… “The last update I got was that the Orlando proposal came to us, we reviewed it as players, and we went back to the league with some of the concerns we had and some of the ideas we had to make the proposal better,” Besler said on The Border Patrol. “This was four or five days ago and I have not heard any updates.”
Dialogue between MLS and the players union has been prolonged due to the fact that each club must gather information from its own players before providing feedback to the union. Because players are continuing to isolate amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, simple locker room meetings that were once an everyday staple can no longer take place. Instead, dozens of phone calls and Zoom meetings are required among players to come to certain decisions. [audio, 21:45]
Celtics forward Grant Williams is accustomed to having roommates.
It was only a year ago that the 21-year-old rookie was sharing living space as a college student during his final season at the University of Tennessee.
So when Celtics teammate Kemba Walker invited Williams to join him at his home in Charlotte, North Carolina, shortly after the NBA went on its pandemic hiatus, Williams jumped at the offer.
“It’s been amazing,” Williams said. “Just hanging out, relaxing, being able to get to know each other better as well as work out together. We’re here, we’re isolating on our own means. … It was just a great decision.”
The Telegram (Ottawa, ON), PostMedia News, Bruce Garrioch from
… “We have a program that we can send out for online and it’s got a prescription of what we think that individual should do and it’s (accompanied with) video,” Schwarz said in a telephone interview Tuesday morning. “They all have programs or they have their own trainers that they’re with for the summer that we might work together with or we might say, ‘You know what they have is good and that’s going to transition you properly into what you’re going to do in another month or two if we don’t end up playing.’
“The balancing act here is, how good a shape do we stay in knowing that even though we’re not one of the teams in the playoffs so we could end up playing later on.? There might be a gap right now that we don’t know about. We used to know that we’re done for the season, maybe we didn’t make the playoffs, we’d have a couple of weeks off and then I’d know in 16-to-18 weeks we have to get a guy ready.
Over the years, a certain type of hypothetical has become a common discussion topic among youth development folks in the US and Canada: What if the next Lionel Messi is growing up somewhere off the beaten path in North America, say rural Nebraska or Manitoba, or in a blue-collar neighborhood like El Paso or Fresno?
Set aside for a moment the reality that there probably won’t be another Messi on this planet anytime soon – the overwhelming size, scope and diversity of this continent poses very real problems for talent identification and player development, deep challenges that remain even after many millions of dollars have been spent by MLS, the two national federations and myriad others working to spot and cultivate the player pool.
… “You’re pretty much just looking for the heaviest thing around,” said Oklahoma State WR Tylan Wallace, one of the top wide receiver prospects for the 2021 draft. “At one point, I was trying to lift a 40-pound box of cat litter.”
Utah quarterback Jake Bentley, who transferred from South Carolina and will draw attention from NFL scouts this fall, constructed his own barbell rack out of lumber. According to Baylor strength coach Corey Campbell, Bears linebacker Michael McNair did the same.
American Chemical Society, Industry Matters newsletter from
For David Mackanic, energy is everything. It motivates him and drives him in everything from entrepreneurship to running ultra-marathons.
Mackanic, founder of Anthro Energy, began graduate school with one broad motivation—to create new technologies that could improve renewable energy storage.
Anthro Energy is an early-stage startup with a mission to create safe, flexible and high-performance batteries for wearable technologies. You might have seen an article floating around social media with the latest stretchable battery he and fellow Stanford researchers have been working on.
Smart scales are nothing new. Step on one of these, and your weight data will magically find its way to a corresponding app on your mobile device or web dashboard. Using the app or dashboard, you can then track your progress over time. But its 2020 and that’s not nearly enough.
Lumen is a unique pocket-sized device that wants to reinvent weight management by monitoring your metabolism and providing a customised nutrition plan. And it does all this by measuring the level of CO2 in your breath.
NBA players are taking all the training tips they learned from years of experience to mobile devices around the world.
The union that represents NBA players has signed a global partnership with Famer, a mobile sports coaching and mentoring platform that in the coming months will enable the athletes and their trainers to share custom training videos with kids and their parents. That part is free.
For an additional cost, however, users will also be able to upload their own videos and receive direct feedback from the players. The company and players would share that revenue.
The NBPA Training Ground, as the virtual program will be called, will be presented by Spalding. Its launch next week will include participation from a handful of players, including Aaron Gordon of the Orlando Magic and Andre Drummond of the Cleveland Cavaliers, as well as trainers whose clients are professional athletes.
IU researchers have demonstrated that a fabric with an electric field kills coronaviruses—and their discovery could revolutionize the future of personal protective equipment.
People with anterior cruciate ligament injuries can lose up to 40% of the muscle strength in the affected leg––with muscle atrophy remaining a big problem even after ACL reconstruction and physical therapy.
Now, a new University of Michigan study in rats challenges conventional wisdom about which exercises are most beneficial during post-injury physical therapy, and findings suggest that adding eccentric exercises could dramatically increase muscle volume and improve outcomes for patients.
The sports drinks category continues to grow and evolve, with brands investing in the research and development of healthier products with functional ingredients. Data from Mordor Intelligence indicates that the global sports drink market will grow at a 4.5% CAGR through 2024. While North America will be the largest market for sports drinks during the forecast period, Asia Pacific is expected to be the fastest-growing market.1 Here are some of the latest trends driving growth and innovation in the sports drinks market.
