… Two weeks turned into 20 as the season resumed July 30 in a bubble environment at Walt Disney World in Orlando, Florida. A year later, half the league’s teams are still hosting games in empty arenas as the pandemic that has claimed more than 500,000 American lives persists across the country.
While some NBA players have personally battled the coronavirus, others cared for and lost loved ones. They shared their experiences with ESPN from a year that affected countless people in ways big and small.
… Haliburton was in uniform to start the second half of the season against the Houston Rockets on Thursday at Golden 1 Center, but Kings coach Luke Walton said the team will take a cautious approach to his return from a calf injury.
Walton said the team’s medical staff has placed Haliburton under a minutes restriction, but he wouldn’t specify how many minutes the former Iowa State star will be allowed to play. It’s also not clear when the minutes restriction will be lifted. Haliburton logged just 18 minutes in a 125-105 victory over the Rockets, well below his season average of 29.7. He finished with five points, three rebounds and two assists in his first game since Feb. 25.
… “It’s been five years since I retired now, my gosh,” Boxx remarks, but she’s been keeping busy since walking away from her playing career. “I think there’s that transition period which every athlete goes through, trying to figure out what else do you have a passion for and what do you want to fall into that makes you as happy as soccer did?
“I don’t necessarily think that’s possible. As a woman, I started my family late because I wanted to play for as long as possible. I had my son after I retired, so I was trying to work out what I was passionate about, but now I have two kids at home.”
Among her varying ventures since retirement, Boxx has helped start an all-girls soccer academy in Portland, where she now calls home, while she has eyes and ears in other projects too. “I think the pay to play model here in the US has gone a little out of control, so I wanted to start a club just for girls that not only teaches them how to play, but also about life, about being a soccer player, about being a good human.
… Following a 15-year playing career in which he made more than 400 league and cup appearances for Hannover, Cherundolo then spent the next seven years in a variety of coaching roles, managing Hannover’s U15 and U17 teams, and later working as an assistant coach with VfB Stuttgart and Germany’s U15s. Along the way he picked up his UEFA Pro coaching license, as coveted a coaching badge as there is on the planet.
All of which sets up Cherundolo well for the job ahead with Vegas, where he’ll be tasked with developing players on the cusp of playing with LAFC’s first team.
“It’s a situation I’m comfortable in, not only curriculum-wise but also to the age group of players,” he told ESPN (Editor’s note: Steve Cherundolo is a frequent guest on ESPN FC, which streams seven days a week on ESPN+). “So it’s something I think comes natural to me and I love doing this. I love helping players move to the next level. There’s a lot in place already in Los Angeles so it’s really just helping a lot of these players get to the next step and get the necessary experiences to make the steps themselves, because it’s not the coach who just makes these players automatically better. It’s the players who have to put in the work, which is showing them the direction.”
After being named the interim England women’s manager, Hege Riise will also lead Team GB at the Olympics this summer. Rather than looking at coaching players from multiple countries as a challenge, she sees it as an advantage but is still keen to foster a good team dynamic among those who are usually rivals.
A team from Fudan University has developed a smart textile that can be used not only for display but also communication, as functional as computers or smartphones.
According to Peng Huisheng, leader of the team from Fudan’s macromolecular science department, it developed transparent conductive weft fibers and luminescent warp fibers. When woven together, they form micrometer-scale electroluminescent units similar to those on a digital display screen.
In the U.S. during the coronavirus pandemic, professional basketball and football seasons were made possible in part by contract tracing—specifically by Kinexon’s ultra-wideband contact tracing system. Ultra-wideband (UWB) is a short-range and high-bandwidth radio technology that, in this case, is contained primarily in Kinexon’s wristband sensors.
Today a small but growing number of smartphones and smartwatches—including flagship models from Samsung and Apple—support UWB. And as this feature appears only to be on the rise in mobile devices, UWB-enabled smartphones could become the backbone of future contact tracing apps.
The most widely used non-UWB contact tracing apps have relied upon Bluetooth technology, which is of course already widely available on smartphones. However, Bluetooth was not designed for proximity detection. By comparison, “peer-to-peer” fine ranging is one of UWB’s strengths. So UWB technology has naturally emphasized applications that rely on accurately detecting the location of other UWB sensors within relatively short ranges. The Kinexon SafeZone system was, in fact, originally designed for keeping track of workers in industrial workplaces during the pre-COVID-19 era.
