In modern football, physiological assessments are becoming increasingly important for optimal performance not only in adults but also in youth. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of ...six-week plyometric exercises with tabata protocol on some biomotor properties in U-16 male football players. The athletes were randomly divided into 2 groups as experimental (n:12) and control (n:12). The plyometric exercise programme was applied to the experimental group in addition to their own football training 2 days a week for 6 weeks, while the control group only participated in football training. The normality level of the data was determined by Shapiro-Wilk test. Independent Sample T Test for independent groups and Paired Sample T Test for dependent groups were used to analyse the normally distributed data. According to the research findings, a statistically significant difference was found in the pre-test - post-test measurement values of all performance tests of the experimental group and between all performance tests (T-Agility, 20-m sprint, vertical jump, flamingo balance and long jump standing) of the experimental and control groups (p < 0.05). No significant difference was found in the control group (p>0.05). In conclusion, it can be said that six-week plyometric exercises applied with Tabata protocol were effective in the development of some biomotor properties in U-16 male football players. In this context, it can be stated that plyometric exercises added to training plans can be used as an effective method in the development of performance parameters of athletes.
Football fans, pundits and even managers have long debated whether having a player sent off can actually make a team stronger. Matthew Dowsett takes a Neymaresque dive into the data
Football fans, ...pundits and even managers have long debated whether having a player sent off can actually make a team stronger. Matthew Dowsett takes a Neymaresque dive into the data
In recent years, scholars have understood the increasing use of the St George's Cross by football fans to be evidence of a rise in a specifically 'English' identity. This has emerged as part of a ...wider 'national' response to broader political processes such as devolution and European integration which have fragmented identities within the UK. Using the controversial figurational sociological approach advocated by the twentieth-century theorist Norbert Elias, this book challenges such a view, drawing on ethnographic research amongst fans to explore the precise nature of the relationship between contemporary English national identity and football fan culture. Examining football fans' expressions of Englishness in public houses and online spaces, the author discusses the effects of globalization, European integration and UK devolution on English society, revealing that the use of the St George's Cross does not signal the emergence of a specifically 'English' national consciousness, but in fact masks a more complex, multi-layered process of national identity construction. A detailed and grounded study of identity, nationalism and globalization amongst football fans, English National Identity and Football Fan Culture will appeal to scholars and students of politics, sociology and anthropology with interests in ethnography, the sociology of sport, fan cultures, globalization and contemporary national identities.
Collegiate football programs encourage athletes to pursue high body weights.
To examine position-dependent trends over time in body size characteristics among football players in the National ...Collegiate Athletic Association Division III New England Small College Athletic Conference (NESCAC) from 1956 to 2014 and to compare the observed absolute and relative changes with those in age-matched male population controls.
Descriptive laboratory study.
Medical school affiliated with a NESCAC institution.
Football team rosters from the 10-member NESCAC schools, available as public documents, were analyzed along with body size data from general population males aged 20 to 29 years from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES).
Body weight, height, and calculated body mass index were evaluated using analysis of variance, linear regression, and nonlinear regression to determine the distribution features of size variables and changes associated with time (year), school, and position.
Among NESCAC linemen, absolute and relative changes over time in body weight and body mass index exceeded corresponding changes in the NHANES population controls. New England Small College Athletic Conference offensive linemen body weights increased by 37.5% from 1956 to 2014 (192 to 264 lb 86.4 to 118.8 kg), compared with a 12% increase (164 to 184 lb 73.8 to 82.8 kg) since 1961 in the NHANES population controls. Body mass index changed in parallel with body weight and exceeded 35 kg/m(2) in more than 30% of contemporary NESCAC offensive linemen. Among skill players in the NESCAC group, time-related changes in body size characteristics generally paralleled those in the NHANES controls.
High body weight and body mass indices were evident in offensive linemen, even among those in Division III football programs with no athletic scholarships. These characteristics may be associated with adverse cardiovascular and metabolic outcomes. We need approaches to encourage risk modification in the postfootball lifestyles of these individuals.
