The Experts below are selected from a list of 360 Experts worldwide ranked by ideXlab platform
Aaron Clauset - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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safe leads and lead changes in competitive Team Sports
Physical Review E, 2015Co-Authors: Aaron Clauset, Marina Kogan, S RednerAbstract:We investigate the time evolution of lead changes within individual games of competitive Team Sports. Exploiting ideas from the theory of random walks, the number of lead changes within a single game follows a Gaussian distribution. We show that the probability that the last lead change and the time of the largest lead size are governed by the same arcsine law, a bimodal distribution that diverges at the start and at the end of the game. We also determine the probability that a given lead is "safe" as a function of its size L and game time t. Our predictions generally agree with comprehensive data on more than 1.25 million scoring events in roughly 40,000 games across four professional or semiprofessional Team Sports, and are more accurate than popular heuristics currently used in Sports analytics.
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Scoring dynamics across professional Team Sports: tempo, balance and predictability
EPJ Data Science, 2014Co-Authors: Sears Merritt, Aaron ClausetAbstract:Despite growing interest in quantifying and modeling the scoring dynamics within professional Sports games, relative little is known about what patterns or principles, if any, cut across different Sports. Using a comprehensive data set of scoring events in nearly a dozen consecutive seasons of college and professional (American) football, professional hockey, and professional basketball, we identify several common patterns in scoring dynamics. Across these Sports, scoring tempo - when scoring events occur - closely follows a common Poisson process, with a sport-specific rate. Similarly, scoring balance - how often a Team wins an event - follows a common Bernoulli process, with a parameter that effectively varies with the size of the lead. Combining these processes within a generative model of gameplay, we find they both reproduce the observed dynamics in all four Sports and accurately predict game outcomes. These results demonstrate common dynamical patterns underlying within-game scoring dynamics across professional Team Sports, and suggest specific mechanisms for driving them. We close with a brief discussion of the implications of our results for several popular hypotheses about Sports dynamics. (See supplementary material 1 )
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scoring dynamics across professional Team Sports tempo balance and predictability
arXiv: Applications, 2013Co-Authors: Sears Merritt, Aaron ClausetAbstract:Despite growing interest in quantifying and modeling the scoring dynamics within professional Sports games, relative little is known about what patterns or principles, if any, cut across different Sports. Using a comprehensive data set of scoring events in nearly a dozen consecutive seasons of college and professional (American) football, professional hockey, and professional basketball, we identify several common patterns in scoring dynamics. Across these Sports, scoring tempo---when scoring events occur---closely follows a common Poisson process, with a sport-specific rate. Similarly, scoring balance---how often a Team wins an event---follows a common Bernoulli process, with a parameter that effectively varies with the size of the lead. Combining these processes within a generative model of gameplay, we find they both reproduce the observed dynamics in all four Sports and accurately predict game outcomes. These results demonstrate common dynamical patterns underlying within-game scoring dynamics across professional Team Sports, and suggest specific mechanisms for driving them. We close with a brief discussion of the implications of our results for several popular hypotheses about Sports dynamics.
Duarte Araújo - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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What's Next in Complex Networks? Capturing the Concept of Attacking Play in Invasive Team Sports.
Sports Medicine, 2017Co-Authors: João Ramos, Rui J. Lopes, Duarte AraújoAbstract:The evolution of performance analysis within Sports sciences is tied to technology development and practitioner demands. However, how individual and collective patterns self-organize and interact in invasive Team Sports remains elusive. Social network analysis has been recently proposed to resolve some aspects of this problem, and has proven successful in capturing collective features resulting from the interactions between Team members as well as a powerful communication tool. Despite these advances, some fundamental Team Sports concepts such as an attacking play have not been properly captured by the more common applications of social network analysis to Team Sports performance. In this article, we propose a novel approach to Team Sports performance centered on sport concepts, namely that of an attacking play. Network theory and tools including temporal and bipartite or multilayered networks were used to capture this concept. We put forward eight questions directly related to Team performance to discuss how common pitfalls in the use of network tools for capturing Sports concepts can be avoided. Some answers are advanced in an attempt to be more precise in the description of Team dynamics and to uncover other metrics directly applied to sport concepts, such as the structure and dynamics of attacking plays. Finally, we propose that, at this stage of knowledge, it may be advantageous to build up from fundamental sport concepts toward complex network theory and tools, and not the other way around.
