Detecting Concussions At Time Of Impact On The Football Field

The University of Minnesota is employing a new sensing device inside the helmets of players to detect forces that are great enough to induce concussions. Known as the Head Impact Telemetry System or HITS, the technology uses sensors in the helmets to page coaches and trainers when a high impact hit occurs, sending the player's jersey number and G-force of the impact. The data is not only being used to alert team staff to potential injury but is being captured and sent to the helmet manufacturer to aid in future design consideration. The system cost about $1000 per helmet. Check out this Discovery Channel video...

Big League Athletes Get Behind Youth Sports Social Site

Weplay.com is a social networking site for kids who play sports, parents, and coaches. According to the New York Times, "Young athletes will be able to set up a profile, post pictures, communicate with friends and share videos of games. Parents will be able to get practice schedules, coordinate car pools and find out which equipment to purchase. Coaches will be able to communicate with their players and parents, as well as learn about strategy and other skills." Big leaguers such as NBA stars Tony Parker and LeBron James, NFLer Payton Manning, and New York Yankee Derek Jeter are taking part. Jeter, in fact, has put some of his own money into the venture and will receive equity in the company in exchange for his participation, saying the equity position is “very important, because you can really feel good about something if you help build it.”

This is a site that should have been built long ago, parents, coaches, and athletes have been using a patch work of sites and tools to communicate schedules and coordinate travel for years. I take an abundance of photos during the hockey and baseball seasons and have recently found the file sharing site drop.io to be invaluable in distributing photos to parents and players alike. The real question is, will the athletes like being in the same social network as their parents? A central location for sharing information amongst team mates sounds like winner, at least for the parents.

How to assure that the best team wins

The CBC has an interesting article that, to me, proves that scientists don't know very much about sports! After analyzing and simulating league play, they found "a great degree of randomness of outcomes in games, with at least some chance that a lesser team can win in any given game". I have some experience in coaching, having participated in two national sporting championships. The fact is that teams who look good on paper do not always win, there is randomness in sport, that's what makes sport interesting! I do find this quote about major league baseball interesting however, "Over the past century, the lower-seeded team had an astounding 44 per cent chance of defeating a higher-seeded team", that number seems high but plausible. The researchers say that in order to ensure that the best team wins the respective schedules should contain a number of games equaling the square of the number of teams in the league. That would mean that a major league baseball team would have to play a schedule of 256 games, nearly 100 more than the current schedule! I say the best team should not necessarily win, but rather the team that performs the best when required to. If the best team won all of the time, nobody would be interested in participating or watching!