Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 4, 2020

… Called the WE League, for women’s empowerment, the new organization will initially consist of six to 10 teams and will kick off in the fall of 2021. The league’s round-robin format will include home and away games between each of the teams. … “Our aim is to contribute to build a sustainable society through promoting female social participation and enhancing diversities and choices. How we contribute to the society through sports is an important mission for all of us in the sports world,” he said in a statement Wednesday. “We will work to establish the career of women’s professional footballer, which is the dream of many girls, and further promote women’s empowerment and solve social issues.”

The English top-flight will resume after three months away on June 17, but its players are risking serious injury given the lack of preparation

Premier League medical staff are about to be busier than they have ever been.

With top-flight football in England set to resume on June 17, the race to get players fit and ready for the restart is well and truly on.

This week saw a major step forward, with clubs voting unanimously to return to full-contact training after a break of more than 10 weeks. Smiles all round, from players to coaching staff.

The U.S. Soccer Federation released return-to-play guidelines for youth soccer from COVID-19, recommending a phased approach with individual and small-group trainings to start and no travel tournaments in different regions even once games can resume.

The guidelines are the most detailed recommendations produced by a national organization for soccer, which is one of the most popular sports for youth in the U.S., with 2.2 million kids ages 6-12 playing the sport in 2018. U.S. Soccer, the national governing body for the sport, says its guidelines are intended for consideration by national and state soccer associations, clubs, players, coaches, referees and parents, while always deferring to local and state public health authorities on specific modifications.

Maybe the debilitating effects of chronic overtraining syndrome are in your muscles after all, not your head or your hormones

The objective of this study was to determine the relationship between adolescents’ participation in various interscholastic sports and differences in bone strength outcomes. Subjects (N = 380) were recruited from the Iowa Bone Development Study and categorized based on sport participation into 3 power groups: no-power, low-power, and high-power. Sports such as basketball, cheerleading/poms, gymnastics, volleyball, track, football, tennis, and soccer were considered high-power. Peripheral quantitative computed tomography (pQCT) was used to determine bone measures of polar stress-strain index (measure of torsion strength), cortical content (measure of cortical bone size and area at the 66% tibia site), and bone strength index (measure of compression strength based on total bone density and area at the 4% tibia site). Adjusted pairwise comparison for group least squares means high-power sport participation compared with no-power sport participation showed significant differences in all bone strength outcomes for both men and women (p value < 0.01). There was a significant difference in all bone strength measures between low-power and no-power groups for men (p value < 0.05), but not women. Because of decreasing levels of physical activity in late adolescence, the promotion of high-power sports may be particularly important for optimal bone development in the final years before peak bone mass.

Purpose: To investigate the effectiveness of different individualization methods of speed zones during match play to estimate postmatch perceptual recovery in soccer.

Methods: Twelve players under the age of 19 y undertook field-based assessments to determine their maximal aerobic speed (MAS) and maximal sprint speed (MSS). External load (extracted from 10-Hz GPS over 10 official matches) was measured and classified into 4 categories as follows: low-speed running, moderate-speed running, high-speed running, and sprinting. Match running distribution into different speed zones was categorized using either MAS, MSS, MAS and MSS as measures of locomotor capacities, and absolute values. Players perceived recovery status was recorded immediately postmatch (Post) and 24 (G+24H) and 48 hours (G+48H) after each game.

Results: Different individualization methods resulted in distinct match outputs in each locomotor category. Perceived recovery status was lower (P < .001) at Post (3.8 [1.32], 95% confidence interval [CI], 3.6 to 4.2), G+24H (5.2 [1.48], 95% CI, 4.9 to 5.6), and G+48H (6.0 [1.22], 95% CI, 5.7 to 6.3) compared with prematch values (7.1 [1.05], 95% CI, 6.8 to 7.3). The absolute perceived recovery-status score was better associated with high-speed running using the locomotor-capacities method at Post (β = -1.7, 95% CI, -3.2 to -0.22, P = .027), G+24H (β = -2.08, 95% CI, -3.22 to -0.95, P = .001), and G+48H (β = -1.32, 95% CI, -2.2 to -0.4, P = .004) compared with other individualization methods. Conclusion: The authors’ results suggest that locomotor capacities may better characterize the match intensity distribution (particularly for the high-speed running and sprinting categories) and should be preferred over MAS and MSS to estimate perceived recovery.

… When U.S. Soccer shuttered its development academy, it eliminated the competitive platform used by hundreds of the country’s top soccer clubs. MLS took this as an opportunity to absorb the displaced athletes into a combination of its own elite youth programs and existing soccer clubs.

MLS announced May 13 that 65 former U.S. Soccer Development Academy clubs will join with its academies in a player development partnership involving the United States and Canada.

