OBJECTIVE: To summarize 16 years of National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) injury surveillance data for 15 sports and to identify potential modifiable risk factors to target for injury prevention initiatives. BACKGROUND: In 1982, the NCAA began collecting standardized injury and exposure data for collegiate sports through its Injury Surveillance System (ISS). This special issue reviews 182 000 injuries and slightly more than 1 million exposure records captured over a 16-year time period (1988-1989 through 2003-2004). Game and practice injuries that required medical attention and resulted in at least 1 day of time loss were included. An exposure was defined as 1 athlete participating in 1 practice or game and is expressed as an athlete-exposure (A-E). MAIN RESULTS: Combining data for all sports, injury rates were statistically significantly higher in games (13.8 injuries per 1000 A-Es) than in practices (4.0 injuries per 1000 A-Es), and preseason practice injury rates (6.6 injuries per 1000 A-Es) were significantly higher than both in-season (2.3 injuries per 1000 A-Es) and postseason (1.4 injuries per 1000 A-Es) practice rates. No significant change in game or practice injury rates was noted over the 16 years. More than 50% of all injuries were to the lower extremity. Ankle ligament sprains were the most common injury over all sports, accounting for 15% of all reported injuries. Rates of concussions and anterior cruciate ligament injuries increased significantly (average annual increases of 7.0% and 1.3%, respectively) over the sample period. These trends may reflect improvements in identification of these injuries, especially for concussion, over time. Football had the highest injury rates for both practices (9.6 injuries per 1000 A-Es) and games (35.9 injuries per 1000 A-Es), whereas men's baseball had the lowest rate in practice (1.9 injuries per 1000 A-Es) and women's softball had the lowest rate in games (4.3 injuries per 1000 A-Es). RECOMMENDATIONS: In general, participation in college athletics is safe, but these data indicate modifiable factors that, if addressed through injury prevention initiatives, may contribute to lower injury rates in collegiate sports.
Sports have long attracted broad attention as they push the limits of human physical and cognitive capabilities. Amid growing interest in spatial intelligence for vision-language models (VLMs), sports provide a natural testbed for understanding high-intensity human motion and dynamic object interactions. To this end, we present CourtSI, the first large-scale spatial intelligence dataset tailored to sports scenarios. CourtSI contains over 1M QA pairs, organized under a holistic taxonomy that systematically covers spatial counting, distance measurement, localization, and relational reasoning, across representative net sports including badminton, tennis, and table tennis. Leveraging well-defined court geometry as metric anchors, we develop a semi-automatic data engine to reconstruct sports scenes, enabling scalable curation of CourtSI. In addition, we introduce CourtSI-Bench, a high-quality evaluation benchmark comprising 3,686 QA pairs with rigorous human verification. We evaluate 25 proprietary and open-source VLMs on CourtSI-Bench, revealing a remaining human-AI performance gap and limited generalization from existing spatial intelligence benchmarks. These findings indicate that sp
This chapter explores the complexities of sports governance, taxation, dispute resolution, and the impact of digital transformation within the sports sector. This study identifies a critical research gap regarding the integration of innovative technologies to enhance governance and talent identification in sports law. The objective is to evaluate how data-driven approaches and AI can optimize recruitment processes; also ensuring compliance with existing regulations. A comprehensive analysis of current governance structures and taxation policies,(ie Income Tax Act and GST Act), reveals preliminary results indicating that reform is necessary to support sustainable growth in the sports economy. Key findings demonstrate that AI enhances player evaluation by minimizing biases and expanding access to diverse talent pools. While the Court of Arbitration for Sport provides an efficient mechanism for dispute resolution. The implications emphasize the need for regulatory reforms that align taxation policies with international best practices, promoting transparency and accountability in sports organizations. This research contributes valuable insights into the evolving dynamics of sports mana
This paper addresses the challenge of automated sports video analysis, which has traditionally been limited by computationally intensive models requiring server-side processing and lacking fine-grained understanding of athletic movements. Current approaches struggle to capture the nuanced biomechanical transitions essential for meaningful sports analysis, often missing critical phases like preparation, execution, and follow-through that occur within seconds. To address these limitations, we introduce SV3.3B, a lightweight 3.3B parameter video understanding model that combines novel temporal motion difference sampling with self-supervised learning for efficient on-device deployment. Our approach employs a DWT-VGG16-LDA based keyframe extraction mechanism that intelligently identifies the 16 most representative frames from sports sequences, followed by a V-DWT-JEPA2 encoder pretrained through mask-denoising objectives and an LLM decoder fine-tuned for sports action description generation. Evaluated on a subset of the NSVA basketball dataset, SV3.3B achieves superior performance across both traditional text generation metrics and sports-specific evaluation criteria, outperforming larg
Accurate 3D human pose estimation is essential for sports analytics, coaching, and injury prevention. However, existing datasets for monocular pose estimation do not adequately capture the challenging and dynamic nature of sports movements. In response, we introduce SportsPose, a large-scale 3D human pose dataset consisting of highly dynamic sports movements. With more than 176,000 3D poses from 24 different subjects performing 5 different sports activities, SportsPose provides a diverse and comprehensive set of 3D poses that reflect the complex and dynamic nature of sports movements. Contrary to other markerless datasets we have quantitatively evaluated the precision of SportsPose by comparing our poses with a commercial marker-based system and achieve a mean error of 34.5 mm across all evaluation sequences. This is comparable to the error reported on the commonly used 3DPW dataset. We further introduce a new metric, local movement, which describes the movement of the wrist and ankle joints in relation to the body. With this, we show that SportsPose contains more movement than the Human3.6M and 3DPW datasets in these extremum joints, indicating that our movements are more dynamic.
