Chris Paul fully understands that these are imperfect times. And that means perfect solutions for issues that the NBA and its players are dealing with, he said, aren’t likely to be found.
Paul, the president of the National Basketball Players Association and guard for the Oklahoma City Thunder, spoke Thursday at a Time100 event and said the league and the union are continuing to work through countless details that have to be settled before the new season begins with training camps next month and the start of games on Dec. 22.
The money issues are largely settled, with the league and the union striking a deal on escrow earlier this week and a decision being made to keep the salary cap for 2020-21 — which could have fallen substantially because of a massive hit to the planned revenues for last season — at the 2019-20 levels. But issues on health and safety and how to try to keep people safe without a bubble during a coronavirus pandemic are still being worked out, and Paul acknowledged that he isn’t sure “what this season is going to look like yet.”
Shawn Olmstead’s relationship to the sport of volleyball rivals that of a ‘90s Disney sports movie. Ever since he was a kid, Olmstead has always had some notion of contact with the sport. This should come as no surprise seeing that his father, Rick Olmstead, was a championship winning coach at Santa Barbara City College and at one point in his career, coached a three-time Olympic gold medalist, Karch Kiraly.
It was common for his father to take Olmstead to the beach on the weekends to play beach volleyball, or to take him to one of his games at SBCC, but it wasn’t until his junior year of high school that Olmstead’s career in volleyball really started.
Prior to his junior year, Olmstead played club volleyball in Santa Barbara, because at the time, Carpinteria High School (CHS) didn’t have a boys volleyball program. As his junior year drew closer, Olmstead had to make a decision—either transfer to Santa Barbara for high school in hopes of playing on a school team, or risk his dream of playing college volleyball and try to help create a program at CHS. He stuck with CHS.
Olmstead gathered a group of guys from a multitude of other sports, and created a league dominating team.
As a middle school kid playing Pop Warner football, Howard Brown was two pounds from exceeding the 135-pound weight limit. But he could play and even carry the ball as a runner — something that had been forbidden in the past because of his size.
Brown quickly became the most physical runner in the league, with his fellow sixth graders petrified to make an open field tackle against him. Parents and opposing coaches began to complain about his violent runs and it came to a boiling point.
International Journal of Sports Physical Therapy from
Biomechanical analysis of lower extremity postural sway variables has been found to be reliable and valid to quantify balance performance for both healthy individuals and individuals with an injury.1-3 Upper and lower extremity postural control is controlled by integrated information from the visual, somatosensory, and vestibular systems. The integrity of the postural control system is typically evaluated with static or dynamic posturography. Postural steadiness, or static posturography, characterizes the performance of the postural control systems in a static position. In the lower extremity, this is often evaluated in both eyes open and eyes closed trials to estimate the role of the visual system while maintaining balance. This postural steadiness or sway is quantified biomechanically by the displacement of the center of pressure on a force platform. These variables can further be quantified into displacement variables, such as mean deviation from center of pressure or path length, or other variables which express the magnitude that the center of pressure moves during a trial. Additionally, velocity-based variables can be utilized to express how quickly the center of pressure is moving during a trial, indicating how quickly this subject is adjusting to maintain their balance. The center of pressure variables reflect the orientation of the body segments as well as the movements of the body to keep the center of gravity over the base of support.2,4 Correspondingly, these measures can be used to assess upper extremity stability and proprioception, quantified by variables measuring the ability of the upper extremity to remain still in a weightbearing position.4,5
SkillShark [is] an innovative evaluation software that is saving coaches time, while improving efficiency and communication. Coaches can eliminate the need for stacks of handwritten notes, spreadsheets, and hours of painful data entry with the SkillShark app, which allows coaches to evaluate anywhere by simply using their smartphone. The software saves associations about 50 hours+ of data entry per tryout.
All data gets stored in one place, and evaluations happen in real-time. Coaches can also compare and sort players, create teams, send player reports, and even track player progression over time. SkillShark is an essential way to improve communication between minor hockey coaches, players, and parents. Player reports show granular results from their evaluations, which give players the opportunity to effectively benchmark and improve.
Scandanavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports from
Trunk motion is related to the performance and risk of injuries during dynamic sports motions. Optical motion capture is traditionally used to measure trunk motion during dynamic sports motions, but these systems are typically constrained to a laboratory environment. Inertial measurement units (IMUs) might provide a suitable alternative for measuring the trunk orientation during dynamic sports motions. The objective of the present study was to assess the accuracy of the three‐dimensional trunk orientation measured using IMUs during dynamic sports motions and isolated anatomical trunk motions. The motions were recorded with two IMUs and an optical motion capture system (gold standard). Ten participants performed a total of 71 sports motions (19 golf swings, 15 one‐handed ball throws, 19 tennis serves, and 18 baseball swings) and 125 anatomical trunk motions (42, 41, and 42 trials of lateral flexion, axial rotation, and flexion/extension, respectively). The root‐mean‐square differences between the IMU‐ and optical motion capture‐based trunk angles were less than 5 degrees and the similarity between the methods was on average across all trials ‘very good’ to ‘excellent’ (R ≥ 0.85; R2 ≥ 0.80). Across the dynamic sports motions, even higher measures of similarity were found (R ≥ 0.90; R2 ≥ 0.82). When aligned to the relevant segment, the current IMUs are a promising alternative to optical motion capture and previous presented IMU‐based systems for the field‐based measurement of the three‐dimensional trunk orientation during dynamic sports motions and the anatomical trunk motions. [full text pdf]
Harvard University, John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences from
… researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering have developed an ultra-sensitive, seriously resilient strain sensor that can be embedded in textiles and soft robotic systems.
The research is published in Nature.
“Current soft strain gauges are really sensitive but also really fragile,” said Oluwaseun Araromi, a Research Associate in Materials Science and Mechanical Engineering at SEAS and the Wyss Institute and first author of the paper. “The problem is that we’re working in an oxymoronic paradigm — highly sensitivity sensors are usually very fragile and very strong sensors aren’t usually very sensitive. So, we needed to find mechanisms that could give us enough of each property.”
Objective Describe the self-reported prevalence and nature of Olympic-career injury and general health and current residual symptoms in a self-selected sample of retired Olympians.
Methods 3357 retired Olympians from 131 countries completed a cross-sectional online survey, distributed by direct email through World Olympians Association and National Olympian Associations databases. The survey captured Olympic sport exposure, significant training and competition injury history (lasting >1 month), general health (eg, depression) during the athlete’s career, and current musculoskeletal pain and functional limitations.
Results 55% were men (44% women, 1% unknown), representing 57 sports (42 Summer, 15 Winter), aged 44.7 years (range 16–97). A total of 3746 injuries were self-reported by 2116 Olympians. This equated, 63.0% (women 68.1%, men 59.2%) reporting at least one significant injury during their Olympic career. Injury prevalence was highest in handball (82.2%) and lowest in shooting (40.0%) for Summer Olympians; and highest in alpine skiing (82.4%) and lowest in biathlon (40.0%) for Winter Olympians. The knee was the most frequently injured anatomical region (20.6%, 120 median days severity), followed by the lumbar spine (13.1%, 100 days) and shoulder/clavicle (12.9%, 92 days). 6.6% of Olympians said they had experienced depression during their career. One-third of retired Olympians reported current pain (32.4%) and functional limitations (35.9%).
Conclusions Almost two-thirds of Olympians who completed the survey reported at least one Olympic-career significant injury. The knee, lumbar spine and shoulder/clavicle were the most commonly injured anatomical locations. One-third of this sample of Olympians attributed current pain and functional limitations to Olympic-career injury. [full text]
The Ivy League canceled winter sports for the 2020-21 season, the conference announced Thursday.
The conference also postponed spring sports until at least the end of February and won’t conduct competition for fall sports during the spring semester.
“This is definitely not a decision we want to make, but I know it’s the right decision for the Ivy League,” Robin Harris, the conference’s executive director, told ESPN.
Athlete groups renewed calls for further reforms of the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) as the embattled body began virtual executive committee and Foundation Board meetings on Wednesday.
Governance reforms are at the top of the agenda, which includes an update on Russia’s appeal against a four-year ban before the Court of Arbitration for Sport, that the executive committee will tackle followed by the Foundation Board.
Netherlands coach Frank de Boer questioned the need for international friendlies in an already congested calendar after losing two players to injuries in his side’s 1-1 draw at home to Spain on Wednesday.
Centre-back Nathan Ake had to be taken off early in the game with a muscle injury and will return to his club Manchester City immediately, missing the Netherlands’ Nations League games with Bosnia and Poland.