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spatial dynamics of Team Sports exposed by voronoi diagrams
Human Movement Science, 2012Co-Authors: Sofia Fonseca, Joao Milho, Bruno Travassos, Duarte AraújoAbstract:Abstract Team Sports represent complex systems: players interact continuously during a game, and exhibit intricate patterns of interaction, which can be identified and investigated at both individual and collective levels. We used Voronoi diagrams to identify and investigate the spatial dynamics of players’ behavior in Futsal. Using this tool, we examined 19 plays of a sub-phase of a Futsal game played in a reduced area (20 m 2 ) from which we extracted the trajectories of all players. Results obtained from a comparative analysis of player’s Voronoi area (dominant region) and nearest Teammate distance revealed different patterns of interaction between attackers and defenders, both at the level of individual players and Teams. We found that, compared to defenders, larger dominant regions were associated with attackers. Furthermore, these regions were more variable in size among players from the same Team but, at the player level, the attackers’ dominant regions were more regular than those associated with each of the defenders. These findings support a formal description of the dynamic spatial interaction of the players, at least during the particular sub-phase of Futsal investigated. The adopted approach may be extended to other Team behaviors where the actions taken at any instant in time by each of the involved agents are associated with the space they occupy at that particular time.
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Sports Teams as superorganisms implications of sociobiological models of behaviour for research and practice in Team Sports performance analysis
Sports Medicine, 2012Co-Authors: Ricardo Duarte, Duarte Araújo, Vanda Correia, Keith DavidsAbstract:Significant criticisms have emerged on the way that collective behaviours in Team Sports have been traditionally evaluated. A major recommendation has been for future research and practice to focus on the interpersonal relationships developed between Team players during performance. Most research has typically investigated Team game performance in subunits (attack or defence), rather than considering the interactions of performers within the whole Team. In this paper, we offer the view that Team performance analysis could benefit from the adoption of biological models used to explain how repeated interactions between grouping individuals scale to emergent social collective behaviours. We highlight the advantages of conceptualizing Sports Teams as functional integrated 'super-organisms' and discuss innovative measurement tools, which might be used to capture the superorganismic properties of Sports Teams. These tools are suitable for revealing the idiosyncratic collective behaviours underlying the cooperative and competitive tendencies of different Sports Teams, particularly their coordination of labour and the most frequent channels of communication and patterns of interaction between Team players. The principles and tools presented here can serve as the basis for novel approaches and applications of performance analysis devoted to understanding Sports Teams as cohesive, functioning, high-order organisms exhibiting their own peculiar behavioural patterns.
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informational constraints shape emergent functional behaviours during performance of interceptive actions in Team Sports
Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 2012Co-Authors: Duarte Araújo, Keith Davids, Luis Vilar, Bruno Travassos, Pedro Esteves, C VandaAbstract:Abstract Objectives This study aimed to explain how defenders intercept the trajectory of a passing ball by understanding how they coupled their actions to critical information sources in a competitive performance setting in Team Sports. Design Time series data on movement displacements of fifteen senior male futsal performers were recorded and digitized during nine competitive futsal games. Method Performance was recorded by a digital camera and digitized with TACTO software. The spatial–temporal dynamics of performers during ten intercepted and ten non-intercepted passes were compared. Time to ball interception was calculated by the difference between the time of each defender to an interception point in ball trajectory and the time of the ball’s arrival at the same interception point. Initial distances between defenders and ball and velocity data of defenders and ball over time were also recorded. Results Time to ball interception revealed positive values when passes were not intercepted, and negative to zero values when passes were intercepted. At the moment of pass initiation defenders’ distances to the ball constrained their possibilities for successful interception. Analysis of defenders’ adaptations to the environment revealed that continuous changes in the defenders’ velocities constrained their success of the interception. Conclusions Intercepted passes seemed to be influenced by the continuous regulation of a defender’s velocity relative to the ball’s trajectory. Time to ball interception is a variable that captured the emergent functional behaviours of players attempting to intercept the trajectory of a pass in the Team sport of futsal.
