It’s late February 2020 and Brandon Payne is sitting in the Accelerate Basketball office lined with framed basketball jerseys and clipped newspaper articles. He’s in Fort Mills, South Carolina, less than a mile from the North Carolina border, but over 2,500 miles from the Golden State Warriors practice facility.
He opens an Instagram story that bridges the gap between him and his client, Stephen Curry, who is shooting the rust off of the shot that turned the Warriors into the Beatles, searching for the finishing touch to his rehab after breaking his wrist early in the season.
For fans, the video builds excitement for the return of the baby-faced assassin. But Payne finds reason for alarm. He texts Curry. “Please stop shooting until I get there in a few days. We can’t let this keep going. I gotta show you something.”
“He had some dead spots from the surgery,” Payne explains. “He couldn’t necessarily feel his hand great. His left hand was rotating behind the basketball a little. What happens when you rotate behind the ball is you actually end up pushing it with your left hand. But if you can’t feel it you don’t know that.”
Major League Baseball will proceed with an on-time start to spring training and the season after players rejected a plan Monday night to delay reporting by a more than a month.
“In light of the MLBPA’s rejection of our proposal, and their refusal to counter our revised offer this afternoon, we are moving forward and instructing our clubs to report for an on-time start to spring training and the championship season, subject to reaching an agreement on health and safety protocols,” MLB said in a statement.
“We were able to complete a 2020 season through Herculean efforts and sacrifices made by our players, club staff and MLB staff to protect one another,” MLB said. “We will do so again, together, as we work towards playing another safe and entertaining season in 2021.”
To schedule and prescribe training throughout the season, we need to know the physical demands that occur during competition as accurately as possible, so that exercises can be set that prepare the players to withstand real game situations. Therefore, adequate adjustment of training to the demands of each sport is an important requirement in order to optimise performance and in turn reduce the risk of injury.
Technology allows us to quantify in real time a large number of variables related to in-game physical requirements. The technological advances of positioning devices over the last two decades mean that they are now widely used by most professional clubs. This is particularly so for the global positioning system, commonly known as GPS, which is used to analyse a wide range of parameters related to the external loads of outdoor athletes. However, a local positioning system, or LPS, a technology that is not as well-known or widely studied as GPS, can be used to analyse the positioning and performance variables of players with greater validity and reliability in indoor sports such as basketball, handball and futsal.1 These systems provide coaches and fitness trainers with a large amount of data with which to perform analyses that will help them to quantify the demands required during matches and training sessions. However, technology is just an instrument and it does not automatically report the necessary parameters with which to quantify and schedule training sessions. Technology must be accompanied by knowledge of what is going to be measured, how it is measured and why it is measured. It is data analysis methods that tell us whether a technology is useful and provides valid information for it to be used by the coaching staff, or whether it simply offers a large number of variables that are unlikely to have a positive impact on performance without proper analysis and interpretation.
… [Al] Washington has been in Columbus for just over two years. When he arrived, the four Buckeyes linebackers were all at different stages of development. They’ll now go out together, hoping to build on the momentum they’ve built in recent years — a few of them having endured significant setbacks along the way.
There’s the survivor. The grinder and fan favorite. The quiet leader. And, perhaps the first one drafted of the group, the massive upside prospect.
“I wish I had more time with these guys,” Washington said. “Two years have flown by. You just see how much each of them has improved and grown over that time and you just see how good each of them are and how good they can become.”
Sara Goodrum’s field of dreams has become a reality.
The former Oregon softball player was promoted Thursday to the position of minor league hitting coordinator of the Milwaukee Brewers.
The 27-year-old Goodrum is the first woman to have that role in any Major League Baseball organization.
Goodrum didn’t consider the gravity of being a female in a male-dominated profession while spending the last three seasons in the Brewers’ sports science department.
In our last installment, I started experimenting with sleep tracking in hopes of recovering better for my weightlifting sessions. I’ve used the Oura ring and Whoop band, but today I’ll talk mainly about Oura—my favorite of the two—and about what metrics I found useful.
