ABSTRACT
Rudy Gobert's positive COVID-19 diagnosis in March of 2020 started the process that led to American sports shutting down in the early days of the pandemic. After the diagnosis, video of him touching reporters' voice recorders at a press availability went viral. This framing analysis in five mainstream newspapers finds that over the course of 72 hours, Gobert went from a bad actor to a hero in news copy as an episodic frame focusing on his actions gave way to a thematic frame about the virus and its effects on the country.
ABSTRACT
History: A 20 year old D1 men's basketball player with a history of COVID the month prior presented with worsening low back pain. He denied any injury, but reported the pain started as low back discomfort after a basketball game the week prior. He noted a progression and radiation of pain down his right lower extremity to his toes. He had tried physical therapy and dry needling, as well as cyclobenzaprine and naproxen from team physicians with mild improvement. The pain worsened and he went to the ED for evaluation. He was afebrile and had a lumbar radiograph with no acute fracture, grade 1 anterolisthesis of L5 on S1. He was discharged home with norco. Over the next 2 days, he developed chills and in the context of his worsening back pain, his team physicians ordered an MRI. Physical Exam: BMI 26.9 Temp 97.9degree Heart rate: 73 Respiratory rate 14 BP: 124/64 MSK: Spine- Intact skin with generalized pain over lumbar area, worse over the right paraspinal musculature. 5/5 strength of bilateral lower extremity flexion and extension of his hips, knees, and plantar and dorsiflexion of ankles and toes. Bilateral intact sensibility in the sciatic, femoral, superficial, and deep peroneal, sural, and saphenous nerve distributions. Slightly diminished sensibility over the right deep peroneal nerve distribution compared to left. 2/4 patellar and achilles DTRs. No clonus, downgoing Babinski sign. Positive straight leg raise at 45 degrees with the right lower extremity. Differential Diagnosis: 141. Sciatica 142. Lumbar Muscle Strain 143. Disk Herniation 144. Spondylolisthesis 145. Vertebral Osteomyelitis Test Results: CBC:WBC10, HGB13.2, neutrophils 75.7% (red 45%-74%). Unremarkable CMP. CRP =7.31, ESR 23 Blood culture negative, throat culture negative. TB test negative. COVID test negative. Flu test negative. Urine culture and UDS negative. HIV test negative. Procalcitonin of 0.07. IR guided aspiration and bacterial Culture yielded MSSA. MRI w/contrast: showing L1-L4 facet edema concerning for infectious spondylitis, intramuscular, and epidural abscess. Final Diagnosis: Acute intramuscular abscess, vertebral osteomyelitis, with epidural abscess. Discussion(s): Vertebral osteomyelitis is a serious but quite rare disease in the immunocompetent, elite athlete population. Staphylococcus Aureus is the culprit a majority of the time, with only 50% of cases showing neurologic symptoms. This case was unique given the proximity to a dry needling treatment which is the only explainable vector of infection, normal blood cultures in this disease which hematogenously spreads, negativeHIV and other infectious disease testing, and otherwise benign history. Early recognition of this disease yields better outcomes and reduces incidence of severe debility. 5% to 10%of patients experience recurrence of back pain or osteomyelitis later on in life. Outcome(s): Patient was hospitalized and started on Cefepime and Vancomycin. Had an echocardiogram revealing changes consistent with athlete's heart without signs of vegetation on his cardiac valves. Neurosurgery declined to treat surgically. He continued to improve until he was ultimately discharged on hospital day 4 with a picc line and Nafcillin and was later changed to oral augmentin per ID. Follow-Up: By his 6 week follow-up visit with infectious disease and the team physicians, his back pain had completely resolved and was cleared to start a return to play protocol. There was no progression of disease since starting antibiotics, and no recurrence of back pain since treatment.
ABSTRACT
[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fphys.2022.949445.].
