Performance analysis of elite men’s and women’s wheelchair basketball teams

Abstract

The purpose of the present study was to identify which game-related statistics discriminate winning and losing teams in men’s and women’s elite wheelchair basketball. The sample comprised all the games played during the Beijing Paralympics 2008 and the World Wheelchair Basketball Championship 2010. The game-related statistics from the official box scores were gathered and data were analysed in 2 groups: balanced games (final score differences ≤12 points) and unbalanced games (final score differences >13 points). Discriminant analysis allowed identifying the successful 2-point field-goals and free-throws, the unsuccessful 3-point field-goals and free-throws, the assists and fouls received as discriminant statistics between winning and losing teams in men’s balanced games. In women’s games, the teams were discriminated only by the successful 2-point field-goals. Linear regression analysis showed that the quality of opposition had great effects in final point differential. The field-goals percentage and free-throws rate were the most important factors in men’s games, and field-goals percentage and offensive rebounding percentage in women’s games. The identified trends allow improving game understanding and helping wheelchair basketball coaches to plan accurate practice sessions and, ultimately, deciding better in competition.     

The ‘White Man’s Game’? West Indian Cricket Tours of the 1900s

The 1900s saw two tours of the United Kingdom (UK) by a mixed race cricket team representing the West Indies. This paper argues that the tours were part of a concerted cultural campaign largely organized by the West India Committee to raise the profile of the British West Indian colonies in the Mother Country in the light of competition for favour among the settler colonies. It analyzes the selection of the team and its reception in the UK to argue that the existing literature has been mistaken in portraying the team to have been subject to consistent hostility due to the inclusion of black players in the touring party. Rather it is argued that the team of 1900 was largely welcomed as a truly representative West Indian team but that by 1906 a tightening of the definition of who could represent the empire on the sports field, influenced by the settlement of the South Africa War, meant that mixed race cricket would be rejected and the West Indians unjustly excluded from the Imperial Cricket Conference, which became an all whites club.     

Getting to the top: an analysis of 25 years of career rankings trajectories for professional women’s tennis

Official rankings are the most common measure of success in professional women’s tennis. Despite their importance for earning potential and tournament seeding, little is known about ranking trajectories of female players and their influence on career success. Our objective was to conduct a comprehensive study of the career progression of elite female tennis talent. The study examined the ranking trajectories of the top 250 female professionals between 1990 and 2015. Using regression modelling of yearly peak rankings, we found a strong association between the shape of the ranking trajectory and the highest career ranking earned. Players with the highest career peak ranking were the youngest when first ranked. For example, top 10 players were first ranked at age 15.5 years (99% CI = 14.8–15.9), 1.2 years (99% CI = 0.8–1.5) earlier than top 51–100 players. Top 10 players were also ranked in the top 100 longer than other players, holding a top 100 ranking until a mean age of 29.0 years (99% CI = 27.8–30.3) compared with age 24.4 years (99% CI = 23.7–25.2) for top 51–100 players. Ranking trajectories were more distinct with respect to player age than years from first ranking. The present study’s findings will be instructive for players, coaches, and administrators in setting goals and assessing athlete development in women’s tennis.     

The media construction of the sports’ elite from the European perspective: an analysis of the European Symposium of Sports 2010

Since the first Olympic Games, the figure of the athlete has roused enormous passion. One may wonder if nowadays the cultural mechanisms that produce them are analogous and perform the same functions as in the past. This article aims to answer these questions. For this purpose, we have relied on the analysis of the discourse from different actors in the 2010 European Symposium of Sports “Thinking Sports, Transforming Society: The EU in favor of citizenship for the XXI Century”. The results will provide relevant information about the responsibility of the mass media in the production of a sports spectacle, the role of the big brands and the exemplarity of the sports’ elite. In this manner, the need was conveyed of producing a different view of sports, so that in the contest between humanistic values and materialistic values, those who contribute to the welfare of the citizens could achieve glory.     

The determinants of stadium attendance in elite women’s football: Evidence from the UEFA Women's Champions League

Women’s football struggles to build a solid platform in terms of fan interest. However, while an increase in gate receipts can help assist its long-term sustainability, there is limited evidence in the academic literature on the factors influencing spectator demand in women’s football. The authors investigate determinants of stadium attendance for UEFA Women's Champions League (UWCL) matches. Using regression models deployed on 554 UWCL games played between 2009/10 and 2017/18, the authors examine contextual and sport-related variables as the main predictors of stadium attendance. Findings show that there is no continuous growth of attendance over the period examined, and highlight that spectators’ interest is positively associated with five factors: stage of the competition, uncertainty of match outcome, competitive intensity, away club’s reputation and weather conditions. Football governing bodies should put in place initiatives to ensure match outcome uncertainty is maintained as this represents a key determinant to maximise stadium attendance. Based on the specific context of European women’s football, recommendations to foster its development are discussed. These include incentivising investment into the elite women’s game and designing sport policies to encourage participation at grassroots levels.     

What limits of legitimate discourse? The case of elite sport as ‘thinkable’ official knowledge in the Norwegian national curriculum

In 2006, elite sport was introduced into the Norwegian national curriculum as an elective subject in the pre-tertiary school. Grades achieved in this 5-hours-a-week subject count towards school-leavers' overall attainment grades. Prior to 2006, this subject was only offered as a specially adapted, alternative pedagogy in private schools. The paper analyzes how ideas about elite performance have become mainstream, particularly in light of the seeming lack of public policy supporting such a development. By using Bernstein's conceptual tools, it analyzes the few existing policy statements about elite sport in the pre-tertiary education sector and builds on interview data with key policy players in the Norwegian Parliament in order to shed light on this seemingly market-driven development. It asks which discourses have legitimated the transformation of elite sport skills, knowledge and values from an exclusive private school niche to national curricular knowledge to meet the physically, most-able and ambitious athlete-students in the pre-tertiary schools, and in so doing, include the development of sport athletes as an educational task of the comprehensive school system. Finally, it addresses whether agencies outside education policy circles may have affected the legitimation of elite sport as elective curricular knowledge to a certain group of students.     

