Until the last five seconds, Jacob Riley didn’t have much fun in Saturday’s Olympic Marathon Trials. First, on Friday, the unsponsored athlete agonized over what shoes to wear—Vaporfly or Alphafly? He chose the latter. “Better than the slab of foam I ran on in the 2016 Trials,” he said of the race in which he finished 15th.
Then there was the course—hilly and windy, presenting many vexing questions about the best race strategy. Things grew more worrisome in the marathon itself when Galen Rupp made his move at 15 miles, pulling along Abdi Abdirahman, Leonard Korir, and several others. Sayonara lifelong Olympic dream. “It was nerve wracking to let them go,” Riley observed later.
And it got even worse as he began closing the gap after 20 miles, finally reaching them at 24. Now what? Someone’s going to make the podium, someone’s not. How do you enjoy that pressure cooker?
Max Scherzer won’t tell me what he would be doing if he wasn’t heading into his 13th major league baseball season as the presumptive Opening Day starter for the reigning world champion Washington Nationals. That’s not even what I asked him, to be fair. I had asked if he has any goals outside of baseball, and he had volunteered how much fun it can be to think about what life would look like if he wasn’t a three-time Cy Young Award winner and one of the most recognizable faces (the eyes help) in the game.
OK, I said, then give me just one example. And that’s where Mad Max clammed up. He’s accessible to the media and takes his role as a spokesman for his teammates, both unofficially and as a high-ranking member of the players association, very seriously. But he is also incredibly savvy and self-aware about what he says in the presence of reporters. He admits that some answers will be different on and off the record. At one point he says “sh–” and immediately asks to expunge it, as if we haven’t all seen videos of him muttering far worse under his breath on the mound.
The sequence never changes. While his netminding peers might kick back on the crossbar and casually slug from a water bottle, or head to the bench to chat up teammates, Avalanche goalie Pavel Francouz always begins every television timeout with a practiced ritual.
First he skates to his right along the goal line, stopping in line with the faceoff dot and dropping onto his knees in a butterfly position. He sits back, head down, and stretches for a bit. Next he goes through a visualization exercise, shifting his body as he pictures saving invisible shots. When this is done, he rises up, shakes his legs, shrugs his shoulders, works his neck, and takes a few deep breaths. Finally, he stands motionless and stares ahead, a masked mannequin for one … three … five seconds, paying no mind to the arena buzz around him.
“I’m trying to shut off and not think about anything connected with the game, have a little chill time and reset,” Francouz says. The whole thing doesn’t last long before he glides back, typically arriving as the ice crew finishes shoveling his crease. But it’s still an important tool for Francouz to manage the topsy-turvy emotions inflicted on his position. “I’m just trying to stay calm,” he says. “Of course there are some inner battles in me, but I’m trying to not show it.”
Playing at academy level is the ambition of any young footballer, a chance to impress, turn professional and enjoy the subsequent riches. The reality though, is harsh.
Football clubs see players as assets. They are judged on what value they can bring to the club, whether it be monetary or performance. This is a system that impacts football all the way down to the lower leagues.
League Two side Exeter City have made over 5 million pounds since 2015 in fees gained from selling prospects on to bigger clubs. Some would consider this a success story, a lower league club competing with high spending Premier League regulars in the production of talent, but the fallout is damaging.
As the number of academies grow so does the number of youngsters who enter a system with a 99% failure rate. Each year hundreds are released amongst different age groups without the skills that will help them succeed outside of football.
“It’s (sports competition) starting earlier. There seems to be a feeling among players and even parents that if their child doesn’t start at this time they’re going to be behind, and they won’t be able to catch up,” said Elizabeth Bohl, women’s volleyball coach at Bloomer High School.
“With organized youth leagues being a booming business, that also creates issues with the amount of travel that you have fourth-, fifth-, sixth-grade teams doing and the cost becomes an issue for some families where they can’t participate as they would have years back,” she said.
Bohl also pointed to burnout among young athletes.
“The number of multi-sport athletes that I’ve seen in my tenure at Bloomer I think has declined. We used to share a lot of softball, basketball, volleyball type athletes, and we don’t as much anymore.”
Chris Branscome is adamant. The biggest reason kids have stopped playing youth soccer in our region is that it just isn’t fun. Imagine that, the chance to go outside and run around, hang with friends, kick a ball in the fresh air and perhaps develop a lifelong desire to remain fit doesn’t bring enjoyment anymore. “In almost every survey that’s done, the lead reference just about every time is that it’s not fun,” says Branscome, CEO of Eastern Pennsylvania Youth Soccer. “Kids say they don’t like the yelling they hear or the pressure they get from parents and even coaches.”
Branscome notes that there are about 122,000 children participating in youth soccer programs in the eastern half of the state, down from 130,000 a decade ago and 150,000 some 15-20 years prior to that. The national numbers on sports participation aren’t any more encouraging. A 2019 survey conducted by Utah State University and the Aspen Institute in Washington, D.C., revealed that kids play only three years of sports, on average. Many quit by age 11. In 2018, only 38 percent of kids ages 6-12 played team sports on a regular basis, down from 45 percent 10 years earlier.
