… “I’m always thinking about hockey,” MacKinnon said . “Not stressing over it, but definitely always thinking about it. I worked hard because another 100 points isn’t going to be handed to me. It’s tough to get that many. I don’t know if I will get that many this year. But I’ll try to and see what happens.”
MacKinnon’s prepared to embrace the pressure of being one of the game’s elite players. Then again, expectations have never weighed down MacKinnon, a native of Halifax, Nova Scotia.
“Growing up, I was always a top prospect, and I went first overall. So it just feels normal,” said MacKinnon, who signed a seven-year, $44.1 million deal in July 2016. “It’s somewhere I expect to be. It’s not like I won the lottery here. I feel like I’ve earned that.”
He was the No. 1 pick overall. People said he would be the LeBron James of baseball. Instead, Young became known for his violent temper and for being the anti-role model. How did a top prospect with such promise fall so far, so hard? And can he come back?
… In reality, different intensities contribute to fitness in diverse ways, just as individual ingredients contribute distinct flavors to a cake. While there aren’t many “experts” who recommend that endurance athletes include only one ingredient—namely, high intensity—in their training recipe (although there are some), the popular notion that high intensity affects the body in the same way as low and moderate intensity, only more so, does incline many triathletes to undervalue and underutilize low and moderate intensities. A glance at the science shows why all three intensity ranges are essential ingredients in the recipe for endurance fitness.
Conceptually, an efficient baseball pitch demonstrates a proximal-to-distal transfer of segmental angular velocity. Such a timing pattern (or kinematic sequence) reduces stress on musculoskeletal structures of the throwing arm and maximises ball velocity. We evaluated the variability of kinematic sequences in 208 baseball pitches. 3D biomechanical pitch analyses were performed on 8–10 fastball pitches from 22 baseball pitchers (5 high school, 11 collegiate and 6 professional). The kinematic sequence patterns – time of peak angular velocity of five body segments: pelvis, trunk, arm, forearm and hand – were measured. None of the pitches analysed demonstrated an entirely proximal-to-distal kinematic sequence. Fourteen different kinematic sequence patterns were demonstrated, with the most prevalent sequence being pelvis -> trunk -> arm -> hand -> forearm. Fewer than 10% of the pitchers performed only one kinematic sequence pattern across the sampled pitches. The variability of the kinematic sequence was similar in high-school pitchers and professionals. Previous studies report that deviation from the proximal-to-distal kinematic sequence is associated with increased injury risk. As a method of evaluating the efficient transfer of energy to the hand, the kinematic sequence may provide insight to injury risk in the future. The ideal kinematic sequence and ideal variability of the sequence when throwing have yet to be determined.
A device that more than 80 percent of Americans virtually always have with them may become an early warning system for soldiers suffering from traumatic brain injuries (TBI) and infectious diseases, thanks to research by a team of computer scientists at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). The researchers are developing machine learning algorithms that will sort through a host of data collected by the sensors in smartphones to detect telltale signs of medical conditions that can affect a soldier’s readiness.
Computer science professors Emmanuel Agu, faculty director for WPI’s Healthcare Delivery Institute, and Elke Rundensteiner, director of the university’s Data Science Program, are developing this new technology with support from a four-year, $2.8 million award from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) through its Warfighter Analytics using Smartphones for Health (WASH) program.
The goal of WASH is to create a mobile application that passively assesses a soldier’s health—immediately and over time—with the goal of detecting potentially severe illnesses at their earliest stages, and pointing soldiers toward care. The system will not replace typical medical assessments, but will augment them by detecting problems outside of scheduled clinical appointments. In this way, the app could help flag small problems before they escalate and before they impair the readiness of soldiers or spread diseases like the flu, tuberculosis, and pneumonia through squadrons.
arXiv, Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition; Jiaxin Cai, Xin Tang from
Action recognition has attracted increasing attention from RGB input in computer vision partially due to potential applications on somatic simulation and statistics of sport such as virtual tennis game and tennis techniques and tactics analysis by video. Recently, deep learning based methods have achieved promising performance for action recognition. In this paper, we propose weighted Long Short-Term Memory adopted with convolutional neural network representations for three dimensional tennis shots recognition. First, the local two-dimensional convolutional neural network spatial representations are extracted from each video frame individually using a pre-trained Inception network. Then, a weighted Long Short-Term Memory decoder is introduced to take the output state at time t and the historical embedding feature at time t-1 to generate feature vector using a score weighting scheme. Finally, we use the adopted CNN and weighted LSTM to map the original visual features into a vector space to generate the spatial-temporal semantical description of visual sequences and classify the action video content. Experiments on the benchmark demonstrate that our method using only simple raw RGB video can achieve better performance than the state-of-the-art baselines for tennis shot recognition.