The Dancing Bear McDole, Ron; Morris, Rob; Flint, George
2018, 2018-10-01
eBook
From the early sixties to the late seventies, defensive end Ron McDole experienced football's golden age from inside his old school, two bar helmet. During an eighteen year pro career, ...McDole-nicknamed "The Dancing Bear"-played in over 250 games, including two AFL Championships with the Buffalo Bills and one NFL Championship with the Washington Redskins. A cagey and deceptively agile athlete, McDole wreaked havoc on football's best offenses as part of a Bills defensive line that held opponents without a rushing touchdown for seventeen straight games. His twelve interceptions remain a pro record for defensive ends. Traded by the Bills in 1970, he was given new life in Washington as one of the most famous members of George Allen's game smart veterans known as "The Over the Hill Gang." Through it all, McDole was known and loved by teammates and foes alike for his knowledge and skill on the field and his ability to have fun off it. In The Dancing Bear McDole the storyteller traces his life from his humble beginnings in Toledo, Ohio, to his four years at the University of Nebraska, his marriage to high school sweetheart Paula, and his long, accomplished professional career. He recounts the days when a pro football player needed an off season job to pay the bills and teams had to drive around in buses to find a city park in which to practice. The old AFL and NFL blitz back to life through McDole's straightforward stories of time when the game was played more for love and glory than for money.
To ensure uncertainty in match outcomes, professional sporting leagues have used various competitive balance policies, including player salary caps, revenue sharing among teams and player drafts. The ...Australian Football League (AFL) introduced a player draft in 1986, and to refine its operation, a draft value index (DVI) was introduced in 2015. The DVI allocates a numeric value to each individual player draft pick, with these values determined by the AFL using historic player compensation or wage and salary data. The AFL DVI plays an essential role in the operation of its player draft; however, other research has questioned the validity of such indexes. This paper aims to produce an alternative to the AFL DVI. The former index uses career compensation as the determinant of value, whereas we use other measures of player performance. First, various models were developed to predict on-field performance, such as games played (both in a recruit’s career and season) after a draftee was selected for the first time by a team. This was then retrofitted to the pick used to select these draftees to create the new DVIs. Even though the predicted DVI followed an inverse monotonic function like the existing index, the decline in value for the DVI produced here was less steep, unlike the AFL’s. This allowed us to conclude that players’ salaries did not always strongly correlate to performance. The change in performance between players selected at different points in the draft did not vary as much as their wages. Though this scheme is applied to the AFL, the underlying concept could be directly exported to other player drafts.
Though player drafts have commonly been utilised to equitably disperse amateur talent and avoid bidding wars, often they have also been accused of creating a monopsony labour market which restricts ...player movement. Within the Australian Football League (AFL) some have called for the increase of the initial draftee contract from two to three seasons, which further pushes the envelope on monopsony power. Instead of increasing the contract length, this paper suggests a call option to be purchased by the teams allowing them to add a further season to the draftee contract at a predetermined compensation package should they choose to do so at the end of the initial contract. The call prices per pick were calculated using the Black-Scholes model and were valued between 1% and 1.5% of the pick value. However, it failed to follow a monotonic function similar to pick value, owing to managerial overconfidence and sunk investment plays. Overall, the findings allow teams to procure the option of increasing initial draftee contracts and not impede further on a player’s ability to move.
Concerned about potentially increased risk of neurodegenerative disease, several health professionals and policy makers have proposed limiting or banning youth participation in American-style tackle ...football. Given the large affected population (over 1 million boys play high school football annually), careful estimation of the long-term health effects of playing football is necessary for developing effective public health policy. Unfortunately, existing attempts to estimate these effects tend not to generalize to current participants because they either studied a much older cohort or, more seriously, failed to account for potential confounding. We leverage data from a nationally representative cohort of American men who were in grades 7-12 in the 1994-95 school year to estimate the effect of playing football in adolescent on depression in early adulthood. We control for several potential confounders related to subjects' health, behavior, educational experience, family background, and family health history through matching and regression adjustment. We found no evidence of even a small harmful effect of football participation on scores on a version of the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression scale (CES-D) nor did we find evidence of adverse associations with several secondary outcomes including anxiety disorder diagnosis or alcohol dependence in early adulthood. For men who were in grades 7-12 in the 1994-95 school year, participating or intending to participate in school football does not appear to be a major risk factor for early adulthood depression.
