Applied Sports Science newsletter – August 6, 2020

… The Athletes Unlimited Volleyball League announced Thursday it has reached an agreement with the city to play its 2021 season at Municipal Auditorium Feb. 26-April 4.

It will be the women’s pro indoor league’s inaugural season, and Municipal Auditorium will serve as the bubble due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’ve been working with Athletes Unlimited for the last six to eight months to announce this — something unique, something different and something cool for Nashville,” said Butch Spyridon, President and CEO of the Nashville Convention and Visitors Corp. “We want to build on being named the best sports city in the country in 2019 (by Sports Business Journal) and for a change we’ll get to shine a spotlight on female athletes along with the city, so we’re really pleased with that opportunity.”

Milwaukee Bucks guards Eric Bledsoe and Pat Connaughton will miss their second consecutive games on Sunday night against the Houston Rockets.

Despite getting up and down the court for 5-on-5 action during practices, both players will remain out as they as they continue to work themselves back into game shape after testing positive for the coronavirus.

… “My dad, when I was young, he always inspired me,” Wilson told ESPN. “He used to always ask me the question, ‘Son, why not you? Why don’t you play pro baseball? Why don’t you play pro football?’ The idea of ‘Why not you?’ was really at the center of who I was. I started really subconsciously and consciously asking myself that question.”

Here’s a look at some reasons we may want to take athlete height into account

… Teams have their own set of protocols for players, although some conferences will require different guidelines during the season. On Tuesday, Louisville began practice with face coverings on.

Louisville head coach Scott Satterfield said there is a long list of protocols the team, led by trainer Matt Summers, is following.

“There’s a lot we put into place. We meet on this so much. There’s a lot we do,” Satterfield said.

Human movement occurs through contraction of the basic unit of the muscle cell, the sarcomere. Sarcomeres have long been considered to be arranged end-to-end in series along the length of the muscle into tube-like myofibrils with many individual, parallel myofibrils comprising the bulk of the muscle cell volume. Here, we demonstrate that striated muscle cells form a continuous myofibrillar matrix linked together by frequently branching sarcomeres. We find that all muscle cells contain highly connected myofibrillar networks though the frequency of sarcomere branching goes down from early to late postnatal development and is higher in slow-twitch than fast-twitch mature muscles. Moreover, we show that the myofibrillar matrix is united across the entire width of the muscle cell both at birth and in mature muscle. We propose that striated muscle force is generated by a singular, mesh-like myofibrillar network rather than many individual, parallel myofibrils. [full text]

Dallas Innovates is highlighting the local startups in MassChallenge Texas’ summer cohort, which aims to make the state the best in the world to start and scale a business. First up is Articulate Labs, which develops wearable devices to accelerate muscle strengthening and training throughout everyday activity.

Imagine shouting at an animal and telling from the returning echo whether it’s a dog or a horse. A team of scientists has pulled off the photographic equivalent of that trick: They teased out a 3D image of a scene by timing the reflections of light onto a simple detector. Known as temporal imaging, the new technique demonstrates the power of a type of artificial intelligence called machine learning to unearth patterns in what appears to be mere noise.

“It’s really surprising to me that they can get anything out of this system because there’s absolutely not enough information coming out of it,” says Laura Waller, a computer scientist and electrical engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, who was not involved in the work. “That just shows the ability of machine learning to solve things that seem unsolvable.”

… Now, a month away from the scheduled kickoff of the 2020 football season, [Catherine] Clawson is spending most of his time at Wake’s football facilities, sleeping in his office and keeping in touch with Catherine by phone.

“Coaching 110 to 120 players with a staff of 50, how could I go home at night and tell my wife there was no way I came in contact with COVID-19?” Clawson said. “I’m sure that college football will have requirements, and people will get tested, but it doesn’t mean that the day before or the day after you didn’t have contact with the virus.”

… [Abby] Wambach thinks a lot about how often she taped up her ankles before playing, without ever worrying about her brain. She was a physically bruising striker who, at 5-foot-11, towered over defenses and, remarkably, scored more goals with her head than her feet. She headed the ball constantly. She was forever putting her head into the fray — sometimes suffering cheap shots, too.

The science now shows that, long-term, a series of blows to the head that aren’t full-on concussions can still collectively amount to the same kind of damage.

“I can’t speculate how many micro-concussions or head impacts I took, but I do know that it’s probably in the hundreds of times,” Wambach says. “I think about it now and I’m like, ‘God, that feels like such a stupid thing to have done for so many years.’ But it’s where I made a living.”

… “The athletes can do everything right; the coaches can do everything right, but when the community spread around them is so high, that bubble just isn’t going to stand up,” said Travis Glenn, a professor of environmental health science at the University of Georgia. “It just isn’t. So that’s the problem.”

The rate of community transmission is an initial concern.

“I think I was much more hopeful earlier in the year (for college football), that we would have a little bit more manageable control,” said Christina Proctor, a clinical assistant professor and colleague of Glenn’s in the College of Public Health at UGA. “And now that things have gotten worse, I’m very worried that it’s not going to happen. And I’m an avid fan.”

… Newcomers to MLS have probably grown accustomed to the DOOP squad being a team to be reckoned with. But you don’t have to be too old to remember when they were synonymous with frustration and recrimination. It was just over five years ago that Union fans held a pregame funeral for their own team’s season – IN MAY – complete with a coffin.

Here are four signposts on Philly’s journey from here to there.

… One week of jumping through the NFL’s preventative hoops inside team facilities has been interesting, if not repetitive. One team employee called it “Groundhog Day.” Another compared the rigid set of protocols and reliance on technology “like living in ‘Blade Runner’ or ‘The Island’.” Not to mention a dash of George Orwell’s dystopian “1984,” thanks to GPS trackers that log contact between employees and constantly monitor whether they’re keeping a proper distance from each other.

“They track you through walls, too,” one team employee said. “We have a lot of temporary walls up now because of the COVID layout, and sometimes you’ll be by yourself and your tracker lights up because you’re sitting or standing too close to someone who is on the other side of a wall. We’re not even in the same room.”

When high schools cut athletes from sports teams, it can be painful for those who didn’t make the team.

But it also has wider implications, according to research from UW kinesiology graduate student Mayrena Hernandez. Larger schools seem to cut more athletes than smaller schools, she found, which led female high school volleyball athletes to specialize in their sport, focusing on it year-round instead of playing multiple sports.

“My research showed that female high school volleyball athletes from schools that cut/larger schools were more likely to be highly specialized, participate in club volleyball, summer volleyball camps, summer college camps, and be a single sport athlete,” she said.

As local governments go to war over whether high schools can open, the fate of the fall sports season hangs in the balance.

The state of play: The National Federation of State High School Associations has offered a 16-page guide to help states resume athletics, but with so many organizations and school districts involved, there has been little uniformity.

The majority of states have announced delays or postponements for some or all fall sports, while 15 are still planning to hold normal fall sports seasons.

Why it matters: Whether seasons start as scheduled, get delayed or move to 2021, high school athletes will be impacted in myriad ways.