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constraints on competitive performance of attacker defender dyads in Team Sports
Journal of Sports Sciences, 2012Co-Authors: Luis Vilar, Duarte Araújo, Keith Davids, Bruno TravassosAbstract:Abstract Previous research on coordination dynamics of 1 vs. 1 sub-phases in Team Sports has reported stable emergent patterns of coordination in the displacement trajectories of attackers and defenders. The aim of this study was to use attacker–defender interactions in competitive Team match-play to investigate how the locations of the goal and ball constrain the pattern-forming dynamics of attacker–defender dyadic systems. Ten high-level futsal matches were filmed and 13 goal sequences selected for analysis. Displacements of the players and the ball were filmed and digitized from 52 attacker–defender dyadic system interactions. Results showed that, although attackers and defenders exhibited similar angular orientations to the goal, the latter always remained closer to the goal than attackers. Observations revealed that in-phase patterns of coordination emerged from changes to both the distances and angles of attackers and defenders to the goal. Attackers always remained closer to the ball than defenders...
Keith Davids - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Team Sports performance analysed through the lens of social network theory implications for research and practice
Sports Medicine, 2017Co-Authors: Joao Ribeiro, Keith Davids, Pedro V Silva, Ricardo Duarte, Julio GargantaAbstract:This paper discusses how social network analyses and graph theory can be implemented in Team Sports performance analyses to evaluate individual (micro) and collective (macro) performance data, and how to use this information for designing practice tasks. Moreover, we briefly outline possible limitations of social network studies and provide suggestions for future research. Instead of cataloguing discrete events or player actions, it has been argued that researchers need to consider the synergistic interpersonal processes emerging between Teammates in competitive performance environments. Theoretical assumptions on Team coordination prompted the emergence of innovative, theoretically driven methods for assessing collective Team sport behaviours. Here, we contribute to this theoretical and practical debate by re-conceptualising Sports Teams as complex social networks. From this perspective, players are viewed as network nodes, connected through relevant information variables (e.g. a ball-passing action), sustaining complex patterns of interaction between Teammates (e.g. a ball-passing network). Specialised tools and metrics related to graph theory could be applied to evaluate structural and topological properties of interpersonal interactions of Teammates, complementing more traditional analysis methods. This innovative methodology moves beyond the use of common notation analysis methods, providing a richer understanding of the complexity of interpersonal interactions sustaining collective Team Sports performance. The proposed approach provides practical applications for coaches, performance analysts, practitioners and researchers by establishing social network analyses as a useful approach for capturing the emergent properties of interactions between players in Sports Teams.
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Sports Teams as superorganisms implications of sociobiological models of behaviour for research and practice in Team Sports performance analysis
Sports Medicine, 2012Co-Authors: Ricardo Duarte, Duarte Araújo, Vanda Correia, Keith DavidsAbstract:Significant criticisms have emerged on the way that collective behaviours in Team Sports have been traditionally evaluated. A major recommendation has been for future research and practice to focus on the interpersonal relationships developed between Team players during performance. Most research has typically investigated Team game performance in subunits (attack or defence), rather than considering the interactions of performers within the whole Team. In this paper, we offer the view that Team performance analysis could benefit from the adoption of biological models used to explain how repeated interactions between grouping individuals scale to emergent social collective behaviours. We highlight the advantages of conceptualizing Sports Teams as functional integrated 'super-organisms' and discuss innovative measurement tools, which might be used to capture the superorganismic properties of Sports Teams. These tools are suitable for revealing the idiosyncratic collective behaviours underlying the cooperative and competitive tendencies of different Sports Teams, particularly their coordination of labour and the most frequent channels of communication and patterns of interaction between Team players. The principles and tools presented here can serve as the basis for novel approaches and applications of performance analysis devoted to understanding Sports Teams as cohesive, functioning, high-order organisms exhibiting their own peculiar behavioural patterns.
