal and making instant impacts, Rúben Dias and Bruno Fernandes being two of the most recent.

It’s been around 10 years since security researcher Jay Radcliffe got up onstage at a conference and demonstrated that he was able to hack into his own insulin pump. If he’d wanted, he could have used the pump to deliver a lethal dose of the drug into his system. Instead, he demanded that medical companies take the security threat seriously.

That presentation and others like it were wake-up calls about the potential danger of connecting vulnerable medical devices to the internet, says Mike Johnson, a securities technologies expert at the University of Minnesota’s Technological Leadership Institute.

In the decade since, there’s been an explosion in the number of connected medical devices — drug infusion pumps, pacemakers, monitors — that makes the issue even more pressing. There is an average of 10 to 15 internet-connected devices on each hospital bed, security researchers estimate. “It’s just a matter of time,” Johnson says. “There are more devices and more exposure.”

That exposure is one reason the University of Minnesota set up a new Center for Medical Device Cybersecurity, which launched at the beginning of September in partnership with medical device companies like Medtronic (which made Radcliffe’s pump) and Boston Scientific.

AT&T, Butler University, Indiana Sports Corp, and Nextech are teaming up to bring you the latest AT&T hackathon in Central Indiana.

The “AT&T 5G Sports Hackathon” is the fifth tech competition the company has hosted locally in the last six years. This year’s event, which will be held at the Butler University Health and Recreation Complex (HRC), will be focused on how 5G technology can be game-changing for the sports world.

From October 22–24, teams of developers, designers, and other creatives will gather at the Butler HRC to come up with tech solutions to sports challenges that organizers will pose to them. Participants will also hear from 5G and edge compute experts, as well as leaders from local sports teams, venues, and public safety, as they think about the challenges and how to tackle them.

Since their discovery almost three decades ago, DNAzymes have been used extensively in biosensing. Depending on the type of DNAzyme being used, these functional oligonucleotides can act as molecular recognition elements within biosensors, offering high specificity to their target analyte, or as reporters capable of transducing a detectable signal. Several parameters need to be considered when designing a DNAzyme-based biosensor. In particular, given that many of these biosensors immobilize DNAzymes onto a sensing surface, selecting an appropriate immobilization strategy is vital. Suboptimal immobilization can result in both DNAzyme detachment and poor accessibility toward the target, leading to low sensing accuracy and sensitivity. Various approaches have been employed for DNAzyme immobilization within biosensors, ranging from amine and thiol-based covalent attachment to non-covalent strategies involving biotin–streptavidin interactions, DNA hybridization, electrostatic interactions, and physical entrapment. While the properties of each strategy inform its applicability within a proposed sensor, the selection of an appropriate strategy is largely dependent on the desired application. This is especially true given the diverse use of DNAzyme-based biosensors for the detection of pathogens, metal ions, and clinical biomarkers. In an effort to make the development of such sensors easier to navigate, this paper provides a comprehensive review of existing immobilization strategies, with a focus on their respective advantages, drawbacks, and optimal conditions for use. Next, common applications of existing DNAzyme-based biosensors are discussed. Last, emerging and future trends in the development of DNAzyme-based biosensors are discussed, and gaps in existing research worthy of exploration are identified. [full text]

The specific heart-related complication, called concentric left ventricular hypertrophy or C-LVH, involves enlargement and thickening of the walls of the heart’s main pumping chamber, the left ventricle. With this condition, in the general population, there is increased risk of later-life cardiovascular disease.

For the new study, researchers recruited and studied 300 college football players from two National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division-I football programs between 2014 and 2019. They reviewed clinical data including body weight and blood pressure, echocardiography (images of the heart), and vascular measurements at multiple timepoints throughout the study period. Researchers also analyzed demographics and family income.

“We found that both self-identified Black and white football linemen—which include players at the tackle, guard, center, or defensive end positions—similarly developed concentric left ventricular hypertrophy,” says Jonathan Kim, associate professor of medicine, division of cardiology at Emory University School of Medicine and chief of sports cardiology for Emory Healthcare.

Researchers at the University at Buffalo’s Concussion Management Clinic have developed a brief, standardized physical exam for sport-related concussive brain injuries in children and adolescents that can readily identify who is at risk for persistent post-concussion symptoms (PPCS).

The Buffalo Concussion Physical Examination’s Risk of Delayed Recovery (RDR) score is the first decision rule to help clinicians who aren’t concussion specialists quickly identify which children are at risk for PPCS within 10 days of injury and should be referred to a specialist for focused treatment. A decision rule is an evidence-based tool that helps clinicians make diagnostic and therapeutic decisions.