Sports game summarization aims at generating sports news from live commentaries. However, existing datasets are all constructed through automated collection and cleaning processes, resulting in a lot of noise. Besides, current works neglect the knowledge gap between live commentaries and sports news, which limits the performance of sports game summarization. In this paper, we introduce K-SportsSum, a new dataset with two characteristics: (1) K-SportsSum collects a large amount of data from massive games. It has 7,854 commentary-news pairs. To improve the quality, K-SportsSum employs a manual cleaning process; (2) Different from existing datasets, to narrow the knowledge gap, K-SportsSum further provides a large-scale knowledge corpus that contains the information of 523 sports teams and 14,724 sports players. Additionally, we also introduce a knowledge-enhanced summarizer that utilizes both live commentaries and the knowledge to generate sports news. Extensive experiments on K-SportsSum and SportsSum datasets show that our model achieves new state-of-the-art performances. Qualitative analysis and human study further verify that our model generates more informative sports news.
Reasoning over sports videos for question answering is an important task with numerous applications, such as player training and information retrieval. However, this task has not been explored due to the lack of relevant datasets and the challenging nature it presents. Most datasets for video question answering (VideoQA) focus mainly on general and coarse-grained understanding of daily-life videos, which is not applicable to sports scenarios requiring professional action understanding and fine-grained motion analysis. In this paper, we introduce the first dataset, named Sports-QA, specifically designed for the sports VideoQA task. The Sports-QA dataset includes various types of questions, such as descriptions, chronologies, causalities, and counterfactual conditions, covering multiple sports. Furthermore, to address the characteristics of the sports VideoQA task, we propose a new Auto-Focus Transformer (AFT) capable of automatically focusing on particular scales of temporal information for question answering. We conduct extensive experiments on Sports-QA, including baseline studies and the evaluation of different methods. The results demonstrate that our AFT achieves state-of-the-a
Advanced analytics have transformed how sports teams operate, particularly in episodic sports like baseball. Their impact on continuous invasion sports, such as soccer and ice hockey, has been limited due to increased game complexity and restricted access to high-resolution game tracking data. In this demo, we present a method to collect and utilize simulated soccer tracking data from the Google Research Football environment to support the development of models designed for continuous tracking data. The data is stored in a schema that is representative of real tracking data and we provide processes that extract high-level features and events. We include examples of established tracking data models to showcase the efficacy of the simulated data. We address the scarcity of publicly available tracking data, providing support for research at the intersection of artificial intelligence and sports analytics.
Understanding sports is crucial for the advancement of Natural Language Processing (NLP) due to its intricate and dynamic nature. Reasoning over complex sports scenarios has posed significant challenges to current NLP technologies which require advanced cognitive capabilities. Toward addressing the limitations of existing benchmarks on sports understanding in the NLP field, we extensively evaluated mainstream large language models for various sports tasks. Our evaluation spans from simple queries on basic rules and historical facts to complex, context-specific reasoning, leveraging strategies from zero-shot to few-shot learning, and chain-of-thought techniques. In addition to unimodal analysis, we further assessed the sports reasoning capabilities of mainstream video language models to bridge the gap in multimodal sports understanding benchmarking. Our findings highlighted the critical challenges of sports understanding for NLP. We proposed a new benchmark based on a comprehensive overview of existing sports datasets and provided extensive error analysis which we hope can help identify future research priorities in this field.