Esports Drinks Go Smart
Jim Tonkin, founder and president of Healthy Brand Builders (Scottsdale, AZ), says Esports drinks are now adopting smarter ingredients with functional properties. Says Tonkin: “The gamer space is a burgeoning part of the young adult market, especially Millennials and Generation Z in the 15-to-30 age range. A big part of that space is brain-health ingredients. These ingredients, whether pharmacological or supplement, are finding their way into ingredient profiles for sports drinks.”
… “Scouting since the suspension of matches has been limited to past performances by video, which helps to refine analysis but it doesn’t further what you know,” a Premier League recruitment staffer told The Independent.
“The risk with signings is now higher than ever, not only in a financial sense, but also an information perspective. You are not entirely sure what a player’s physical condition is given the months without action and how their bodies will react to matches.
Growing up near Montreal in Canada, Sam Gregory’s life revolved around soccer. “I played. I refereed. I coached,” he recalls. “I was totally obsessed with it.” He also cared about team statistics. But he never saw himself finding a career that married the two. Today, he’s a data scientist for Sportlogiq in Montreal. He and his colleagues analyze data — numbers, really — on soccer, ice hockey and other team sports.
Gregory was one of many kids who grew up loving team sports. Most didn’t realize that math helped decide who would play on their favorite team. Or that it guided how players would train and what equipment they might use. Of course, teams don’t call it “math.” To them, it’s sports analytics, team stats or digital technology. But all those terms describe numbers that can be crunched, compared or tallied.
Data scientists like Gregory often focus on team performance. They might measure ratios of wins to losses or runs batted in. The numbers might be games played without an injury or goals per time on the field.
Background In individual sports, the effect that injuries have on an athlete’s performance, success and financial profit is implicit. In contrast, the effect of a single player’s injury or one player’s absence in team sports is much more difficult to quantify, both from the performance perspective and the financial perspective.
Objectives In this study, we attempted to estimate the effect of injuries on the performance of football teams from the English Premier League (EPL), and the financial implications derived from this effect.
Methods Our analysis is based on data regarding game results, injuries and estimations of the players’ financial value for the 2012–2013 through the 2016–2017 seasons.
Results We found a statistically significant relationship (r=−0.46, 95% CI −0.6 to 0.28, p=0.001) between the number of days out due to injuries suffered by team members during a season and the place difference between their actual and expected finish in the EPL table (according to overall player value). Moreover, we can interpolate that approximately 136 days out due to injury causes a team the loss of one league point, and that approximately 271 days out due to injury costs a team one place in the table. This interpolation formula is used as a heuristic model, and given the relationship specified above accounts for a significant portion of the variance in league placement (21%), the remaining variance is related to other factors. Calculating the costs of wage bills and prize money, we estimate that an EPL team loses an average of £45 million sterling due to injury-related decrement in performance per season.
Conclusion Professional football clubs have a strong economic incentive to invest in injury prevention and rehabilitation programmes.
Making Sense Of: Researching Athletes, Preserving Privacy
Differential privacy is technology that anonymizes personal data. It helps to make public data sets usable for analysts, while maintaining secure privacy for the human subjects who could otherwise have their personal information revealed. Larger study populations, which would not exist without differential privacy, stand to dramatically improve the quality of sports science research, enabling far greater detail in the hows and whys of athletes’ abilities and performances.
Personal health data and privacy is currently an ethical quagmire. HIPAA rules are subject to federal laws that impose significant penalties when organizations fail to keep personal health information private. Meanwhile, wearable technology generates enormous amounts of data. Sometimes the data is personal health data subject to HIPAA, and sometimes it isn’t. My understanding is that if you have collected personal data with wearable technology and then uploaded your data to a cloud storage resource using a publicly available service (basically, you’ve synced your sport watch to its companion app), then you have forgone your expectation of HIPAA privacy protection. HIPAA generally applies to doctor-patient medical interactions where data is collected, stored and accessed in private circumstances. Sorry for the clear-as-mud explanation. It’s complicated.
What of sports teams who use athlete management systems? I’ve seen presentations where athletes’ data is referenced. The athletes’ are not named but it quickly becomes a guessing game to identify the specific athlete behind the data. When that happens in a collegiate setting the privacy breach can be subject to institutional research review which oversees tight control over human subjects’ data. Universities’ human subjects review boards are powerful and serious-minded groups at American research universities. Athletic departments are foolish not to fall in line with the on-campus research ethics policies. Non-academic sports organizations are well-served by establishing the same kind of governance for their athletes’ data management. Government rules about personal data are uncertain, but organizational leadership does not have to be.
Getting started with differential privacy should be helped by a new Microsoft product called WhiteNoise. Hopefully the launch of supported, usable products eases the to-be-expected hassle that comes with adopting new software. Keep in mind that long-term, long-scale effort is what’s needed grow a valuable data resource. This is an investment that takes time.
Ten years ago the UK government’s Medical Research Council and the philanthropic Wellcome Medical Trust started the UK Biobank, a resource linking genetic profiles and detailed health records for 500,000 UK citizens. It has become a crucial resource for researchers around the world. And it is giving the UK a major leg up on understanding of the spread of Covid-19 in the country.
The last point I want to make is how big data resources can remake communities of research. Prominent psychologists argue that “team science” is an under-utilized strategy among social scientists who would benefit from the approach’s efficiency, resources and improved reproducibility. Investigations that rely on big data resources are prone to highly variable results when the studies are similar, but lack coordination.
Get (or stay) organized. Make sure of ethical oversight. Both steps help with the adoption of differential privacy and, in turn, help to grow the size and scale of sports science research.