With one year to go until the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Games (once again), we’re launching our new site feature showcasing the selected climbers. On 4-7 August 2020, Sport Climbing was due to make its Olympic debut. In a historic move, the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in postponement of the event until 3-6 August 2021, resulting in mixed emotions for both confirmed athletes and those still fighting for a place.
The Philadelphia 76ers announced Thursday that guard/forward Ben Simmons is out after an MRI showed a subluxation of the patella in his left knee. The team said in its statement that “treatment options are currently being considered and further updates will be provided as appropriate.”
That language can sound ominous, particularly for Sixers fans who have seen their star players lost to injury several times over the last few years. With the team in the Orlando bubble and set to begin the playoff push in a little over a week, the question of when or if Simmons could return looms.
The Women's Game (Australia), Janakan Seemampillai from
… The 47-year-old has had widespread exposure to Australia’s football system, having been involved in junior and senior coaching for both men and women for more than a decade since retiring after a 20 year career as a player. At present he runs the Female Football Development (FFD) academy, a program he started in Brisbane last year following his departure from the Brisbane Roar, where he served as an assistant coach in the A-League for five years. The FFD program not only caters for girls who want to strengthen their technical football ability, but also develops female coaches.
“I started the program to allow players to do extra training outside of their clubs, its more technical stuff that enhances the ability of players by exposing them to more ball contact, so when they go back to their clubs and follow the curriculum, they will have the sufficient ball control required to play out of the back,” explains Aloisi. “But I am also mentoring young female coaches as part of the program, they get paid for it as well.
Indianapolis Star, Bloomington Herald-Times, Jon Blau from
… The pandemic wiped away many of Allen’s plans. IU was coming off of an eight-win season and returning a roster full of promising talent. Then a pandemic shortened spring practice, contributed to a start-and-stop of the team’s summer workouts in July, and continues to present so many unknowns.
“To be honest, there’s a frustration,” Allen said. “I’m a super organized guy that likes to have everything down. I love routines. I like things to have a rhythm. It was hard to get into a good rhythm. And as soon as we felt we got into a rhythm of doing things, then it got stopped.”
… Tempo’s machine learning algorithms help plan workouts tailored to an individual user’s progress. During live classes, instructors are notified when a user makes a mistake, enabling them to provide guidance in real time. To further motivate fitness enthusiasts, a live leaderboard allows them to compete with friends and others and to request personalized weight recommendations that take into account their overall experience level.
Tempo’s classes — which are available live and on-demand and are led by National Academy of Sports Medicine-certified trainers — combine traditional weight lifting with high-intensity training intervals (HIIT) for full-body workouts based on accepted sports science principles. Optional trainer-curated programs deliver a sequence of courses designed to target different muscle groups daily, while algorithms track progress to inform the system’s feedback features.
The version of Tempo’s software that will ship to early adopters can recognize bicep curls, seated shoulder presses, lunges, front squats, bent over rows, hammer curls, and other exercises while simultaneously collating data to show users how recent performances compared with past efforts. It’s powered by a data set captured by Tempo’s successor system, SmartSpot, which contains over 1 million tagged workout sessions.
New face biometrics and body temperature screening software and solutions for preventing the spread of COVID-19 have been launched by CyberLink, Mitrefinch, CompuLynx and DOCUmation. A deployment of similar technology has been carried out for commuter trains in Argentina, while researchers continue to work on early and asymptomatic detection of the disease.
CyberLink has added temperature scanning thermal camera capabilities to its biometric facial recognition software development kit (SDK) FaceMe to support the safe reopening of businesses.
Features for temperature scans, mask detection, contactless payments and logins and more are now available with FaceMe, which has been ranked in the top 20 in NIST’s Face Recognition Vendor Test. FaceMe is also able to identify people wearing masks, according to the announcement.
