… Leonard said he’s substantially healthier than he was to start last season, when he still was recovering from a quadriceps injury and would play only 60 regular-season games. The Raptors were cautious and conservative with his playing time, a strategy that paid off in the postseason, when Leonard averaged 30 points to help Toronto win its first NBA title.
“It’s different this season,” said Leonard, a three-time All-Star and two-time Finals MVP from Moreno Valley. “Last year I was going in with an injury that I was dealing with the year before still was lingering, and we knew that I had to be healthy going throughout the season and making it to the playoffs. But this year I’m feeling good, feeling way better than I was at the start of last season, but there’s really no plan laid out yet.”
… A few weeks later, Rodgers began sprinting and then he began cutting on the right knee and then, in a stunner to medical trainers, he returned to practice during the week of Clemson’s season opener, five months after the injury. In the Tigers’ third game of the season (and Rodgers’s second), Rodgers achieved his rehabilitation goal of playing against Syracuse and vindicating a 2018 game against the Orange, one he refers to as the worst of his career. It was a dream-like result in Round 2: four catches, 121 yards and two touchdowns, including an 87-yard jaunt in which he caught quarterback Trevor Lawrence’s pass five yards behind the line of scrimmage, broke a tackle a yard later and then out-raced two defenders down the sideline for 94 more yards. He returned to his cell phone post-game to 130 text messages and 30 direct messages on Twitter.
This all happened 173 days or 24½ weeks after tearing his ACL during a spring football practice on March 25. The six-month anniversary of the injury was this Wednesday. That was the earliest date trainers had originally scheduled for him to return… to practice. “My goal was different than what the doctors said,” Rodgers says. “They said I wouldn’t be able to come back until the middle of October. I wanted to be back for Syracuse, and I wanted to make up for 2018, which I did, which was crazy.
Adam Fantilli could very well be the first-overall pick in the 2020 OHL draft, but the elite 14-year-old has decided to leave his minor midget team to head to a New Hampshire prep school. And the decision comes down to family.
Gut instincts told Aaron Nelson he was making the right decision to join the New Orleans Pelicans this spring, particularly after he kept hearing positive things about the franchise’s direction. Over a span of just five days, a series of events emphatically confirmed to Nelson that those intangible feelings were correct.
After interviewing with David Griffin and touring the team’s six-year-old practice facility – the Ochsner Sports Performance Center – Nelson accepted his new role as vice president of player care and performance on a Sunday. By Monday, Nelson’s entire list of renovation recommendations for the facility had been reviewed and OK’d by Owner Gayle Benson. Griffin called Nelson, who was in the initial stages of preparing to move his family from Arizona, to ask if he could meet Friday with contractors, to discuss the specific changes Nelson outlined.
“I was like, ‘Really?’ ” Nelson recalled, alluding to the stunningly rapid timeline. “Griff said (in a phone call), ‘Everything on your equipment list was approved.’
… Technologies now exist that allow for constant and long-term recording of a pitcher’s arm movements, enabling players to track and understand the stresses on their bodies.
At our sports technology company, Motus Global, we use consumer-grade sensors—the kind that have been perfected for smartphones—to gather biometric data related to an athlete’s ultimate workload. Our analytics use software models of muscle fatigue to help pitchers improve performance while decreasing risk of injury. By using affordable technologies, we put data not just within the reach of the 30 MLB teams but also their 160 minor league affiliates, hundreds of college teams, and thousands of youth-level teams around the country.
… Researchers in Finland analyzed the relation between medal-winning success and days sick in cross country skiers during the run-up to the last winter Olympics. They found that while medal-winners spent an average of 14 days per year with colds and other respiratory infections, less successful athletes spent an average of 22 days out sick with similar infections.
Similarly, a study conducted by the Australian Institute of Sport on track and field athletes over five seasons found that illness and injury that prevented or limited training were major factors in determining success.
On the positive side, athletes who completed 80% or more of their planned training were seven times more likely to reach their goals and succeed in events compared to those that did not.
They also found that most illnesses were associated with overtraining, and that 50% of illnesses occurred in the two months prior to competition when training loads and mileages are highest.
… “It’s hard to look back like that at an injury,” he said. “But Devyn was doing 10 hours of activity, wearing herself down mentally and physically. And when you do that, your body doesn’t respond as if it were fresh.