ABSTRACT
Using the setting of the National Basketball Association's "bubble” during early stages of the COVID‐19 pandemic, we use fixed‐effects regressions with game‐level player data to test for the impact of "psychic” costs of migration on worker productivity. We construct a unique dataset on player families to test for differential impacts of worker isolation from friends and family on players in committed relationships or those with children. Our results indicate that relative to other players, the "psychic” costs of the migration of playing in the "bubble” had a differential negative impact on the performance of players in relationships and/or with children.
ABSTRACT
Studies on the effects of training confinement on athletes with physical impairments are limited. Hence, in this retrospective cohort study, we aimed to investigate the impact of prolonged cessation of organized team training due to the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic on the body composition of elite female Japanese basketball athletes. Fourteen female wheelchair basketball athletes (aged ≥20 years) were enrolled. The primary outcomes were lean and adipose indices measured using whole-body dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry. The impact of prolonged organized team training cessation on body composition was investigated by comparing the body composition at baseline and post-training confinement. A reduced whole-body lean mass (p = 0.038) and percent lean mass (p = 0.022), as well as an increased percent body fat (p = 0.035), were observed after the confinement period. The regional analysis revealed reduced percent lean and increased percent fat masses in the trunk (p = 0.015 and p = 0.026, respectively) and upper limbs (p = 0.036 and p = 0.048, respectively). In conclusion, prolonged organized team training cessation reduced lean mass and increased body fat percentage, primarily in the trunk and upper limbs. Individualized training programs targeting these body regions should be implemented to improve body composition and physical conditions in athletes during and after prolonged cessation of organized team training.
ABSTRACT
Using COVID-19 safety protocols as a natural experiment, we are able to delineate three distinct attendance categories in the NBA: 1) unrestricted games played prior to the pandemic, 2) attendance-restricted games played with socially distanced fans, and 3) ‘ghost games' played without fans. Further, since attendance at restricted games was exogenously determined by local COVID-19 protocols that were in turn driven by changes in COVID-19 case counts, we are able to estimate whether the ‘marginal fan' contributes to home advantage. Taken together, our results indicate that the presence of fans matters to home team performance;in fact, ‘ghost games' eliminated home advantage in totality. With a relatively small number of socially distanced fans, however, the entirety of home advantage was retained. Interestingly, since the size of socially distanced crowds had a statistically insignificant impact on home advantage, we find no evidence of a ‘marginal fan' effect. Finally, since researchers have found that officiating is influenced by fans in international soccer (e.g. Anders and Rotthoff, 2014), we explore whether NBA officiating behaviour was altered due to changes in attendance conditions. Our results indicate that NBA officials were not measurably influenced by the presence or quantity of fans.
ABSTRACT
Purpose: The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic response is not only devastating nations and economies across the globe but it is also severely disrupting the event industry, with government and health authorities forcing many events to be postponed or cancelled. The purpose of this study is to investigate the prospective attendees' emotional responses to cancelled events. This study draws upon grief cycle theory to articulate different layers of the grief process in the event domain of inquiry. Design/methodology/approach: The National Collegiate Athletic Association basketball tournament was selected as the research context. Taking user-generated messages from Twitter, this study first performed content analysis to organize lexical patterns into categories and higher-order themes based on the grief cycle. It also performed social network analyses using UCINET to illustrate how different grief phases are inter-related. Findings: Results not only point to attendees' self-expression manifested through a continuum of denial, anger, bargaining and acceptance but they also reveal a three-layer hierarchy of grief, namely, event-related, socio-politics-related and crisis-related. The network analysis further illustrates how grief phases are tied into a complex network of grief messages. Originality/value: This study advances the event literature by improving knowledge about attendees' emotional responses to cancelled events. It increases our understanding of the grieving process in the aftermath of COVID-19. The proposed triple grief cycle helps advance the literature by showcasing how voices from prospective attendees represent three pillars of grief hierarchy. The findings also underscore the emotional crisis of the COVID-19 aftermath. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)
ABSTRACT
In modern days, making recommendation for news articles poses a great challenge due to vast amount of online information. However, providing personalized recommendations from news articles, which are the sources of condense textual information is not a trivial task. A recommendation system needs to understand both the textual information of a news article, and the user contexts in terms of long-term and temporary preferences via the user's historic records. Unfortunately, many existing methods do not possess the capability to meet such need. In this work, we propose a neural deep news recommendation model called CupMar, that not only is able to learn the user-profile representation in different contexts, but also is able to leverage the multi-aspects properties of a news article to provide accurate, personalized news recommendations to users. The main components of our CupMar approach include the News Encoder and the User-Profile Encoder. Specifically, the News Encoder uses multiple properties such as news category, knowledge entity, title and body content with advanced neural network layers to derive informative news representation, while the User-Profile Encoder looks through a user's browsed news, infers both of her long-term and recent preference contexts to encode a user representation, and finds the most relevant candidate news for her. We evaluate our CupMar model with extensive experiments on the popular Microsoft News Dataset (MIND), and demonstrate the strong performance of our approach.
