Applied Sports Science newsletter – June 15, 2020

On the cusp of hundreds of millions of dollars in contract extensions, several of the NBA’s top young stars had a Friday call with National Basketball Players Association officials about the possibility of league-financed insurance policies to protect against career-threatening injuries in the bubble restart in Orlando, sources tell ESPN.

Miami’s Bam Adebayo, Sacramento’s De’Aaron Fox, the Los Angeles Lakers’ Kyle Kuzma, Utah’s Donovan Mitchell and Boston’s Jayson Tatum — five players with significant star and earning power — talked with executive director Michele Roberts and senior counsel Ron Klempner about the NBPA facilitating talks with the league on possible insurance allowances for players, sources said.

… Norway’s Toppserein is the biggest Aussie attraction. Tameka Yallop could return for her fourth season there with Klepp IL. While her arrival in Norway has yet to be confirmed she is still listed on the Norwegian FA’s as part of the Klepp 2020 squad.

Two young Australians are in confirmed to be in Norway for their first overseas seasons abroad. Teagan Micah signed with Anja-Bjornar in March while Karly Roestbakken joined LSK Kvinner last month.

Two seasoned veterans could also play Toppserien football in 2020. Clare Polkinghorne and Katrina Gorry both signed with Avaldnes IL in January, adding Europe to their overseas resumé after having previously played in both Japan and America. (The Women’s Game was unable to confirm whether they have joined Avaldnes IL ).

… It’s not an excuse, but when you think about it, of all the sports, we got unlucky with the timing of how this worked out — it seems like it’s a lot more complicated for baseball.

The NBA and the NHL got pretty much three-quarters of their seasons in before the virus happened. They can set themselves up in one or two sites for their playoff scenario and control everyone’s movement.

The NFL is still 2½ months away, so if everything goes well by then, football is going to be in a way better place to play. And football plays just one game a week, so that makes it a lot easier to control the week of practicing, stagger when people are in the facility, and maybe you could test everyone on Friday and keep them in a hotel until Sunday’s game. Then you’re only talking about being away from your family for Saturday and you go home Sunday after the game.

I am shocked how little I knew despite being an educator in a prominent US institution and a lifelong learner. Here are a few things I have learned in the book /THREAD

… “We had strength coaches, sports-medicine staff, physicians and facilities folks,” [Mark] Rountree said. “I think having that group discuss, ‘Hey, what do we think is safe, what do we think is appropriante in our facilities’ (was helpful). That’s how they came to that number.”

The group also included football assistant coach Chris Wiesehan, men’s basketball assistant coach Anthony Wilkins, football strength coach Lewis Caralla, sports-medicine director Carla Gilson, baseball player Hugh Chapman and 22 others from across the athletic department and institute, including doctors and members of the health-services department.

“I know there’s been moments that I’ve gone, ‘Wow, I’m glad we had that person on the committee,’ ” Rountree said. “Because, obviously, bringing in different points of view and bringing in a diverse group was very important for us.”

Coming into this abbreviated MLB Draft – which was a travesty, by the way – teams had a unique chance to take the bonus structure and the mix of talent and do some weird things. Yes, they missed out on a lot of lottery tickets in the seventh, seventeenth, thirty-sevenths rounds, but that’s what they are – hope. In the first ten, certain the first five, a team needs to get the most talent it possibly can.

But there’s something else. They have to develop that talent and that is something that people seem to forget.

Everyone has goals they’re striving to achieve, even during a global pandemic. Maybe you’re a scientist working around the clock to find a cure for COVID-19 (if so, thank you and good luck!). Or maybe you’re stuck working from home and pushing hard to hit 10,000 steps a day while confined to a small, urban living space. Whatever it is you’re striving to achieve, science shows you’re likely to push harder the closer you feel to the finish line. When researchers first speculated about this tendency, they called it the goal gradient hypothesis. And it turns out to have interesting implications not only for predicting when we’ll push ourselves the hardest, but also for marketers hoping to convince us to buy our next cup of coffee or take our next airline flight (at least, once we start flying again).

Oleg Urminsky, a professor of marketing at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, has been studying the goal gradient hypothesis since he was a doctoral student.