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informational constraints shape emergent functional behaviours during performance of interceptive actions in Team Sports
Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 2012Co-Authors: Duarte Araújo, Keith Davids, Luis Vilar, Bruno Travassos, Pedro Esteves, C VandaAbstract:Abstract Objectives This study aimed to explain how defenders intercept the trajectory of a passing ball by understanding how they coupled their actions to critical information sources in a competitive performance setting in Team Sports. Design Time series data on movement displacements of fifteen senior male futsal performers were recorded and digitized during nine competitive futsal games. Method Performance was recorded by a digital camera and digitized with TACTO software. The spatial–temporal dynamics of performers during ten intercepted and ten non-intercepted passes were compared. Time to ball interception was calculated by the difference between the time of each defender to an interception point in ball trajectory and the time of the ball’s arrival at the same interception point. Initial distances between defenders and ball and velocity data of defenders and ball over time were also recorded. Results Time to ball interception revealed positive values when passes were not intercepted, and negative to zero values when passes were intercepted. At the moment of pass initiation defenders’ distances to the ball constrained their possibilities for successful interception. Analysis of defenders’ adaptations to the environment revealed that continuous changes in the defenders’ velocities constrained their success of the interception. Conclusions Intercepted passes seemed to be influenced by the continuous regulation of a defender’s velocity relative to the ball’s trajectory. Time to ball interception is a variable that captured the emergent functional behaviours of players attempting to intercept the trajectory of a pass in the Team sport of futsal.
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constraints on competitive performance of attacker defender dyads in Team Sports
Journal of Sports Sciences, 2012Co-Authors: Luis Vilar, Duarte Araújo, Keith Davids, Bruno TravassosAbstract:Abstract Previous research on coordination dynamics of 1 vs. 1 sub-phases in Team Sports has reported stable emergent patterns of coordination in the displacement trajectories of attackers and defenders. The aim of this study was to use attacker–defender interactions in competitive Team match-play to investigate how the locations of the goal and ball constrain the pattern-forming dynamics of attacker–defender dyadic systems. Ten high-level futsal matches were filmed and 13 goal sequences selected for analysis. Displacements of the players and the ball were filmed and digitized from 52 attacker–defender dyadic system interactions. Results showed that, although attackers and defenders exhibited similar angular orientations to the goal, the latter always remained closer to the goal than attackers. Observations revealed that in-phase patterns of coordination emerged from changes to both the distances and angles of attackers and defenders to the goal. Attackers always remained closer to the ball than defenders...
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The role of ecological dynamics in analysing performance in Team Sports
Sports Medicine, 2012Co-Authors: Lus Vilar, Duarte Araújo, Keith Davids, Chris ButtonAbstract:Performance analysis is a subdiscipline of Sports sciences and one-approach, notational analysis, has been used to objectively audit and describe behaviours of performers during different subphases of play, providing additional information for practitioners to improve future Sports performance. Recent criticisms of these methods have suggested the need for a sound theoretical rationale to explain performance behaviours, not just describe them. The aim of this article was to show how ecological dynamics provides a valid theoretical explanation of performance in Team Sports by explaining the formation of successful and unsuccessful patterns of play, based on symmetry-breaking processes emerging from functional interactions between players and the performance environment. We offer the view that ecological dynamics is an upgrade to more operational methods of performance analysis that merely document statistics of competitive performance. In support of our arguments, we refer to exemplar data on competitive performance in Team Sports that have revealed functional interpersonal interactions between attackers and defenders, based on variations in the spatial positioning of performers relative to each other in critical performance areas, such as the scoring zones. Implications of this perspective are also considered for practice task design and sport development programmes.