ABSTRACT
PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to explore and test certain assumptions concerning the role of the media in its coverage of the Olympic Games, US men's and women's basketball in particular, and its perceived impact on brand image of the athletes' performance from a fan's motivational and financial perspective.Design/methodology/approachUses and gratifications theory and sport fan motivation scales were used to identify potential impacts of media coverage and branding on athletic performance. Based on a study of 143 working professionals that identified themselves as Olympic sport fans in the Pittsburgh, PA metropolitan area, several hypotheses were tested.FindingsThe most to least important factor-based constructs found from a PCA (Principal Components Analysis)/factor analysis included competitiveness, fan commitment, media connections, media impacts, demographics and financial impacts. When using the construct athletic performance at the Olympic level as the dependent variable, results suggested that competitiveness, media connections and fan commitment were significant for males only, while only media connections for significant for females. Males were found to be more player-centric than females, willing to be more focused on the competitive nature of the Olympic Games and to dedicate more money for such activities.Originality/valueFocusing on Olympic Games and associated athletes' competitive nature opens a unique perspective from fan's gender perspective.
ABSTRACT
The aim of this study was to determine possible changes in physical performance and morphological characteristics in young basketball players before and after quarantine caused by COVID-19. The research was conducted on a total sample of 46 young basketball players. Participants were measured before the quarantine and pandemic in January 2020 and then after the quarantine period, one year later in March 2021. The results indicate the existence of significant differences in total muscle mass (p < 0.01) in favor of higher values measured before quarantine. Moreover, total fat percentage was higher (p < 0.03) after quarantine. As for physical performance, significant differences were also observed in the counter movement jump test (p < 0.05) and the 20 m shuttle run test (p < 0.05), with significantly poorer results for the group of participants measured after quarantine. The authors conclude that the consequences of the quarantine and pandemic of the SARS-CoV-2 virus were definitely negative, as higher values of body fat and lower values of the percentage of total muscle mass were observed. In addition, a lower level of the explosive power of lower limbs was observed, accompanied by lower aerobic endurance in young basketball players.
ABSTRACT
The two-parameter classical Weibull distribution is commonly implemented to cater for the product's reliability, model the failure rates, analyze lifetime phenomena, etc. In this work, we study a novel version of the Weibull model for analyzing real-life events in the sports and medical sectors. The newly derived version of the Weibull model, namely, a new cosine-Weibull (NC -Weibull) distribution. The importance of this research is that it suggests a novel version of the Wei-bull model without adding any additional parameters. Different distributional properties of the NC-Weibull distribution are obtained. The maximum likelihood approach is implemented to esti-mate the parameters of the NC-Weibull distribution. Finally, three applications are analyzed to prove the superiority of the NC-Weibull distribution over some other existing probability models considered in this study. The first and second applications, respectively, show the mortality rates of COVID-19 patients in Italy and Canada. Whereas, the third data set represents the injury rates of the basketball players collected during the 2008-2009 and 2018-2019 national basketball associ-ation seasons. Based on four selection criteria, it is observed that the NC-Weibull distribution may be a more suitable model for considering the sports and healthcare data sets.(c) 2022 THE AUTHORS. Published by Elsevier BV on behalf of Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/).