In video understanding, action spotting consists in temporally localizing human-induced events annotated with single timestamps. In this paper, we propose a novel loss function that specifically considers the temporal context naturally present around each action, rather than focusing on the single annotated frame to spot. We benchmark our loss on a large dataset of soccer videos, SoccerNet, and achieve an improvement of 12.8% over the baseline. We show the generalization capability of our loss for generic activity proposals and detection on ActivityNet, by spotting the beginning and the end of each activity. Furthermore, we provide an extended ablation study and display challenging cases for action spotting in soccer videos. Finally, we qualitatively illustrate how our loss induces a precise temporal understanding of actions and show how such semantic knowledge can be used for automatic highlights generation. [link to full text]

Mesenchymal stem cells (MSCs) are multipotent in that they naturally replenish the cell types that build our bone, cartilage and adipose tissues. However, their much broader regenerative potential, based on their capacity to migrate and engraft in injured tissues and secrete factors that enhance the formation of new blood vessels, suppress inflammation and cell death, and promote healing, makes them exquisite candidates for cell-based therapies for diseases as varied as cardiovascular, liver, bone and cartilage diseases, lung and spinal cord injuries, autoimmune diseases and even cancer and skin lesions.

MSCs provoke no or negligible adverse reactions in patients that receive them from healthy donors, and can be easily isolated from human tissues, expanded to clinical scales, biopreserved, and stored for point-of-care delivery. This efficiency in preparing medical grade MSCs contrasts with the relative inefficiency with which they currently can be delivered to target tissues in patients. Clinicians often need to administer massive numbers of MSCs with high precision to reach sufficient numbers of cells that successfully engraft and remain functional over time.

In theory, you could pull it off without a hitch: About 1,500 people test negative for the coronavirus — several times — before entering the NBA’s proposed “bubble” at the ESPN Wide World of Sports Complex in Orlando, Florida, they interact with almost no one else, and the league emerges three months later with 1,500 healthy people and one champion.

“If you have [1,500] people quarantined without contact with others, assuming none of them bring coronavirus into the bubble, then none of them will get it,” said Sandro Galea, an epidemiologist and dean at the Boston University School of Public Health. “In some respects, it is that simple.”

Really curious about the number of contacts these students had, when these tests occurred relative to arrival, and how often they were testing. And what about staff?

Ohio State football players and their parents were asked to sign an acknowledgement of risk waiver regarding the coronavirus pandemic before returning to campus for voluntary workouts on June 8, athletic director Gene Smith confirmed to ESPN on Sunday.

The “Buckeye Pledge,” obtained and reported by the Columbus Dispatch, asks players to “help stop the spread of the COVID-19” and accept “I may be exposed to COVID-19 and other infections.” By signing the two-page electronic pledge, players agree to testing and potential self-quarantining, monitoring for symptoms, reporting any potential exposure in a timely manner and to practice Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines, such as wearing a mask and practicing social distancing.

… In the UK, around one in three adults are obese and many more are overweight. In the US, around two in five adults and nearly one in five children are obese. From generalised government nutritional guidelines to Instagram-worthy fad diets, there’s no end of advice on how to lose weight. Clearly, it isn’t working.

This is a complex problem to unpick. Factors such as sex, ethnicity, socioeconomic status and availability of healthy food all play a part. But on an individual level, we still understand relatively little about how each person should eat to optimise their health and weight.

In search of answers, our research team at King’s College London together with our colleagues at Massachusetts General Hospital, Stanford University and health science company ZOE launched PREDICT, the largest ongoing nutritional study of its kind in the world. Our first results have now been published in Nature Medicine.

… No longer are athletes able to push forward and understand their value to the fullest extent without the use of technology and data. The information and significance it provides has been accepted by those at the highest levels of the game, and its utility continues to expand with increased investments of money and time.

To a process that was exclusively determined through anecdote and experience with minimal quantitative support, “New Data” provides a supplementary resource that bolsters the efforts, accuracy and strength of those in player evaluation. It is time that athletes and their representation start to understand the gravity of the situation and take the proper steps towards being prepared.