Single-frame sports field registration often serves as the foundation for extracting 3D information from broadcast videos, enabling applications related to sports analytics, refereeing, or fan engagement. As sports fields have rigorous specifications in terms of shape and dimensions of their line, circle and point components, sports field markings are commonly used as calibration targets for this task. However, because of the sparse and uneven distribution of field markings, close-up camera views around central areas of the field often depict only line and circle markings. On these views, sports field registration is challenging for the vast majority of existing methods, as they focus on leveraging line field markings and their intersections. It is indeed a challenge to include circle correspondences in a set of linear equations. In this work, we propose a novel method to derive a set of points and lines from circle correspondences, enabling the exploitation of circle correspondences for both sports field registration and image annotation. In our experiments, we illustrate the benefits of our bottom-up geometric method against top-performing detectors and show that our method succe
Most sports visualizations rely on a combination of spatial, highly temporal, and user-centric data, making sports a challenging target for visualization. Emerging technologies, such as augmented and mixed reality (AR/XR), have brought exciting opportunities along with new challenges for sports visualization. We share our experience working with sports domain experts and present lessons learned from conducting visualization research in SportsXR. In our previous work, we have targeted different types of users in sports, including athletes, game analysts, and fans. Each user group has unique design constraints and requirements, such as obtaining real-time visual feedback in training, automating the low-level video analysis workflow, or personalizing embedded visualizations for live game data analysis. In this paper, we synthesize our best practices and pitfalls we identified while working on SportsXR. We highlight lessons learned in working with sports domain experts in designing and evaluating sports visualizations and in working with emerging AR/XR technologies. We envision that sports visualization research will benefit the larger visualization community through its unique challen
We present SMPLOlympics, a collection of physically simulated environments that allow humanoids to compete in a variety of Olympic sports. Sports simulation offers a rich and standardized testing ground for evaluating and improving the capabilities of learning algorithms due to the diversity and physically demanding nature of athletic activities. As humans have been competing in these sports for many years, there is also a plethora of existing knowledge on the preferred strategy to achieve better performance. To leverage these existing human demonstrations from videos and motion capture, we design our humanoid to be compatible with the widely-used SMPL and SMPL-X human models from the vision and graphics community. We provide a suite of individual sports environments, including golf, javelin throw, high jump, long jump, and hurdling, as well as competitive sports, including both 1v1 and 2v2 games such as table tennis, tennis, fencing, boxing, soccer, and basketball. Our analysis shows that combining strong motion priors with simple rewards can result in human-like behavior in various sports. By providing a unified sports benchmark and baseline implementation of state and reward des
The advent of large (visual) language models (LLM / LVLM) have led to a deluge of automated human-like systems in several domains including social media content generation, search and recommendation, healthcare prognosis, AI assistants for cognitive tasks etc. Although these systems have been successfully integrated in production; very little focus has been placed on sports, particularly accurate identification and natural language description of the game play. Most existing LLM/LVLMs can explain generic sports activities, but lack sufficient domain-centric sports' jargon to create natural (human-like) descriptions. This work highlights the limitations of existing SoTA LLM/LVLMs for generating production-grade sports captions from images in a desired stylized format, and proposes a two-level fine-tuned LVLM pipeline to address that. The proposed pipeline yields an improvement > 8-10% in the F1, and > 2-10% in BERT score compared to alternative approaches. In addition, it has a small runtime memory footprint and fast execution time. During Super Bowl LIX the pipeline proved its practical application for live professional sports journalism; generating highly accurate and styliz
Visualizing data in sports videos is gaining traction in sports analytics, given its ability to communicate insights and explicate player strategies engagingly. However, augmenting sports videos with such data visualizations is challenging, especially for sports analysts, as it requires considerable expertise in video editing. To ease the creation process, we present a design space that characterizes augmented sports videos at an element-level (what the constituents are) and clip-level (how those constituents are organized). We do so by systematically reviewing 233 examples of augmented sports videos collected from TV channels, teams, and leagues. The design space guides selection of data insights and visualizations for various purposes. Informed by the design space and close collaboration with domain experts, we design VisCommentator, a fast prototyping tool, to eases the creation of augmented table tennis videos by leveraging machine learning-based data extractors and design space-based visualization recommendations. With VisCommentator, sports analysts can create an augmented video by selecting the data to visualize instead of manually drawing the graphical marks. Our system can
