Applied Sports Science newsletter – September 24, 2020

… “The bubble is so small that you’re going to run into other people from other teams, players, coaches, management. It’s unavoidable,” Calgary Flames forward Matthew Tkachuk said earlier in the playoffs. “Everyone wants to go watch each other’s games, too. It’s literally a youth hockey tournament. It’s pretty cool actually.”

At a youth hockey tournament, games can take a bit of a backseat to hoarding the sweetest offerings of the continental breakfast, hours on end at arcades, jumping in the pool over and over, and testing the limits of the hotel’s noise policy. For NHL players, the grown-up version of the youth tournament lifestyle has included some of the old staples from their younger days, such as pingpong, video game tournaments and movie nights. The Vegas Golden Knights’ famed “Fun Committee” played the role often reserved for the “cool dads” on the youth circuit, finding fun things for players to do.

That’s where there’s a big difference between the NHL’s playoff bubble and the youth tournaments of yesteryear.

… [Derek] Van Rheenen had marveled at Brown’s curiosity and drive to be challenged intellectually; to take a heavy course load that focused on race, poverty, inequality, social injustice; to surround himself with mentors who had roots in Berkeley and its foothold within activism and the civil rights movement. Brown had submerged himself in the campus culture, devouring as much knowledge as possible, churning out essays, blazing through books, conversing with his professors after hours — all while balancing his role on the men’s basketball team.

As the weeks continued, Brown developed a deeper sense about the history of race in America; about the social constructs that perpetuated inequality; about the division and lack of opportunity. In sports, he learned more about privilege and exploitation: For instance, how Black athletes were typically praised for athleticism while IQ was cited for white athletes. He read how athletes often weren’t accepted as public intellectuals or scholars. He kept pushing, wanting to learn more while fighting the stigma that he was just an athlete passing through en route to the NBA and its paychecks with several zeros.

“Jaylen wanted to be thrown to the wolves, intellectually, and to really fight to find his intellectual identity in his first term,” Van Rheenen says. “So he had to fight to demonstrate — I’m not kidding — ‘You know, I chose to be here because I want to get a genuine education. I want to be challenged.'”

… [Udonis] Haslem and Jae Crowder are now Heat teammates, competing in the Eastern Conference finals against the Boston Celtics. Corey Crowder is living in Fort Myers, Florida, a couple hours west of Miami, a couple hours southwest of Lake Buena Vista — the site of the NBA’s restart at Walt Disney World. And nearly two decades ago in France, Corey Crowder took a young rookie under his wing to show him the ropes. That rookie was Udonis Haslem.

“It’s an awesome story, when you think about it,” Corey Crowder said.

This tale of things going full circle starts 18 years ago in Chalon-sur-Saône, France, about 200 miles southeast of Paris. Haslem was a 22-year-old kid who went undrafted after his four seasons at Florida and headed to France hoping to kickstart his career. Corey Crowder had been playing overseas for nearly a decade at that point and was the person Haslem gravitated to for advice.

… “We had concerns about pushing guys too much in practice,” Gundy said, “because of what’s been happening with the virus.”

What happened against Tulsa was the Cowboys gasped to a 16-7 win.

“So we have to begin to push them now. We’ve got to get in better shape,” Gundy said. “We’ll push them more now than we have in the last three weeks.”

… Philadelphia Union owner Richie Graham believes American soccer is in the midst of its own Gold Rush. But, in this case, it’s a rush filled with clubs looking to win the race to find the next Christian Pulisic, Gio Reyna or, in the Union’s case, Brenden Aaronson.

At this moment, the Union are among the best in MLS when it comes to identifying, developing and selling on young players. Aaronson, one of the brightest talents in MLS, looks bound for a European move . Mark McKenzie appears to be destined to follow him

In the Premier League, Leicester City has long been at the forefront of injury prevention. When the humble Foxes beat 5000-1 odds to win the EPL title back in 2016 over wealthy and more decorated rivals such as Arsenal, Tottenham and the two Manchester behemoths, they did it using just 18 players all season. On average, then-manager Claudio Ranieri had 96 percent of his first-team squad available for each match, the highest in England’s top flight.

“Players are the ones who win the medals,” Paul Balsom, head of performance innovation for Leicester City, said in an interview with Yahoo Sports. “But whatever we did that year, the lack of injuries played a key role.”

Staying healthy is crucial for any successful sports team. And avoiding injuries — particularly the soft tissue variety caused by overuse — has never been more important than it will be during the condensed and jam-packed 2020-21 campaign, which began almost a month later than usual after last season extended into July because of the coronavirus pandemic.