Among the many mysteries in medical science, it is known that minority and low-income patients experience greater pain than other parts of the population. This is true regardless of the root cause of the pain and even when comparing patients with similar levels of disease severity.
As reported in Nature Medicine, researchers show that AI can more accurately and more fairly measure severe knee pain.
Today, when patients with knee pain visit the doctor, the severity of their osteoarthritis is rated on what is known as the Kellgren and Lawrence Grade (KLG). However, even for two patients with similar osteoarthritis and the same KLG score, low-income populations report more pain. Consequently, the underserved fail to qualify for knee-replacement surgeries and are more often treated with risky opioid painkillers.
In a new study, the team developed and applied artificial intelligence (AI), or machine-learning, algorithms to physiological data — including respiratory rate, blood pressure, heart rate, body temperature and oxygen levels — from patients with chronic pain from sickle cell disease. Not only did the researchers’ approach outperform baseline models to estimate subjective pain levels, it also detected changes in pain and atypical pain fluctuations.
The AFL will embrace technology in the rollout of two major concussion projects during the 2021 season in an effort to better understand head trauma and how to protect the health and safety of its players.
The league on Friday wrote to clubs to encourage them to participate in the studies, which will use eye tracking technology and “smart” mouthguards to collect data. The projects, named Bio-Eye and HitIQ, are the latest attempts by the league to address the issue of long-term effects of concussion.
By mid-February, the National Hockey League had reached a crisis point in its already abbreviated 56-game season. Five teams were down because of the coronavirus, and Commissioner Gary Bettman and his deputy Bill Daly knew there had to be a severe tightening of protocols governing the players or the season would be in jeopardy.
This all came just short of a year after the league had to shut down for what turned out to be four months, joining Major League Baseball and the National Basketball Association. The dubious anniversary of that date is Friday.
“There was no doubt we had a very difficult couple of weeks with the amount of positive tests coming back,” Daly said during Thursday’s joint media conference call with Bettman. “What we’ve confirmed through this process is that we’re dealing with a very contagious virus, easily transmissible if people aren’t taking appropriate precautions.”
… What transpired in the sports world in the next year was a bumpy and ongoing road to normal. Bubbles became more synonymous with controlled, virus-free environments, than bathtubs. COVID-19 testing became an exam no one wanted to pass. And no program was left totally unscathed from the pandemic’s wrath.
Just ask leaders in sports right here in mid-Missouri. The Missourian did just that, bringing you an oral history of local sports in a pandemic year and why they will never be the same.
… But with this year-long pause to ponder the games, it’s worth considering this provocation: Perhaps the one thing that could breathe new life into these ancient games and make them feel more relevant is the exact opposite of what amateur sports are supposed to be free of: technological, chemical, and biological enhancers of performance.
Humans have long aspired to push past our “species-typical” boundaries with the use of technological enhancements, be they cybernetic or biological. Throughout much of the 20th century, however, the Olympics embraced a different standard by allowing only amateur athletes (meaning those who are unpaid) to compete. As such bans have lifted in recent years, more and more winners who stand on podiums today are far from what we would once have considered “pure,” and yet we still insist they be non-augmented.
That’s not to say that these ultra-high-performance athletes themselves are not heroic. Their grueling schedules and punishing routines are accompanied by extraordinary sacrifice, discipline, and mental toughness.
Robust information systems are not free. They require time, attention and money — but they can pay for themselves over and over again in better decisions taken, and better democratic accountability after the fact. … It isn’t cheap to build the systems that show you what’s coming at you. But failing to build them? That’s far more expensive.
Wu was especially inspired by Namita Nandakumar, who currently works for the Seattle Kraken, and wrote a paper analyzing the effect of various professional drafts.
“Once I found out that Namita had been offered a sports analytics job with the Philadelphia Eagles, I was like, ‘Wait,'” Wu said. “I can do this professionally.”
After her junior year of college, Wu passed on an internship with a wine company to attend that 2019 CMU camp and see if she really wanted to turn her pipe dream into a career. Turns out, those eight weeks were like the launching pad.