John Baker has built a value system based on being a continuous learner, so upon retiring from the major leagues five years ago, he attended an analytics conference in Boston to build an awareness and understanding of data.
What left a lasting impression on Baker was one of the guest speakers.
Pittsburgh Pirates general manager Ben Cherington was on the slate, despite recently resigning as Boston Red Sox GM only two years after winning a World Series.
“I was like, ‘Oh man, I bet he doesn’t show up and honor that commitment.’ Well, he did,” Baker said. “And in honoring that commitment and being kind of like vulnerable, open and sharing his experience with a roomful of people really kind of blew me away. Just as like a behavioral example of what it means to be accountable.”
When Gersson Rosas joined the Minnesota Timberwolves as President of Basketball Operations in May 2019, the mission was clear: Rosas aimed to transform the Wolves through innovation.
Leading that innovation on the medical and technology side is Dr. Robby Sikka. A lifelong Minnesotan and Timberwolves fanatic, Sikka left a career in medicine to follow his dream of working in the sports world for his hometown team.
“Robby makes us better by challenging us to look at things in a different perspective, mostly out of the box, mostly outside of basketball, more from a physical, from a medical biomechanical perspective that we often don’t look at the game,” Rosas says of his Vice President of Basketball Performance and Technology. “It’s understanding the deeper layers, not only in terms of performance and health and wellness, but development as well… His perspective, his background, and his ability to question the norm in his own way allows us to be more well-rounded.”
Every Major League Baseball organization desires young, talented, homegrown pitching. The Kansas City Royals are hardly an exception.
The Royals have largely focused their rebuilding efforts around acquiring and building pitching depth in their farm system.
“Without question it’s the deepest we’ve ever been, when you combined some of the international pitchers with a deep and talented draft class from 2018, who have gone out and achieved and done everything we’ve asked them to do,” Royals assistant general manager/player performance J.J. Picollo said.
“I think our depth is as great as it has ever been, especially when you talk about starting pitchers. It’s a credit to what Lonnie (Goldberg) and his scouting staff have done on the amateur side. … It gives us a lot of optimism and belief that we are deep and we are prepared to put a good homegrown starting rotation together for years to come.”
Making Sense Of:Quality Sports Science
Q: Can a bad team be good at sports science?
My answer: No.
The reason has nothing to do with technology, data or analysis. The reason has everything to do with collaboration, and my feeling that applied sports science is the only sports science that matters. Bad teams get worse instead of better as their seasons progress. Any team that shows regular improvement is applying sports science effectively.
Applied sports science is immature technologically and in its methods. Identifying, transferring and implementing new technologies and methods are central to applied sports science, and in most cases there are no roadmaps to guide any of the work. A group of Australian sports scientists recently wrote up their model for how to innovate in sports science, saying it should fit a pattern similar to Hunter-Gatherer behaviors.
Johnson makes the point that the Adjacent Possible model of innovation is intensely inter-disciplinary and collaborative. Innovative advances come at the limits of what’s known, and from there they move in the direction of other related, but relatively unexplored disciplines — the adjacent possible. Only rarely do individuals navigate the innovation gauntlet solo.
The Hunter-Gatherer model is in line with how sports teams organize around individual workflows, where managers manage, coaches coach, players play and analysts analyze. While the first principle is collaboration, the second and third principles are persistence and documentation.
The core competencies of the Adjacent Possible are expertise and collaboration. The authors of the Hunter-Gatherer model “propose that to hunt ‘new ideas’ and gather translatable knowledge, sport science researchers and practitioners need to wayfind through uncharted regions located in new performance landscapes.” Whatever that is.
Hard to tell who’s worse off, the Hunter-Gatherer sports scientists or the Buffalo Sabres sports scientists, who recently told their innovation story despite a lengthy record of dismal on-ice performance. The Sabres’ story has plenty of expertise but fails to mention collaboration. I’m confident in my belief that if there’s sports science expertise in place, but no improvement, then it’s a lack of effective collaboration that is holding a team back. And there is no other reason.
The curation and production of this newsletter reflect my belief in the Adjacent Possible. It’s why you might see articles about endurance training, about the NBA draft, about nutrition, about behavioral economics and decision-making, about new sensor technologies, all contained in a daily news package. It’s why I mostly leave it to the reader to make sense of how these things go together. And it’s why I am impressed by organizations that ask me to put a lot of their people on the mailing list.