“The plan is to make it better and time will tell,” said Onalfo. “But the plan has been implemented to make it better and honestly my mission and my job is to make our club be the best we can and that is my primary focus.”

… Since mid-March, children worldwide have been forced to social distance and abide by stay-at-home orders. This has contributed to an abrupt stop to something that Shawn Borzelleri deems as imperative to youth development: normalcy.

“I don’t know that all kids necessarily understand that this doesn’t stop,” Borzelleri, the YMCA of the USA’s senior vice president of service delivery, program development, and innovation, said. “When our most vulnerable communities are probably at higher risk of not having an outlet of positive role models, they could have additional post-traumatic stress from some of this because they are used to a routine and activity, and this is part of their norm. We’ve had to figure out how do we, just like every other industry, figure out how to engage with those kids?”

Catering to millions of youth sports players nationwide has led the Y to transition to digital training.

… People are often systematically underconfident and don’t take chances that would be successful. We may stay home when it’s safe to go outside (provided we maintain a safe distance from others, wear a mask, and so forth). Likewise, post-pandemic, we may decline to talk to strangers who might turn into friends or avoid investments that could pay off handsomely. Our children may avoid entering an essay contest or decline a more challenging math class, either because they lowball their odds of succeeding or exaggerate the consequences of failing.

But there are also circumstances in which people are systematically overconfident. We all know people who discount the risks posed by Covid-19. My 84-year-old mother, for instance, would have happily continued taking meals with all her friends had her retirement home not closed the dining hall. And it’s common to routinely overestimate how much we can get done, winding up with a to-do list longer than any mortal could accomplish on schedule.

So how do you balance the risks of underconfidence and overconfidence?

Athletes are exposed to many stressors that can increase injury and illness risk and cause excessive fatigue. These include physical workload, sleep loss, travel, and psychological stress.

Two synergistic approaches to blood biomarker analysis in sport, profiling and monitoring, offer an opportunity to gain insight into an athlete’s nutritional and physiological status.These approaches may help to avoid overtraining, injury and illness when combined with other contextual information.

Common problems that can be identified via blood test data include: poor vitamin D and iron status, low energy availability, persistent inflammation, persistent oxidative stress, and decreased hormonal drive.

Vision-based monocular human pose estimation, as one of the most fundamental and challenging problems in computer vision, aims to obtain posture of the human body from input images or video sequences. The recent developments of deep learning techniques have been brought significant progress and remarkable breakthroughs in the field of human pose estimation. This survey extensively reviews the recent deep learning-based 2D and 3D human pose estimation methods published since 2014. This paper summarizes the challenges, main frameworks, benchmark datasets, evaluation metrics, performance comparison, and discusses some promising future research directions.

This situation likely sounds familiar to parents: You want your child to eat a healthy array of fruits and vegetables. But your kid is more interested in crackers, chips, and other processed snacks. So you find yourself disguising grated veggies in baked treats, or artfully arranging fruits in rainbows.

Now Michal Maimaran, a research associate professor of marketing at Kellogg, and her colleagues have hit upon a new technique that parents can add to their toolbox.

The researchers found that if kids didn’t already have strong preferences for the foods being offered, they often chose to try a couple of different options rather than just one. And children tended to pick a wider variety of options, including more fruit, when asked to select all their snacks for the week ahead of time, compared to when choosing one each day.

In a recent post, we defined three key attributes of a concept we call Serious Data Science: Credibility, Agility and Durability. In this post, we’ll drill into the challenge of delivering credible insights to your stakeholders, and how to address that challenge.

Ultimately, organizations use data science to discover valuable insights and then apply those insights intelligently. Such applications might include making a better decision, improving a process, or otherwise changing how things are usually done. However, to make this happen, the organization must do at least two things:

Communicate these insights to the right decision-maker, stakeholder, or system (we’ll talk more about that in our next Serious Data Science post on being Agile).

Convince decision makers to trust the insight and accept its implications. If decision makers lack this trust, then they will likely ignore the recommendation, and fall back on “the way we’ve always done things.”

… Altman says there are two main ways in which the platform liberates football analytics. The first is its price point, which means “advanced analytics based on models of the entire game are available to absolutely anyone who wants them for the first time.”

The premium option is $5 a month, while Altman argues that even the free tier offers “a huge amount of utility” and has “thousands and thousands of users.”

The second big liberator is the platform’s transparency, he says.

“There is an FAQ section on the site that explains exactly how the algorithms work. It doesn’t give every single formula, because we have to keep some of our intellectual property for ourselves, but you really understand heuristically how everything works.

At the player level, your draft slot & pre-draft evals follow you into your 30s. Also not a meritocracy.