Introduction The treatment of an anterior cruciate ligament rupture is still controversial. In particular, this applies to the question of conservative versus surgical treatment. The answer to this question is often based on consequential damage such as the development of posttraumatic osteoarthritis, secondary damage to the meniscus or cartilage, and participation in sports. If there are significant differences in these parameters between the individual treatment options, the results will be of great importance for the development of evidence-based treatment pathways. Therefore, the aim of this work was to evaluate the development of knee osteoarthritis after rupture of the anterior cruciate ligament and the corresponding treatment (conservative or surgical).

Material and methods To answer the above question, a systematic literature search was conducted in Medline via Pubmed, the Cochrane Library and in CINAHL. Only systematic reviews with a minimum follow-up period of 10 years were included. The search was conducted in January 2020 and updated in January 2021. Investigated cohorts included patients with a rupture of the anterior cruciate ligament who had undergone either conservative or surgical treatment. Osteoarthritis was diagnosed either radiologically (recognized scores) or clinically (pain and impaired function). Appropriate reviews were qualitatively evaluated using the AMSTAR-2 questionnaire.

Results The literature research initially identified n = 42 reviews from which 14 reviews were included. After full-text review and qualitative evaluation, only n = 2 systematic reviews remained for evaluation. The results of both papers show imprecise data with a high variability. However, it can be assumed with high probability that the development of osteoarthritis of the knee is increased after a rupture of the anterior cruciate ligament. There is no evidence that the incidence of joint degeneration may be reduced by reconstruction of the anterior cruciate ligament, nor is there a difference when comparing conservative and surgical treatment directly.

Conclusion Patients with an anterior cruciate ligament rupture are likely to be at a greater risk of developing progressive joint degeneration. A protective effect of cruciate ligament surgery has not been found in the evaluated studies. A general argument in favour of cruciate ligament surgery aiming to achieve a protective effect on hyaline articular cartilage seems obsolete based on the results and should therefore not be used in patient education in the future.

For weeks, one name kept popping up, unprompted, in interviews with Michigan State’s football players: Amber Rinestine.

And that was before the Miami game last Saturday. Before MSU played with more vigor in the fourth quarter — in the sweltering South Florida heat — than it had the first three quarters.

For a team dietitian, that’s validation. For the players who already believed in her, it was proof.

… At the end of the 12-week study, it was a draw. “There were no real extra benefits or drawbacks to using either product,” Ross says. “Plant-based protein has the same impact on your training as animal protein for the 9-to-5 gym-goer.

Elite athletes have been using plant-based protein products with success because plant protein works and gets similar results as animal protein, but has also been shown to lower inflammation and allow for faster recovery times for athletes who also give up meat and dairy, which have been shown to increase inflammation.

“We’re not saying this study is absolute,” Ross adds. “There’s a huge amount more testing we could do to uncover more data and results.

… There is nothing wrong with teams valuing health. But it is unfair to past players or current players who actually play all the time to not recognize that there is a difference in showing up and dominating when everything is right and showing up and dominating every night.

By no means should we complain about prioritizing players health. But the next time someone tells you that a player who plays 60-65 games a season is better than a superstar of the past, consider how dominant that player of the past might have been if they chose to rest for the 10-20 percent of games they felt the worst for. No matter how great a player is, they cannot help you win games when they aren’t playing.

Tournament theory posits that some organizations are modeled after sports tournaments whereby individuals are incentivized to compete and win against other members of the organization. A persistent criticism of tournament theory is that rank-order success of employees is entirely dependent on non-interacting or at least non-cooperating entities. To address what part, if any, cooperation plays in competitive tournaments, this study examines the role of social networks in tournament-style promotion and reward systems. Specifically, we seek to identify the importance of social relationships, such as group dissimilarity, initial tie formation, and tie strength in predicting tournament success. Bringing two largely independent research streams together (one focused on cooperation and one framed around competition), we examine how individuals’ performance interacts with their social relationships—their social networks—to influence their chances of winning a tournament. Using the Survivor television series, we analyze the behaviors of 535 interacting contestants across 30 tournaments. In general, the findings help to illustrate how performance and social networks predict tournament advancement. Interestingly, we find that group dissimilarity based on gender, race, and age, largely does not play a role in advancement in the tournaments. Further, the strength of ties fails to mediate between variables such as group dissimilarity and initial tie formation. We conclude by discussing future directions for theoretical and practical exploration of tournament-style promotion systems. Recommendations include continuing to explore and test the role of social dynamics in compensation and promotion systems.