Biosensors that are wearable on human skin or safely used inside the body are increasingly prevalent for both medical applications and everyday health monitoring. Finding the right materials to bind the sensors together and adhere them to surfaces is also an important part of making this technology better.

A recent study from Binghamton University’s Thomas J. Watson College of Engineering and Applied Science offers one possible solution, especially for skin applications. Matthew S. Brown, a fourth-year PhD student with Assistant Professor Ahyeon Koh’s lab in the Department of Biomedical Engineering, served as the lead author for “Electronic‐ECM: A Permeable Microporous Elastomer for an Advanced Bio‐Integrated Continuous Sensing Platform,” published in the journal Advanced Materials Technology. For more information see the IDTechEx report on Wearable Technology Forecasts: 2020-2030.

The study utilizes polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS), a silicone material popular for use in biosensors because of its biocompatibility and soft mechanics. It’s generally utilized as a solid film, nonporous material, which can lead to problems in sensor breathability and sweat evaporation.

In this work, for the the first time, we connect the dots between interactive articles such as those featured in this journal and publications like The New York Times and the techniques, theories, and empirical evaluations put forth by academic researchers across the fields of education, human-computer interaction, information visualization, and digital journalism. We show how digital designers are operationalizing these ideas to create interactive articles that help boost learning and engagement for their readers compared to static alternatives.

I work in data, and one thing that I think everyone in data knows but never really thinks to explain to non-data people is how all data is ultimately human-generated and wrong at some level of examination.

Soccer, in its purest form, is the most accessible and racially diverse team sport in the world. But American soccer, as Precious realized, is not. It’s disproportionately white and upper-middle-class. Doug Andreassen, the former chair of a U.S. Soccer diversity task force, recognized this decades ago. He’d look around a country home to tens of millions of non-white people. Then he’d look around soccer boardrooms, and out onto fields, and wonder: “Why doesn’t soccer in America look like America?”

The superficial answer is obvious. Participation, in most cases, requires money. Soccer’s diversity problem, at its core, is a socioeconomic problem. And in America, after centuries of racial oppression – of slavery, Jim Crow laws, redlining, ongoing mass incarceration, and so much more – socioeconomic problems are race problems. In 2017, the median non-Hispanic white household owned $171,700 in net wealth; the median Black household owned $9,567. White America controls soccer, just as it controls so much else.

But the full answer is more complex.

Australia has a historic opportunity to set forward-looking data governance standards to anticipate and respond to the largely unchecked acceleration of data capture, aggregation and analytics in Australian professional sport, according to leading experts.

The lack of oversight in how data is being collected has implications for athletes’ rights and protections, the organisational practices of sporting organisations and third-party tech vendors, and the state and stakes of fair competition in professional sport.

The issue will be examined by an Expert Working Group announced today by the Australian Academy of Science and supported by Minderoo Foundation. The project is being coordinated in collaboration with the newly established Minderoo Tech & Policy Lab at the University of Western Australia, which is directed by domain experts in data in health and sport.

Uefa’s decision to add an extra match during international breaks, increasing them to three games in the space of two weeks, has been described as “ludicrous” by Dr Paul Balsom, head of performance innovation for Leicester City and the Swedish national team.

Traditionally, national teams have played two games during each international break, but for the next two, in ­October and November, an extra friendly has been squeezed in after the coronavirus caused chaos with the football schedule.

In October, England play a friendly against Wales alongside their Nations League matches with Belgium and Denmark, and a month later a friendly with New Zealand is scheduled alongside their Nations League games against Belgium and Iceland.

It’s easy to blame the turf. When you lose five starting players and two for the season, the unfamiliar surface becomes a natural scapegoat, and it’s likely it isn’t totally innocent. The 49ers players were not making up their discomfort with playing on the newly-installed turf at MetLife Stadium, but they’re also the only team that’s come out loudly against it.

The root cause of these injuries is much simpler: a preseason the NFL rushed in order to start the season on time. Without allowing players to re-acclimate to football properly, through periodization, which gradually increases workloads and the intensity of workouts so the body can handle it, NFL players are less well-prepared this year than they have been since the 2011 lockout year.

When you combine a rushed preseason with a surface that, generally speaking, has been proven to cause an increase in injuries, and which players are uncomfortable with prior to the game, you have the perfect storm which the 49ers endured on Sunday.

Conventional football wisdom suggests player health would benefit from either more — or less — preparation.

It’s well-known that video analy­sis plays a piv­otal part in train­ing, match prepa­ra­tion, pre­views and reviews, but inno­v­a­tive per­for­mance ana­lysts are now work­ing along­side med­ical staff, using analy­sis soft­ware to assess on-field injuries and aid the man­age­ment of return to play protocols.