Sears Merritt - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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Scoring dynamics across professional Team Sports: tempo, balance and predictability
EPJ Data Science, 2014Co-Authors: Sears Merritt, Aaron ClausetAbstract:Despite growing interest in quantifying and modeling the scoring dynamics within professional Sports games, relative little is known about what patterns or principles, if any, cut across different Sports. Using a comprehensive data set of scoring events in nearly a dozen consecutive seasons of college and professional (American) football, professional hockey, and professional basketball, we identify several common patterns in scoring dynamics. Across these Sports, scoring tempo - when scoring events occur - closely follows a common Poisson process, with a sport-specific rate. Similarly, scoring balance - how often a Team wins an event - follows a common Bernoulli process, with a parameter that effectively varies with the size of the lead. Combining these processes within a generative model of gameplay, we find they both reproduce the observed dynamics in all four Sports and accurately predict game outcomes. These results demonstrate common dynamical patterns underlying within-game scoring dynamics across professional Team Sports, and suggest specific mechanisms for driving them. We close with a brief discussion of the implications of our results for several popular hypotheses about Sports dynamics. (See supplementary material 1 )
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scoring dynamics across professional Team Sports tempo balance and predictability
arXiv: Applications, 2013Co-Authors: Sears Merritt, Aaron ClausetAbstract:Despite growing interest in quantifying and modeling the scoring dynamics within professional Sports games, relative little is known about what patterns or principles, if any, cut across different Sports. Using a comprehensive data set of scoring events in nearly a dozen consecutive seasons of college and professional (American) football, professional hockey, and professional basketball, we identify several common patterns in scoring dynamics. Across these Sports, scoring tempo---when scoring events occur---closely follows a common Poisson process, with a sport-specific rate. Similarly, scoring balance---how often a Team wins an event---follows a common Bernoulli process, with a parameter that effectively varies with the size of the lead. Combining these processes within a generative model of gameplay, we find they both reproduce the observed dynamics in all four Sports and accurately predict game outcomes. These results demonstrate common dynamical patterns underlying within-game scoring dynamics across professional Team Sports, and suggest specific mechanisms for driving them. We close with a brief discussion of the implications of our results for several popular hypotheses about Sports dynamics.
Darren Burgess - One of the best experts on this subject based on the ideXlab platform.
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the research doesn t always apply practical solutions to evidence based training load monitoring in elite Team Sports
International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, 2017Co-Authors: Darren BurgessAbstract:Research describing load-monitoring techniques for Team sport is plentiful. Much of this research is conducted retrospectively and typically involves recreational or semielite Teams. Load-monitoring research conducted on professional Team Sports is largely observational. Challenges exist for the practitioner in implementing peer-reviewed research into the applied setting. These challenges include match scheduling, player adherence, manager/coach buy-in, sport traditions, and staff availability. External-load monitoring often attracts questions surrounding technology reliability and validity, while internal-load monitoring makes some assumptions about player adherence, as well as having some uncertainty around the impact these measures have on player performance This commentary outlines examples of load-monitoring research, discusses the issues associated with the application of this research in an elite Team-sport setting, and suggests practical adjustments to the existing research where necessary.
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talent development in adolescent Team Sports a review
International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance, 2010Co-Authors: Darren Burgess, Geraldine NaughtonAbstract:Traditional talent development pathways for adolescents in Team Sports follow talent identification procedures based on subjective games ratings and isolated athletic assessment. Most talent development models are exclusive rather than inclusive in nature. Subsequently, talent identification may result in discontentment, premature stratification, or dropout from Team Sports. Understanding the multidimensional differences among the requirements of adolescent and elite adult athletes could provide more realistic goals for potential talented players. Coach education should include adolescent development, and rewards for Team success at the adolescent level should reflect the needs of long-term player development. Effective talent development needs to incorporate physical and psychological maturity, the relative age effect, objective measures of game sense, and athletic prowess. The influences of media and culture on the individual, and the competing time demands between various competitions for player training time should be monitored and mediated where appropriate. Despite the complexity, talent development is a worthy investment in professional Team sport. No clear guidelines exist for the effective development of talented Team Sports athletes. Talent development issues are global and not exclusive to Team Sports athletes. 1 The one unifying factor is that because of the many factors associated with growth, development, and maturation, the same strategies employed with elite adult athletes are unlikely to be sustainable in adolescents.