ABSTRACT
Globally, a gender gap in sport leadership exists despite global reforms, leadership and key strategic actions. This paper reports on the leadership dimension of the 2021 follow-up study to the 2014 baseline study on gender leadership and participation in sport within southern Africa. It reports on changes over time in selected sports (athletics, basketball, boxing, football, and judo as recorded in the 2014 study, with the addition of netball in the 2021 research) and within five countries (Lesotho, Malawi, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe). A purposively selected sample group completed an online survey (N = 41), followed by structured interviews conducted with 45 decision makers from relevant government entities and national sport organisations. Findings indicate that Covid-19 had little effect on leadership composition across organisational types. Government entities spearheaded ‘gender reform' with 47.7% female representation at the executive level. National Olympic Committees had 24.1% women in leadership and national sport federations 27.7% with the latter showing an increase of 6.7% since 2014. Men dominated in sub-committees (62.2%) and emerged as leaders in netball – a sport featuring 98% female participation. Key recommendations address the gender gap in sport leadership from the regional level.
ABSTRACT
Basketball in performance depends on numerous factors, where a stable trend was identified by winning teams with better performances in shooting effectiveness and rebounding. However, there is a need for a better understanding of pre-shot combinations that lead to these performance trends. This study aimed to analyze NBA teams' game-related statistics, pre-shooting combinations, and pick-and-roll differences between winning and losing teams (considering the context: playing at home, away, or in a neutral court) during the COVID-19 season. A retrospective cross-sectional study on the 2019-2020 NBA season (906 games) was carried out. Game-related statistics were gathered from the private company InStat (https://basketball.instatscout.com/). The discriminant analysis and binary logistic regression models were run in order to discriminate the most important features of winning teams depending on the game location. The results showed that defensive rebounds and three-point shooting percentage remained the most important variables that best discriminated winners and losers independently of the game location context. The main results showed that winning teams had a better shooting percentage based on three-pointers, catch-and-shot actions, cuts, pick-and-roll efficacy, and uncontested shots based on a better collective behavior after a successful space creation dynamic through a tactical functional unit. At the same time, teams would need players with the ability to clear those possessions in which the opponents force to an isolation or a contested shot. From a practical application perspective, coaches should focus on composing a team with good shooters, skilled players in isolations, and a good game-time pick-and-roll strategy.
ABSTRACT
The global crisis caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the training of football players, disrupting its continuity as one of the basic principles of training. In this regard, the aim of this paper is to determine the fitness level of young football players before and after the lockdown caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which led us to new findings in specific football training and sports training theory. The subjects in this study were young Serbian football players (15-16 years of age, N = 11). All players were tested for assessment of speed, agility, jumping ability, and endurance before and after the lockdown caused by COVID-19. The results indicate that there is no significant difference in speed at 5, 10, 20, and 30m, in the jumping ability measured by the countermovement jump with and without arm swing, nor in the endurance measured by the YO-YO intermittent recovery test-Level 1. The only statistically significant differences were found in the zig-zag agility test, both with and without dribbling the ball (p < 0.05). In conclusion, it can be argued that individual programmes that were the main content of the activities during lockdown could replace systematic football training in terms of developing and sustaining general abilities, such as speed, endurance and power, but it is impossible to compensate for specific team training in terms of specific abilities such as agility. © 2021, Drustvo Pedagoga Tjelesne i Zdravstvene Kulture. All rights reserved.
ABSTRACT
Sports spectators are one of the factors that affect home advantage. The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic created unique conditions under which most of the leagues in the world played matches without crowds for over six months. This situation facilitated an analytical comparison of two different periods: before and during the coronavirus pandemic. The current study sought to examine home advantage in the Israeli sport domain in general, and specifically the impact of the absence of a crowd. The study consisted of 4,030 matches played in Israel's top football and basketball leagues, of which 3,589 took place with crowds from August 2015 to March 2020, while the others were held without spectators from May 2020 to February 2021. Descriptive and analyses of variance procedures indicated a home advantage independent of crowd size, density, geographic region, league level, and type of sport. However, higher-quality teams demonstrated a higher home advantage ratio for the goals conceded. The findings of the study indicate that in the Israeli context, the crowd plays less of a role in home advantage than other potential factors.
