It remains the elephant in the room, and as rookie Casey Mize continues to mature right before our eyes, posting three straight quality starts, its presence seems to be growing.
Nobody wants to talk about it but at some point, load management is going to be an issue for him. He’s already matched the seven starts he made last year and he’s thrown 10 more innings — 38. At what point will the Tigers have to back him off to avoid having to shut him down completely later? And how will that look?
Virgil van Dijk has ruled out captaining the Netherlands at the European Championship finals this summer to focus on regaining full fitness with Liverpool.
The Liverpool defender is still recovering from the cruciate ligament injury that curtailed his season in October and his manager, Jürgen Klopp, insists it would have taken a “miracle” for him to return for the delayed Euro 2020 finals. Van Dijk, in his first interview since the injury, has announced he will not be part of Frank de Boer’s squad.
“It’s been a very, very long road,” Van Dijk told the club’s website. “I had to take it step by step. Things have been going well, I’ve not had a real setback or anything – I’ve just progressed nicely.
Indianapolis Star, Bloomington Herald-Times, Jeremy Price from
… And Glass wants his teammates to do it, not just for him, but for themselves. For him, the sweet outweighs the bitter.
“I’m not the guy who wants the team to do bad so it proves how much of an impact I had,” he said. “As much as I wanted to be out there, I know my impact off the field in helping guys improve their game.
“Yeah, I want to have cleats on, but the success we’ve had doesn’t take away from that. There’s nothing I would trade from this year and the point we’ve gotten to. (For the team) to lose a senior and not bat an eye and do what they do, I couldn’t be happier.”
… “It’s just bonkers to me to think we are in a profession where we don’t have any diversity. That part of it is bonkers. I’d be interested to know which professions still exists which are so homogenous. I’m not sure they do exist.
“It will be a big jump for someone when that happens (a woman manages a men’s team) but what I do know is that how you win a football match, regardless of the gender, is exactly the same thing.
“And the type of work you do doesn’t change just because I’m coaching women. I don’t say, ‘Oh this is the women’s game, we prepare them differently than a men’s team.’
Professional sports are highly dependent on revenue from television and fans. Their survival is linked to maintaining the interest and the public’s support during the whole season. This might be the reason why more and more games are being played and the intensity of the game is increasingly high. The NBA’s usual season consists of 82 games that are played in just 5 and a half months. It breaks down to a game being played every 2 days on average. An ACB League team that also participates in the Euro League could play 83 games in 8 and a half months of competition. In other words, on average, a game is played every 3 days. Coaches and players point out that playing too many games with such short recovery time can be detrimental to health, and it might also be a disadvantage when the opposing team has had more days of rest. Are these teams with less time of rest between two games less likely to win? How does an overloaded competition schedule affect the performance of teams?
Recent research has studied how recovery time between two games affects the performance of the game and the probability of winning in elite basketball. The study, published in the European Journal of Sport Science magazine in 2020, analysed the 82 games played by each NBA team during the 2016-17 season. Resting between each cycle of two games was classified into four different categories: Games played on consecutive days, with one day of rest, with two days of rest, or three or more days of rest. Additionally, the effect of playing at home and the opponent’s level in the probability of winning games was measured.
… Park and recreation professionals identified coach training on safety and health as a top priority in youth sports (71 percent), according to a survey by the National Recreation and Park Association (NRPA). And while many park and recreation agencies require coach training in the prevention of concussions and health-related risks, it’s important to note that park and recreation departments don’t need to have all the answers for training coaches. There are many free resources agencies can leverage to boost their coach training offerings, meanwhile eliminating the burden of creating resources of their own.
Below are a series of best practices park and recreation agencies can utilize as they support coaches in ensuring youth safely return to play.
Myovolt, the Los Angeles-based pioneer of patented wearable recovery technology, is launching four new products exploiting focal vibration to massage muscles, stimulate blood flow, promote localised circulation, relieve soreness and increase flexibility for athletes on the move.
Using Myovolt products for as little as ten minutes can reduce muscle and joint soreness by up to 70%.
The company’s arm, shoulder, lower back, and leg units are all equipped with the Myovolt module, containing vibration software and electronics technology embedded in a soft, size-adjustable package designed to conform comfortably to the body to deliver clinical-grade results during warm-ups and cooldowns.
“We’ve created clothing with physiotherapy benefits built-in,” said Myovolt co-founder, Steve Leftly.
The type, timing, and total amounts of food and fluid consumed by an athlete on a daily basis can have a significant impact on their health and performance. Hence, dietary strategies have been developed to reduce injury and illness risks, amplify training adaptations, and to enhance competition performance. Specifically, carefully periodised plans, that recommend adjusting energy, macronutrient and micronutrient intakes, on a day by day and meal by meal basis, inspired by the “fuel for the work required” research, has come to the forefront of sport nutrition1.
Yet, despite knowing what and when to eat, athletes still struggle to adhere. In fact, nutrition knowledge appears to have only a small bearing on an athlete’s dietary behaviours. Simply put, just because an athlete knows what to do, it doesn’t mean they’re going to do it. It appears clear that education alone is insufficient to influence change. Instead, multifaceted and theoretically driven behaviour change interventions need to be designed and delivered, where education may be one component of a more comprehensive strategy.
