Soccer Team Vectors

In this work we present STEVE - Soccer TEam VEctors, a principled approach for learning real valued vectors for soccer teams where similar teams are close to each other in the resulting vector space. STEVE only relies on freely available information about the matches teams played in the past. These vectors can serve as input to various machine learning tasks. Evaluating on the task of team market value estimation, STEVE outperforms all its competitors. Moreover, we use STEVE for similarity search and to rank soccer teams.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure; This paper was presented at the 6th Workshop on Machine Learning and Data Mining for Sports Analytics at ECML/PKDD 2019, W\"urzburg, Germany, 201

Spartan Daily, March 3, 1976

Volume 66, Issue 20https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/6051/thumbnail.jp

Spartan Daily, March 3, 1976

Volume 66, Issue 20https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/6051/thumbnail.jp

“A Matter of Personal Pride”: How African American Football All-Stars Exposed Bigotry in New Orleans, including Didactic Considerations and Lesson Plans

Throughout African American history, sport has played a major role in promoting integration and full participation in American society beyond the playing fields or courts. In the 1960s, after the first wave of African American athletes entering the white-dominated collegiate and professional sports leagues, active forms of protest against racial inequality in the US became gradually more relevant. Though in relatively small numbers, some African American athletes across various sports have used their privileged situation to voice the need for a revision of the system which has failed to represent and serve their people throughout American history. This paper focuses on the boycott of the American Football League (AFL) All-Star Game in New Orleans after African American ball players experienced racial discrimination in the Crescent City. Their decisive action led the league officials to move the game to Houston, but, of course, also impacted New Orleans’ reputation and prestige in a rapidly changing America. Through an analysis of newspaper discourse, this diploma thesis attempts to reconstruct how public opinion about this incident was shaped. Moreover, it will be discussed how the boycott impacted race relations in New Orleans and how the protest became a part of public memory in recent years

In Search of the Final Head Ball: The Case for Eliminating Heading from Soccer

Soccer encourages and demands one action that puts the head in consistent danger: heading the ball. Thirty percent (30%) of concussions in soccer occur when two players attempt to head the ball at the same time, resulting in head clashes or heads colliding with other body parts or the ground. The desired outcome of an attempted header – head to ball impact – causes untold damage as well. This Article, therefore, argues that soccer’s governing bodies should eliminate the practice of heading from the game. Do-ing so would protect generations of soccer players to come and would limit potentially wide-spread liability among soccer governing bodies, as well as the ensuing economic consequences, ensuring the continued existence of “The Beautiful Game.” Part II of this Article offers a primer on brain trauma and its incidence in contact sports. Part III details the historical relationship between soccer and football, the ties that bind them, and each game’s position vis-a-vis the other in the pecking order of American sports. Part IV explores the underappreciated danger of brain trauma that playing soccer poses. Part V examines the inefficacy of headgear in protecting soccer players’ brains. Part VI tracks the technological advances in soccer ball development that have led to increased heading and examines the movement to reduce heading in youth, but not adult, soccer. Part VII concludes that for the safety of soccer players and the future of the game, heading should be eliminated from soccer at all levels

Suffolk Journal Vol. 57, No. 4, 10/07/1998

https://dc.suffolk.edu/journal/2287/thumbnail.jp

Home Comforts : the Role of Hormones, Territoriality and Perceptions on the Home Advantage in Football

Since the seminal work of Schwartz and Barsky (1977) detailing the notion of a home advantage, whereby teams perform consistently better at home opposed to away, there has been a plethora of research dedicated to studying this phenomenon. Many explanations for the home advantage have been proposed, including crowd support, venue familiarity, travel, rules, referee bias, and more recently, the territorial and behavioural responses elicited by a home venue. Neave and Wolfson (2003) reported that testosterone levels in male football players increased significantly at home compared to away, with defenders? levels higher than midfielders and forwards. Ice hockey players? pre-game cortisol levels have also been shown to be significantly higher at home (Carré, Muir, Belanger & Putnam, 2006). This thesis has attempted to provide a clearer understanding of the home advantage in football through both hormonal and perceptual perspectives

The Zircon, November 15, 2017 [Spoof Issue]

https://digitalcollections.dordt.edu/dordt_diamond/1790/thumbnail.jp