Alabama head coach Nick Saban announced the hiring of David Ballou as the Crimson Tide’s Director of Sports Performance and Dr. Matt Rhea as the Director of Performance Science.
“Just as with any other area, we feel that it is imperative that we adopt and integrate advancements in the field of strength and conditioning that will provide elite training, while better protecting our players from injuries and helping them develop and perform at a higher level,” Saban said. “Our program has been working toward these type of advancements with the development and construction of our own sports science center, and with the addition of David and Matt, we believe our student-athletes will be better equipped to reach their goals for many years to come.”
The three-times World Cup-winning centre-back Christie Pearce Rampone described Dawn Scott as “the secret to everything” and the Ballon d’Or winner Megan Rapinoe, asked how she felt about losing USA’s high-performance coach to England, shed tears.
For those who have worked with Scott, she is simply the best. Now, after nine years in the States, the South Shields-born sports scientist is working for the Lionesses, aiming to unseat her former team from the top of the game. Scott won two World Cups and an Olympic gold medal with USA but switched sides at the end of last year and faces her former employers in her first game with England in the SheBelieves Cup on Thursday.
… This workshop will bring together statisticians, mathematicians, clinicians and data scientists to tackle emerging and existing problems in health research. Specifically, the overarching goal is to present the real-world clinical questions, existing state-of-the-art methods and build scientifically-aware analytical groups dedicated to answering the most important scientific problems in health applications of wearable and implantable computing. This workshop is a timely event to capitalize on this momentum.
Objective: To summarize risk factors for injury in elite women’s soccer.
Methods: Ten electronic databases were searched for studies that explored risk factors for injury in elite women soccer players. Study cohorts were required to consist of adult (?18 years) elite players defined as ‘the best performers in their country in a certain sport who are competing at national or international levels’ [1]. Two reviewers independently assessed articles for eligibility. The CASP checklist was used for quality assessment of included studies, and the Oxford Center of Evidence-Based Medicine guidelines were used to determine their level of evidence.
Results: Eight studies were included in this review. Findings indicated an association between an increased injury risk and previous injury and increased joint laxity. There is additional evidence to support a relationship between injuries and higher soccer exposure, playing position, increased BMI, low H/Q ratio, player’s level of balance and co-ordination, as well as various psychological issues. However, there were conflicting findings for the effect of postural control. Individual differences in Q-angle, intercondylar notch width or pelvic width measurements were not found to be associated with injury. The incidence of injury was higher in the dominant limb.
Conclusion: The risk of injury in elite female soccer players is multifactorial, complex, and associated with a range of intrinsic, and extrinsic factors. More high-quality studies are needed to investigate each identified risk factor in order to inform effective injury screening.
At the 2020 U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials, the women’s field (all of which had to run under a 2:45:00 to qualify) was double the size of the men’s. Currently, there are more women participating in the sport of running than men, especially on the roads. Despite strong female representation at every level of the sport, the research on sports medicine for women specifically remains startlingly low.
The 9 research paper finalists and 11 posters for the research-paper competition at the 2020 MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference have been announced.
British Journal of Sports Medicine; Jane S Thornton, Preston Wiley, Andrew Pipe from
… As more laboratory data roll in and theoretical frameworks roll out, we should ask ourselves the fundamental question, ‘Yes, but does it matter?’ Are we moving the needle on physical inactivity? Are we pushing the edges of sport, including who can and should participate? This issue has been curated by the Canadian Academy of Sport and Exercise Medicine (CASEM) and we explore the answers to some of those questions. [full text]
njuries occur when an athlete performs a greater amount of activity than what their body can withstand. To maximize the positive effects of training while avoiding injuries, athletes and coaches need to determine safe activity levels. The International Olympic Committee has recommended using the acute:chronic workload ratio (ACWR) to monitor injury risk and has provided thresholds to minimize risk when designing training programs. However, there are several limitations to the ACWR and how it has been analyzed which impact the validity of current recommendations and should discourage its use. This review aims to discuss previously published and novel challenges with the ACWR, and strategies to improve current analytical methods. In the first part of this review, we discuss challenges inherent to the ACWR. We explain why using a ratio to represent changes in activity may not always be appropriate. We also show that using exponentially weighted moving averages to calculate the ACWR results in an initial load problem, and discuss their inapplicability to sports where athletes taper their activity. In the second part, we discuss challenges with how the ACWR has been implemented. We cover problems with discretization, sparse data, bias in injured athletes, unmeasured and time-varying confounding, and application to subsequent injuries. In the third part, conditional on well-conceived study design, we discuss alternative causal-inference based analytical strategies that may avoid major flaws in studies on changes in activity and injury occurrence.