In engineering, the concept of futureproofing means to design something so that it can still be used for the long haul, even when technology changes. By anticipating the future, engineers can develop methods for minimizing the shocks and stresses of future events, be it a building that will one day need to expand or a computer that will need to be compatible with changes in network operations. Future-proofing something, at its core, means to take steps now to avoid becoming dysfunctional later.
It’s a concept that has swirled around in the mind of Dr. Michael Kennedy, a sport scientist and Associate Professor at the University of Alberta, for years. Though his specialty is athletic performance, not engineering, he’s long sought out ways to apply the concept of futureproofing to endurance sport. His big question: Are the methods we’re using in triathlon now helping athletes avoid consequences in the future? Is it possible to futureproof endurance sports to create happier, healthier, lifelong triathletes?
The result of his investigation, published in the January 2020 journal BMC Sports Science, Medicine, and Rehabilitation, suggests several themes coaches, race directors, physicians, and athletes can apply to triathlon today to ensure long-term health and performance. Here Kennedy discusses his research.
Modern elite football is increasingly demanding in terms of the number of games played during the season, adding an additional physical and mental burden to the players. A top-tier European team used to play around 50 games in the 2008/2009 season, and this number increased to around 60 in the 2018/2019 season. Additionally, for the most outstanding players, we also have to add the friendly matches, as well as the international matches for all of them. This can result in more than 70 games played per season. UEFA’s elite club injury study with 36 of the best European clubs reported a 2.5-fold increase in training and match time between 2001/2002 and 2013/2014, and this constitutes a workload elevated for gamers.
A few months ago an editorial was published ( Nassis et al, 2020; Scand J Med Sci Sports 30: 962; doi: 10.1111 / sms.13681 ) in which the authors address what in the immediate future could be changes in preparation physics of the players in the coming years in accordance with the new physiological demands, as well as posing the medical and physiological challenges, which will involve areas such as nutrition.
Tactical changes in matches and new organizational initiatives launched by FIFA are expected to have a massive impact on the physiological and psychological demands of players.
In the course of deciding whether to keep reading this article, you may change your mind several times. While your final choice will be obvious to an observer – you’ll continue to scroll and read, or you’ll click on another article – any internal deliberations you had along the way will most likely be inscrutable to anyone but you. That clandestine hesitation is the focus of research, published Jan. 20 in Nature, by Stanford University researchers who study how cognitive deliberations are reflected in neural activity.
Dr Boyd Anderson from the NUS School of Computing worked on the development of MANA 2.0 as an affordable and portable solution for capturing clinical gait measurements
Gait analysis is an important clinical measurement used for medical diagnosis of sports injuries, neurological conditions such as Parkinson’s disease and Cerebral Palsy, and for assessing frailty and fall risk of the elderly. To obtain accurate gait measurements, a gold-standard proprietary gait measuring mat is usually used in the clinics. The mat is, however, large, heavy and expensive, and gait measurements using it can only be conducted in the clinic in the presence of a clinician.
In order to create a more affordable and portable alternative, researchers from the NUS School of Computing have developed a novel wireless sensor system capable of achieving clinical gait measurements with comparable accuracies to the current gold-standard mat.
In this new reality, Sports need innovation more than ever. In early 2020, HYPE Sports Innovation (“HYPE”) teamed up with FIBA, Miami Dolphins, The Royal Belgian Football Association, and others, to create the first Sports Tech Global Virtual Accelerator (GVA) with the primary mission of solving the Sports industry’s real challenges in this new reality.
The 1st GVA cycle resulted in 17 confirmed pilots and commercial agreements (and 24 are still in the pipeline) between Sports Tech startups and some of the biggest sports clubs and federations, focusing primarily on technologies such as 5G, blockchain, AI, BIG Data, etc.
Now, as HYPE is about to launch its 2nd cycle of the Global Virtual Accelerator (GVA2.0) focused on enabling the top Sports Tech startups to secure pilots with our lead partners. GVA 2.0 is constructed of 7 Sports Tech Verticals which will be populated based on a pre-pilot selection process in which for example, DFB will be presenting its actual challenges to a handpicked shortlist of startups narrowed down from around 1,200+ applications. The Sports Tech startups that will be invited to come to the table, displaying the relevant technology and ability to scale, stands to conduct a product/service pilot with them.