However, designing a successful behaviour change intervention is a complex process
… “We launched with this mission of providing transparency in sports, which is through our review platform,” [Matt Morrison] said. “Glassdoor, which would be traditionally used, isn’t used in sports. It’s expensive to use, and someone may be the first person to be the social media manager for the [Tampa Bay Buccaneers], for example, so there was no previous person to look at.”
The company is based in Tampa and co-founded by Morrison’s brother, Kevin Morrison. They are a member of innovation hub Embarc Collective and entirely bootstrapped right now. More than 2,000 users have signed up to join the talent pool alone on the site.
It’s game time for a Houston-based coworking company that’s working on opening a sports innovation hub this summer.
The Cannon is working on opening new hub in 53 West, a Galleria-area office building recently renovated by Braun Enterprises. The project is in partnership with Gow Media, InnovationMap’s parent company, and will be co-located with the media business that runs Gow Broadcasting LLC and the SportsMap Radio Network, which includes local sports station 97.5 as well as national syndicated content.
Stanford University, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence from
… In the end, while ethical and legal frameworks are being developed to address deep fakes with all due seriousness they deserve, Agrawala says the benefits of the technology, and his passion for it, gets at the most basic of all human endeavors — better communication. Agrawala tells host Russ Altman, associate director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, all about it in this episode of Stanford Engineering’s The Future of Everything podcast. [video, 28:15]
If you’re a woman and you’ve been struggling with more injuries or slower times lately, it may not be your training regimen that’s the problem. According to recent research in the journal Archivos Latinoamericanos de Nutrición (Latin American Archives of Nutrition), you may want to give your meals and snacks a closer look.
Researchers reviewed 42 studies that assessed the effect of deficits on calories, protein, minerals, and vitamins on performance. They found that female athletes were much more susceptible to iron, calcium, and vitamin D deficiencies than their male counterparts. These athletes also need to be aware of a greater need for magnesium, folic acid, and vitamin B12, the researchers added.
Sportico, Scott Soshnick and Eben Novy-Williams from
Genius Sports has reached an agreement to purchase Second Spectrum, a video analytics platform that works with the NBA, Premier League and Major League Soccer, for $200 million.
The total will be paid partially in cash and partially in Genius Sports stock, the company said Thursday. It’s unclear if Second Spectrum, whose investors include Los Angeles Clippers owner Steve Ballmer, will continue to operate as a separate entity, or if Genius plans to re-brand it.
As data becomes increasingly important to power sportsbooks and live broadcasts, providers like Genius Sports are in an arms race to acquire faster, more reliable, proprietary feeds. Buying Second Spectrum, which specializes in turning video into data, will give Genius both new technology capabilities and a complementary client base.
… “We’ve brought guys up in a velocity world,” Marlins manager Don Mattingly said. “We gotta throw harder, you gotta get more spin rate, guys are trying to get more all the time. When you do that, you’re sacrificing the accuracy of what you’re doing.”
The number of batters hit by a pitch, along with wild pitches, have steadily increased over the past decade. Teams are getting hit at a rate of 0.47 times per game in 2021, which is up from 0.32 in 2011. Wild pitches have increased to 0.40 from 0.32 over the same span.
So, it’s official, more or less. The Premier League’s website confirms what has been widely reported, that “the UK renewals for the next broadcast cycle – from seasons 2022-23 to 2024-25 – will be concluded at the same overall value as the current arrangements between the Premier League and its broadcast partners”.
This, the league goes on, “will provide financial certainty to clubs throughout professional football”.
The problem is the financial certainty that it provides is that the chief revenue stream for most participants in the English top tier looks like being at best flat for another three years. This when cumulative pre-tax losses for the covid-hit 2019-20 financial year are set to weigh in at somewhere in the region of £1 billion. That’s £50 million per club on average, or £1 million per week each.
Making Sense Of: Hacking and Rulemaking
Bruce Schneier, the computer security expert, gives his assessment of a world where AI does the malicious hacking that people do now. He makes sure to ask himself, “How realistic is AI hacking in the real world?” The inevitability isn’t avoidable and it also isn’t predictable, but it will be without precedent. When it comes to untrustworthy AI systems, Schneier foresees resilient governance capable of patching vulnerabilities rapidly, not the sclerotic leadership seen in many rule-making bodies.
Now consider sports. Twenty-five years of Moneyball analytical hacks have removed athleticism from the game of baseball while adding dead time from pitching changes, pickoff attempts and strikeouts. Major League Baseball is scrambling to bring in new rules to reverse those trends and improve the product.
The National Football League seeks to learn from baseball, embedding analysts in the league office, a group led by Skidmore University professor Michael Lopez. Each year Lopez gets hundreds of hackers to participate the Big Data Bowl, the NFL’s analytics contest put on with the help of Amazon AWS and Kaggle. This year’s winning team included Sam Walczak, a student in the University of Minnesota data science master’s program. Walczak met teammates Marc Richards and Jack Werner as undergraduates at St. Olaf College. Wei Peng, who studies statistics in the University of Pittsburgh Statistics Ph.D. program with Richards, completed the squad.”
Michael Lewis, the author of the book Moneyball, covers the subject of NBA rules enforcement in his April 2019 podcast. One of his conclusions: fairness is a function of players’ relative importance. More important, higher-paid players are treated differently than less important, lower-paid players.
The rate of analytical innovation should only increase throughout sports, so the rate of rule-changing in sports will also need to move quickly. The athletes, especially the ones we like the best, are not going to like the changes. But it’s what needs to happen.