In the time BC—before COVID—digital and IRL workouts were like the David and Alexis Rose of the fitness world—constantly at odds with each other. Most people were either living room workout warriors or swore that they would never give up their gym memberships or studio passes. There were plenty of online-only offerings out there (Mirror, Obé, and Aaptiv, for example) but many major brands stayed true to their brick and mortar roots (Barry’s, for one). But as stay-at-home orders forced us all to embrace the practice of working out at home, it has paved the way for a future “omnichannel fitness”—in which brands have begun to offer fitness classes via both their online platforms and in brick and mortar locations—proving that it is possible for digital and IRL fitness to get along.
The world of drug-cheating in sports is set for major disruption with the formation of InsituGen, a start-up company which will supply anabolic drug testing kits developed at the University of Otago, New Zealand.
InsituGen is built on a collaboration comprising deep-tech investor Pacific Channel, and anabolic drug-detection technology created by Professor Alison Heather of the University of Otago. The company will equip established drug screening operators with kits which detect designer anabolics that current technology is not able to identify.
… Dr. Ginger Gilmore-Childress is the Director of Behavioral Medicine for the program.
With everyone in her department practicing social distancing, Gilmore-Childress went inside one of the behavioral health suites and discussed how student-athletes are tested. She said the main thing is about identifying student-athletes that may have mental or behavioral health issues, screen them, and get them the resources they need. Seeing where our world is currently with social and racial issues and the Coronavirus pandemic, Gilmore-Childress said there is a lot on the plate of student-athletes.
… In studies affected by low compliance, we believe that drawing a conclusion on the effect of an intervention may be misleading as low compliance may bias results if data are analysed according to the ITT principle.1 We encourage clinicians, coaches and athletes to take a sceptical, cautious step back when reading bombastic conclusions in the sports injury literature. Researchers should do their best to deal with low compliance during (1) study design, (2) data collection and (3) when analysing data from sports injury trials. As a part of a BJSM educational series on methods in randomised controlled trials (RCTs), we discuss here an alternative analytical approach to the ITT—‘instrumental variable (IV) analysis’.2
As the world of sports tries to deal with the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis and the racial reckoning at the same time, the West Coast Conference stepped forward with an unprecedented move Monday by requesting a racial and gender report card for its league.
I applaud the West Coast Conference and its commissioner, Gloria Nevarez, the first and only Latinx commissioner in Division I, for their boldness and leadership. It has made me even more determined to get other conferences to adopt their own racial and gender report cards and take other measures to lead to a more inclusive world of college sport.
247 Sporrts, HawgSports.com, Curtis Wilkerson from
… “On a recruiting aspect, the landscape has changed. It’s never going to look the same I don’t think,” Musselman said. “This virtual stuff is going to stick around, and I think that’s a good thing. I think you can educate people a little bit more on your program than just waiting for a visit. I think you can find out what is real and not real even before an official visit on campus.”
The most difficult obstacle college staffs are facing right now in terms of recruiting is getting solid, in-depth evaluations on the prospects that may shape the future of their programs. Watching film or live-stream is better than nothing, but the in person aspect is critical to player evaluation. With increased room for error, Musselman is taking a more pragmatic and patient approach to the recruiting process with the 2021 class.
In recent years, GAIN LINE Analytics has developed a unique metric, the Team Work Index (TWI®). The metric is used for measuring the quantity and intensity of linkages within a team. The higher the number, the more cohesive the team, the more likely the organisation is to enjoy sustained success in their specific field.
Put simply, the higher a sides Team Work Index and cohesion, the more unified the team, the more likely the club is to enjoy sustained on-field success and off-field stability.
The Team Work Index initially had three measures, ‘Internal Experience’, ‘External Experience’ and ‘Externally shared experience’. Since then, Ben Darwin, the founder, added more measures such as ‘Playing System’, ‘Combinations’ and ‘Skillsets’. This makes for a better and more robust metric.
When Marcelo Bielsa joined Leeds United in June 2018, the move surprised football. Club Chairman Andrea Radrizzani was evidently proud of the work done by Director of Football Victor Orta and CEO Angus Kinnear in securing the Argentinian legend on a two year deal, and was effusive in how he felt this piece of recruitment could help the club evolve.