Background Patellofemoral pain (PFP) is a prevalent condition commencing at various points throughout life. We aimed to provide an evidence synthesis concerning predictive variables for PFP, to aid development of preventative interventions.
Methods We searched Medline, Web of Science and SCOPUS until February 2017 for prospective studies investigating at least one potential risk factor for future PFP. Two independent reviewers appraised methodological quality using the Newcastle–Ottawa Scale. We conducted meta-analysis where appropriate, with standardised mean differences (SMD) and risk ratios calculated for continuous and nominal scaled data.
Results This review included 18 studies involving 4818 participants, of whom 483 developed PFP (heterogeneous incidence 10%). Three distinct subgroups (military recruits, adolescents and recreational runners) were identified. Strong to moderate evidence indicated that age, height, weight, body mass index (BMI), body fat and Q angle were not risk factors for future PFP. Moderate evidence indicated that quadriceps weakness was a risk factor for future PFP in the military, especially when normalised by BMI (SMD −0.69, CI −1.02, –0.35). Moderate evidence indicated that hip weakness was not a risk factor for future PFP (multiple pooled SMDs, range −0.09 to −0.20), but in adolescents, moderate evidence indicated that increased hip abduction strength was a risk factor for future PFP (SMD 0.71, CI 0.39, 1.04).
Conclusions This review identified multiple variables that did not predict future PFP, but quadriceps weakness in military recruits and higher hip strength in adolescents were risk factors for PFP. Identifying modifiable risk factors is an urgent priority to improve prevention and treatment outcomes.
Introduction: Elite performance in sports is known to be influenced by heritable components, but the magnitude of such an influence has never been quantified.
Hypothesis/Objectives: We hypothesized that having a former world-class champion in the family increases the chances of an athlete to repeat the achievement of her or his kinship. We aimed to measure the heritability of a medal in the Olympic Games (OG) among Olympians and to estimate the percentage of the genetic contribution to such a heritance.
Study Design: Twin-family study of a retrospective cohort.
Methods: All the 125,051 worldwide athletes that have participated in the OG between 1896 and 2012 were included. The expected probability to win a medal in the OG was defined as the frequency of medallists among Olympians without any blood kinship in the OG. This expected probability was compared with the probability to win a medal for Olympians having a kinship (grandparent, aunt/uncle, parent, or siblings) with a former Olympian that was a (1) non-medallist or (2) medallist. The heritability of the genetically determined phenotype (h2) was assessed by probandwise concordance rates among dizygotic (DZ) and monozygotic (MZ) twins (n = 90).
Results: The expected probability to win a medal in the OG was 20.4%. No significant difference of medal probability was found in the subgroups of Olympians with a Non-medallist kinship, except among siblings for whom this probability was lower: 13.3% (95% CI 11.2–14.8). The medal probability was significantly greater among Olympians having a kinship with a former Olympic Medallist: 44.4% for niece/nephew (33.7–54.2); 43.4% for offspring (37.4–48.6); 64.8% for siblings (61.2–68.8); 75.5% for DZ twins (63.3–86.6); and 85.7% for MZ twins (63.6–96.9); with significantly greater concordance between MZ than DZ (p = 0.01) and h2 estimated at 20.5%.
Conclusion: Having a kinship with a former Olympic medallist is associated with a greater probability for an Olympian to also become a medallist, the closer an athlete is genetically to such kinship the greater this probability. Once in the OG, the genetic contribution to win a medal is estimated to be 20.5%. [full text]
FIFA’s stakeholder committee, which brings together representatives from federations, clubs, professional leagues and the players’ union, FIFPro, met for the first time in March 2017. Almost exactly 18 months later, on Sept. 24, they will meet to discuss a raft of measures that, if approved, will represent the biggest overhaul to the transfer system since the Bosman ruling in 1996 (a European Court ruling that required clubs to allow players over the age of 25 to move freely between clubs once their contracts have expired).