… “We’re always trying to maximize any opportunity that comes our way, which we were doing before COVID-19—but this environment has made solutions more important because the whole space is evolving,” [Todd] Stansbury said. “Some of these new deals continue to become even more important as we look to navigate our way not only through the current crisis but also at how to come out the other side. I don’t think we’re ever going to be able to just stand still and do things exactly how we did it last year. We’re all going to have to forever innovate.”
Stansbury expects the financial belt to continue to tighten through 2021, with the economic effects of the virus becoming increasingly apparent as the months pass. “The financials will probably be reflected over a three-year period; we’ll probably be in a pretty fluid situation for a while yet,” he said, but innovation will still be a prioritized investment in his department when appropriate. And some solutions might not even have to come from big companies. There are plenty of problems for the student participants in Georgia Tech’s annual athletic department-sponsored Sports Innovation Hackathon to try to tackle this year, or perhaps the students in the athletics-created “Sports Intelligence Platform” class in Georgia Tech’s College of Computing can help.
Dr. Rachel Lampert, professor of medicine at Yale School of Medicine and a cardiologist with Yale Medicine, is on the steering committee for the Outcomes Registry for Cardiac Conditions in Athletes (ORCCA), which was formed by sports medicine doctors and cardiologists at Harvard and the University of Washington in conjunction with the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine and the American Heart Society. Over 60 colleges nationwide are participating in the study.
“Very soon we will have better data on what the prevalence really is and that data, in addition to giving us a number, will also be helpful in guiding what the workup should be,” Lampert said.
Exercise is widely accepted to improve health, reducing the risk of premature mortality, cardiovascular disease (CVD) and cancer. However, several epidemiological studies suggest that the exercise-longevity relationship may be ‘J’ shaped; with elite athlete’s likely training above these intensity and volume thresholds. Therefore, the aim of this meta-analysis was to examine this relationship in former elite athletes. Methods
38,047 English language articles were retrieved from Web of Science, PubMed and SportDiscus databases published after 1970, of which 44 and 24 were included in the systematic review and meta-analysis, respectively. Athletes were split into three groups depending on primary sport: Endurance (END), Mixed/Team, or power (POW). Standard mortality ratio’s (SMR) and standard proportionate mortality ratio (SPMR) were obtained, or calculated, and combined for the meta-analysis. Results
Athletes lived significantly longer than the general population (male SMR 0.69 [95% CI 0.61–0.78]; female SMR 0.51 [95% CI 0.40–0.65]; both p < 0.01). There was no survival benefit for male POW athletes compared to the general population (SMR 1.04 [95% CI 0.91–1.12]). Although male athlete’s CVD (SMR 0.73 [95% CI 0.62–0.85]) and cancer mortality (SMR 0.75 [95% CI 0.63–0.89]), were significantly reduced compared to the general population, there was no risk-reduction for POW athletes CVD mortality (SMR 1.10 [0.86–1.40]) or END athletes cancer mortality (SMR 0.73 [0.50–1.07]). There was insufficient data to calculate female sport-specific SMR’s.
Discussion
Overall, athletes live longer and have a reduced incidence of both CVD and cancer mortality compared to the general population, refuting the ‘J’ shape hypothesis. However, different health risks may be apparent according to sports classification, and between sexes, warranting further investigation. [full text]
Data science has become more prominent in many industries in recent years, and sports is no different. The book and movie Moneyball, about how the 2002 Oakland Athletics used data analysis to rethink how to build a team and make in-game decisions, helped accelerate the adoption of data science in sports and helped popularize analytics. Fast forward to today and the data available are far more detailed than what was available to the Athletics in 2002, and the analytical methods are far more sophisticated. In several sports leagues, player-tracking data are available, where the locations of all players and the ball or puck are recorded several times per second throughout the game using camera-based or chip-based technologies.
For professional basketball and (American) football, the availability of player-tracking data is especially compelling. Because of the simultaneous movements of multiple agents and the dynamic spatial relationships and interactions among them, spatiotemporal information is essential to fully understand the evolution of a play in these sports.