“I remember going home that night and thinking, ‘What are we doing wrong with our kids?’ ”
Injuries to Devyn and a host of other student-athletes have caused doctors and coaches in the La Crosse area to reconsider how hard adults should be pushing children and adolescents, even in the highly competitive world of prep sports.
Enhancing a culture of safety in college sports is foundational to reducing the occurrence of catastrophic injury and death. The goal of the NCAA sport science institute (SSI) is protecting the life and the long-term well-being of all athletes. To support that effort, the SSI developed the following document entitled Interassociation Recommendations: Preventing Catastrophic Injury and Death in Collegiate Athletes. In addition to the main document, links to two additional companion documents are available: (1) a frequently asked questions document, and (2) a checklist. Together, they provide comprehensive recommendations on preventing catastrophic injury and death in collegiate athletes, which were unanimously endorsed by the NCAA Board of Governors as Association-wide policy under the Uniform Standard of Care Procedures.
The recommendations in the main document have been endorsed by 13 external scientific and medical organizations and illuminate areas of consensus about the best ways to prevent catastrophic injury and death in collegiate athletes. They provide a flexible roadmap for NCAA member institutions to address catastrophic injury prevention in six key areas: sportsmanship; protective equipment; acclimatization and conditioning; emergency action plans; strength and conditioning personnel; and education and training.
… My colleagues and I at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas recently completed a study of 35 former NFL players age 50 and older who had sustained multiple concussions throughout their careers. Our findings showed no significant association between the length of the individuals’ careers, the number of concussions, and their cognitive function later in life.
How to account for these differences? Why does one former pro football player develop cognitive problems while another doesn’t? We simply don’t know.
Although many factors must be considered, I think it is premature to discourage teenagers from playing contact sports. What is needed now is more research to gain a deeper understanding of how concussions and hits to the head affect the brain. To facilitate this work, all states should follow the lead of Texas, Michigan, and others that have instituted registries to gather data on concussions sustained by high school athletes. Data from these registries can help us define the number of concussions that occur in every sport and learn how they occur, how long it takes to recover from them, and how they affect boys and girls differently.
Stanford University, Stanford Medicine, News Center from
Researchers at Stanford and Trinity College in Dublin report preliminary evidence of damage to the brain’s protective barrier in adolescent and adult athletes even if they did not report a concussion.
arXiv, Physics > Physics and Society; J.M. Buldu, J. Busquets, I. Echegoyen, F. Seirul.lo from
The application of Network Science to social systems has introduced new methodologies to analyze classical problems such as the emergence of epidemics, the arousal of cooperation between individuals or the propagation of information along social networks. More recently, the organization of football teams and their performance have been unveiled using metrics coming from Network Science, where a team is considered as a complex network whose nodes (i.e., players) interact with the aim of overcoming the opponent network. Here, we combine the use of different network metrics to extract the particular signature of the F.C. Barcelona coached by Guardiola, which has been considered one of the best teams along football history. We have first compared the network organization of Guardiola’s team with their opponents along one season of the Spanish national league, identifying those metrics with statistically significant differences and relating them with the Guardiola’s game. Next, we have focused on the temporal nature of football passing networks and calculated the evolution of all network properties along a match, instead of considering their average. In this way, we are able to identify those network metrics that enhance the probability of scoring/receiving a goal, showing that not all teams behave in the same way and how the organization Guardiola’s F.C. Barcelona is different from the rest, including its clustering coefficient, shortest-path length, largest eigenvalue of the adjacency matrix, algebraic connectivity and centrality distribution.
When it comes to teaching basketball players how to execute a winning drive to the hoop, a tactic board can be a coach’s best friend. But this top-down view of the court has a major limitation: It doesn’t reveal how the opposing team will respond. A new program powered by artificial intelligence (AI) could change that.
Here’s how the technology works. A coach sketches plays on a virtual tactic board on their computer, representing their own players as red dots and the defending team as blue dots. Once they drag their virtual players around to indicate movements and passes, an AI program trained with player movement data from the National Basketball Association converts these simplified sketches into a realistic simulation of how both offensive and defensive players would move during the play.
The underlying mechanism is a generative adversarial network, which pits two AI programs against each other. One takes sketches and tries to generate realistic player movements; the other provides feedback on how closely these match real-world data. Over time, this results in increasingly realistic plays.