When I spoke to FIFA president Gianni Infantino last spring, he foreshadowed what he’d like to see from transfer reform. From creating a consistent transfer window globally for all leagues and capping agent fees to introducing a clearinghouse for cross-border transfers and limiting squad sizes and loans, he made it clear everything was on the table. Indeed, this is the biggest effort yet to regulate what has become a business worth nearly $6.5 billion a year, roughly twice what it was in 2011.
ESPN has obtained a copy of the report and recommendations circulated to stakeholders. Here’s a Q&A to help make sense of it.
… FIFA said it was agreed that loans should be used for the “purpose of youth development as opposed to commercial exploitation” and there should be a limit on the number of loans each club could make in a given season.
The committee also supported “new and stronger regulations for agents” including limits on how much they could earn and on how many different parties they could represent in a given transaction.
FIFA said the clearing house would be to “process transfers with the aim of protecting the integrity of football and avoiding fraudulent conduct.”
Should the kickoff be abolished? Should the College Football Playoff increase to eight teams? How will schools with smaller budgets compete in an environment where big schools keep getting richer?
Experts around college football talked about these topics and more at an event called The Future of College Football put on by Dallas Influencers in Sports and Entertainment (DISE) last week in Dallas. The panel was moderated by Rachel Lindsay, known for her appearances on The Bachelor and The Bachelorette reality television shows. Lindsay is also an ESPN sports personality.
Not all passes are created equal. A quarterback receives the same credit for a completion whether the pass traveled 60 yards downfield to a receiver in double-coverage, or whether the pass traveled 2 yards behind the line of scrimmage to an open running back in the flat. Next Gen Stats player tracking data can be leveraged to add context to each passing play.
Next Gen Stats’ new metric for the 2018 season, Completion Probability, seeks to improve on the limitations of raw box score statistics and is intended to contextualize passing and receiving performance on a per play basis, to account for the level of difficulty of a throw.
An athlete who feels he is underappreciated can sulk, sound off to the media, or go on a Twitter rant. Or he can invent a new statistic that proves his worth.
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That’s what two defensive midfielders did, and now their invention is the talk of soccer’s statistics world.
Stefan Reinartz and Jens Hegeler were defensive midfielders in the Bundesliga in 2015 when they created the metric known as packing. The rudimentary statistics in soccer, like goals and assists, cast favorable light primarily on strikers and attacking midfielders, the players who do most of the scoring and assisting. The grunts of the sport, defensive-minded midfielders like Reinartz and Hegeler, often get offensive moves started, but they are seldom recognized statistically.
Reinartz and Hegeler reasoned that what they did best was move the ball past opposition players. That is what packing measures.
In the summer of 2016, Aaron Mooy signed for Manchester City from Melbourne City, another club in the City Football Group. Six days later, he was loaned to Huddersfield. After a successful season, Mooy moved permanently. Mooy never played a minute for Manchester City – but he made them £10 million.
The curious case of Mooy is an emblem of what is driving Fifa to explore radical changes to the loan rules and stop clubs stockpiling talent. City have 28 players out on loan; Chelsea have 40.
Juventus, who have reached two of the last four Champions League finals, are a window into how European superclubs use the loan system. From the start of 2010 until the end of 2017, Juventus loaned out 142 different players – in 316 deals – to 132 clubs, spanning 21 different countries, according to the academics Paul Widdop, Alexander Bond and Daniel Parnell. In the calendar year 2016, Juventus loaned out 51 players – more than twice as many as teams are allowed to register in their first team squads each year – in 58 separate deals.
Canada Sport Information Resource Center blog; Laura Chittle, Jess Dixon, Sean Horton and Joe Baker from
… Relative age effects tend to occur when individuals are selected based upon their perceived ability and then placed into differing steams (e.g., gifted programs, competitive sport) that offer dissimilar opportunities and resources. The problem is that coaches, teachers, and parents often confuse “talent” with “age.” While they assume they are selecting the most talented children for these elite opportunities, often it is just the oldest among the cohort.