ABSTRACT
Background. Case and contact investigation is a mitigation strategy to understand transmission of diseases. The goal of this study is to assess COVID-19 transmission in schools that employ contact tracing. Methods. Five middle and high schools provided a list of ongoing student and staff cases and their school contacts for the 2021-22 school year. Cases were eligible for interview if they had a known positive test or were a 'presumed positive' by a practitioner. Contacts were eligible if they were identified as a close contact to a case within their school. Contacts who later became a case were eligible for a separate case interview. Trained interviewers contacted eligible individuals to offer COVID-19 resources and determine interests in participating in the study. Interested cases and contacts underwent a semi-structured interview with standardized questions. Results. From 5/2021-4/2022, 360 cases (45% during Omicron surge) and their 412 contacts were identified (Fig 1).Among the 111 cases interviewed, 75% were students, half were in grades 6-8 (Fig 2). 61% of the cases were vaccinated with their primary series. 92% were symptomatic and fatigue, cough, and headaches were the most common symptoms. Transmission from school occurred in 29% (Fig 3) and most commonly occurred in the classroom. Among the 68 contacts interviewed, 96% were students. The two most reported activities contacts participated in were band (n=9) and sports (n=22), 10 from playing basketball. Three contacts reported exposure to COVID-19 within the household and five contacts reported exposure outside the home or school. Conclusion. Case and contact investigation can be a valuable tool to assess COVID-19 transmission in schools. Almost one-third of cases reported school exposures, a greater school transmission rate than previous reported likely do to the increased transmissibility of Omicron. Assessing transmission events with this strategy alone may be limited by its reliance on self-reports. Case investigations can help schools identify potential areas to improve in limiting school-based COVID-19 transmission.
ABSTRACT
Learning environments that support a sense of belonging have been shown to help students fully and meaningfully participate in their learning. Less is known, however, about the social organization of online learning environments that support a sense of belonging, particularly in postsecondary contexts. With an explicit attention to issues of equity, this mixed-methods study examined what makes undergraduate students in the United States of America (N = 4,544) feel included in online learning environments during a global pandemic. Survey responses collected in the fall of 2020 were analyzed through a sociocultural learning theory framework. Rating scale and open-ended responses revealed that students' sense of belonging and inclusion varied by student race and gender and by instructional modality (synchronous vs. asynchronous). Opportunities for discussion, interaction with peers, and feeling that one's racial or ethnic group was represented in the curriculum were among the environmental affordances that supported a sense of belonging.
ABSTRACT
This study investigates the impact of restricted crowds caused by the COVID-19 pandemic on the margin of victory of games in the NBA. Using 12,500 game-level observations from 11 NBA seasons from 2010/11 to 2020/21, the study first shows that during the COVID-19 season of 2020/21, games had a greater average margin of victory than any of the prior seasons. Regression results reveal that games played in front of restricted crowds were more likely to be won by a margin of 15, 20, or 25 points than games played in front of non-restricted crowds. The results indicate similar effects for games played in an empty arena or in front of a small crowd. Implications for the NBA and other major team sports leagues are discussed.
ABSTRACT
Recent advancements in virtual reality technology have attracted increasing attention from enterprises and scholars, and many new related products have been launched. Due to the current COVID-19 epidemic, the non-face-to-face teaching environment will seriously affect students' basketball learning. We therefore combined basketball learning with metaverse technology, discussed basketball teaching in a virtual reality environment, and examined the influencing factors of college students' intentions to use metaverse technology. In the light of UTAUT2, a new research model was proposed, and quantitative research was carried out. The results of a survey of 1074 valid samples revealed that habits and attitudes are crucial factors in the success of basketball learning using a metaverse. The findings also indicate that grade and gender are moderator variables.