Camera virtualization -- an emerging solution to novel view synthesis -- holds transformative potential for visual entertainment, live performances, and sports broadcasting by enabling the generation of photorealistic images from novel viewpoints using images from a limited set of calibrated multiple static physical cameras. Despite recent advances, achieving spatially and temporally coherent and photorealistic rendering of dynamic scenes with efficient time-archival capabilities, particularly in fast-paced sports and stage performances, remains challenging for existing approaches. Recent methods based on 3D Gaussian Splatting (3DGS) for dynamic scenes could offer real-time view-synthesis results. Yet, they are hindered by their dependence on accurate 3D point clouds from the structure-from-motion method and their inability to handle large, non-rigid, rapid motions of different subjects (e.g., flips, jumps, articulations, sudden player-to-player transitions). Moreover, independent motions of multiple subjects can break the Gaussian-tracking assumptions commonly used in 4DGS, ST-GS, and other dynamic splatting variants. This paper advocates reconsidering a neural volume rendering fo
Deep learning has the potential to revolutionize sports performance, with applications ranging from perception and comprehension to decision. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of deep learning in sports performance, focusing on three main aspects: algorithms, datasets and virtual environments, and challenges. Firstly, we discuss the hierarchical structure of deep learning algorithms in sports performance which includes perception, comprehension and decision while comparing their strengths and weaknesses. Secondly, we list widely used existing datasets in sports and highlight their characteristics and limitations. Finally, we summarize current challenges and point out future trends of deep learning in sports. Our survey provides valuable reference material for researchers interested in deep learning in sports applications.
This chapter provides an overview of recent and promising Machine Learning applications, i.e. pose estimation, feature estimation, event detection, data exploration & clustering, and automated classification, in gait (walking and running) and sports biomechanics. It explores the potential of Machine Learning methods to address challenges in biomechanical workflows, highlights central limitations, i.e. data and annotation availability and explainability, that need to be addressed, and emphasises the importance of interdisciplinary approaches for fully harnessing the potential of Machine Learning in gait and sports biomechanics.
In daily fantasy sports, players enter into "contests" where they compete against each other by building teams of athletes that score fantasy points based on what actually occurs in a real-life sports match. For any given sports match, there are a multitude of contests available to players, with substantial variation across 3 main dimensions: entry fee, number of spots, and the prize pool distribution. As player preferences are also quite heterogeneous, contest personalization is an important tool to match players with contests. This paper presents a scalable contest recommendation system, powered by a Wide and Deep Interaction Ranker (WiDIR) at its core. We productionized this system at our company, one of the large fantasy sports platforms with millions of daily contests and millions of players, where online experiments show a marked improvement over other candidate models in terms of recall and other critical business metrics.
Camera calibration is a crucial component in the realm of sports analytics, as it serves as the foundation to extract 3D information out of the broadcast images. Despite the significance of camera calibration research in sports analytics, progress is impeded by outdated benchmarking criteria. Indeed, the annotation data and evaluation metrics provided by most currently available benchmarks strongly favor and incite the development of sports field registration methods, i.e. methods estimating homographies that map the sports field plane to the image plane. However, such homography-based methods are doomed to overlook the broader capabilities of camera calibration in bridging the 3D world to the image. In particular, real-world non-planar sports field elements (such as goals, corner flags, baskets, ...) and image distortion caused by broadcast camera lenses are out of the scope of sports field registration methods. To overcome these limitations, we designed a new benchmarking protocol, named ProCC, based on two principles: (1) the protocol should be agnostic to the camera model chosen for a camera calibration method, and (2) the protocol should fairly evaluate camera calibration meth
A deep understanding of sports, a field rich in strategic and dynamic content, is crucial for advancing Natural Language Processing (NLP). This holds particular significance in the context of evaluating and advancing Large Language Models (LLMs), given the existing gap in specialized benchmarks. To bridge this gap, we introduce SportQA, a novel benchmark specifically designed for evaluating LLMs in the context of sports understanding. SportQA encompasses over 70,000 multiple-choice questions across three distinct difficulty levels, each targeting different aspects of sports knowledge from basic historical facts to intricate, scenario-based reasoning tasks. We conducted a thorough evaluation of prevalent LLMs, mainly utilizing few-shot learning paradigms supplemented by chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting. Our results reveal that while LLMs exhibit competent performance in basic sports knowledge, they struggle with more complex, scenario-based sports reasoning, lagging behind human expertise. The introduction of SportQA marks a significant step forward in NLP, offering a tool for assessing and enhancing sports understanding in LLMs.