The risk of heat-related illness and death may continue to increase in many locations as a consequence of climate change, but information on the effectiveness of policies to protect populations from ...the adverse effects of excessive heat is limited. In 2009, the National Athletic Trainers' Association Inter-Association Task Force (NATA-IATF) released guidelines to reduce exertional heat illness (EHI) among U.S. high school athletes participating in preseason sports activities, including preseason practice sessions for American football. A subset of state high school athletic associations have implemented state-mandated guidelines consistent with the 2009 NATA-IATF recommendations, but their effectiveness for reducing preseason EHI is unknown.
This study examines the association between the enactment of state high school athletic association-mandated NATA-IATF guidelines and the rate of EHI among high school students during preseason American football practice sessions.
We performed a quasi-experimental interrupted time-series study of EHI during high school American football practices in the 2005/2006-2016/2017 school years. We estimated state-level EHI rates using High School Reporting Information Online injury and athlete-exposure data, and used generalized estimating equations Poisson regression models to estimate incidence rate ratios (IRRs) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) comparing state-years with and without mandated NATA-IATF guidelines. State-level covariates included state-year-specific average August temperatures, yearly deviations from each state's August average temperature across the study period, and school year.
Data were available for 455 state-years from 48 states, including 32 state-years (7.0%) from 8 states when mandated guidelines consistent with the NATA-IATF recommendations were implemented. During an estimated 2,697,089 athlete-exposures, 190 EHIs were reported. Estimated preseason EHI rates were lower during state-years with versus without mandated guidelines (adjusted Formula: see text, 95% CI: 0.23, 0.87).
Our findings suggest that high school athletes would benefit from enactment of the 2009 NATA-IATF guidelines. Similar analyses of the effectiveness of other public health policies to reduce adverse health effects from ambient heat are warranted. https://doi.org/10.1289/EHP4163.
Background:
Biomechanical studies have shown that synthetic turf surfaces do not release cleats as readily as natural turf, and it has been hypothesized that concomitant increased loading on the foot ...contributes to the incidence of lower body injuries.
This study evaluates this hypothesis from an epidemiologic perspective, examining whether the lower extremity injury rate in National Football League (NFL) games is greater on contemporary synthetic turfs as compared with natural surfaces.
Hypothesis:
Incidence of lower body injury is higher on synthetic turf than on natural turf among elite NFL athletes playing on modern-generation surfaces.
Study Design:
Cohort study; Level of evidence, 3.
Methods:
Lower extremity injuries reported during 2012-2016 regular season games were included, with all 32 NFL teams reporting injuries under mandated, consistent data collection guidelines. Poisson models were used to construct crude and adjusted incidence rate ratios (IRRs) to estimate the influence of surface type on lower body injury groupings (all lower extremity, knee, ankle/foot) for any injury reported as causing a player to miss football participation as well as injuries resulting in ≥8 days missed. A secondary analysis was performed on noncontact/surface contact injuries.
Results:
Play on synthetic turf resulted in a 16% increase in lower extremity injuries per play than that on natural turf (IRR, 1.16; 95% CI, 1.10-1.23). This association between synthetic turf and injury remained when injuries were restricted to those that resulted in ≥8 days missed, as well as when categorizations were narrowed to focus on distal injuries anatomically closer to the playing surface (knee, ankle/foot). The higher rate of injury on synthetic turf was notably stronger when injuries were restricted to noncontact/surface contact injuries (IRRs, 1.20-2.03; all statistically significant).
Conclusion:
These results support the biomechanical mechanism hypothesized and add confidence to the conclusion that synthetic turf surfaces have a causal impact on lower extremity injury.
PDF