Marketing ‘Brand China’: Maintaining the Momentum – ‘The Middle Kingdom’ Resurgent and Resplendent

The multiplicity of manoeuvres that characterise modern China's geopolitical ascendancy and ambition illustrate political ingenuity used calculatedly with the clear intention of becoming invulnerable. Past recent humiliations are not to reoccur. In addition, ‘The Middle Kingdom’ is to be reincarnated: invincible imperialism pursued. The strategic plurality employed in complex compositional patterns is both imperial and historic in nature: the past is to be projected into the present and the future. The once ‘Great Game’ is now ‘The Great East Asia Game’! In the light of the Guangzhou Asian Games Triumphalism, there could be a ‘double entendre’ employed here of sizable significance. This essay considers the possibility.     

The ‘inclusion’ of elite athletes with disabilities in the 2002 Manchester Commonwealth Games: An exploratory analysis of British newspaper coverage

The XVII 2002 Commonwealth Games held in Manchester, England, was the first major international multi-sport event to include elite athletes with disabilities (EADs) in its main sports programme and medal table. In this exploratory article we seek to examine some of the complex issues surrounding the inclusion of EADs in the Manchester Games by analysing the coverage afforded those athletes by six national British newspapers. The results suggest that: (1) there was a tendency by the British media to discuss the performances of EADs in terms more-or-less consistent with a medicalized understanding of disability; (2) the inclusion of EADs in the Games signalled the ‘end of a sporting apartheid’ between ‘able-bodied’ athletes and EADs; and (3) that the participation of EADs in the Games was said to reflect the alleged growing ‘inclusion’ of people with disabilities in the wider society more broadly. The paper concludes by discussing some of the unintended consequences of including EADs in the Games, including those brought about by the classification system used to group athletes into events according to their particular impairment. Those which were associated with the supposed need for greater media coverage of EADs in ‘able-bodied’ sports competitions such as the Commonsealth Games.     

The Capriciousness of Play: Collingwood’s Insight

This paper argues that human psychological resilience is a central virtue in sport and in human life generally. Despite its importance, it is an overlooked virtue in philosophy of sport and classical and contemporary virtue theory. The phenomenon of human resilience has received a great deal of attention recently in other quarters, however. There is a large and instructive empirical psychological literature on resilience, but connections to virtue theory are rarely drawn and there is no agreement about what the concept refers to. This paper attempts to clarify the concept of resilience and explain how it fits into and supports a traditional Aristotelian conception of virtue. It shows how resilience figures centrally in sport and can extend and enrich our understanding of virtue and success in sport and of sport's internal values. The investigations into the nature of resilience in sport can also help us to understand better sport's contributions to human culture and well-being.     

I am sailing—towards a transactional analysis of ‘body techniques’

In recent years there has been a growing interest in questions related to embodiment and learning. Within the field of ‘body pedagogics’ great efforts have been made to develop theory and methodology that can deal with the corporeal aspects of experience and knowledge without adopting any form of dualistic conceptions of body/mind and organism/environment. This article connects to this body of research. The purpose is to first present a synthesis of James' radical empiricism, Dewey's transactional understanding of experience and learning and Marcel Mauss' concept of ‘body techniques’ and the notion of education embedded in it. Against the background of this theoretical development, and with a Transactional Model of Analyzing Bodying (TMAB), we then show how we can analytically come to terms with different dualistic problems that research into ‘body pedagogics’ has to deal with. We use an empirical example of dinghy sailing to create knowledge about what we learn when learning embodied knowledge, and how this learning takes place. We argue that experience is an important concept for understanding the acting knowing human being, describing how experience is organized and developed and outlining how this organization can be understood as learning. We hold that situations where someone learns to embody certain knowledge are cases of overt actions, in which we can see what kinds of relations are created and how these relations become meaningful for further action.     

‘Too Semitic’ or ‘Thoroughly ‘Anglicised’? The Life and Career of Harold Abrahams

Harold Maurice Abrahams (1899–1978) – the British-Jewish athlete made famous by the film Chariots of Fire – won gold for Britain in the 100 m sprint in the 1924 Paris Olympics. Far from being the ‘outsider’ depicted in Chariots of Fire, however, Abrahams’ ‘Anglicisation’ was extensive and played an important role in his life before, during and after his athletics career. Abrahams’ integration went hand-in-hand with his sporting success – something which was celebrated by British Jewry. Such was his assimilation, that by 1936 – a year when Abrahams courted controversy over his stance on the Berlin Olympics – he was criticised for having ‘lost’ all attachment to the community of his birth. In contrast to the film, where Abrahams is seen to be ‘too Semitic’, the Bedford athlete was actually ‘thoroughly Anglicised’. A desire to move into or support middle-to-upper class British society characterised Abrahams’ personal and sporting life much more so than his Jewishness. As time progressed, Abrahams’ Jewish origins meant less and less, both to Harold himself and to those around him.     

‘You Had to Cover Nadia Comaneci’: ‘Points of Change’ in Coverage of Women’s Sport

Abstract

In the 1970s, women’s sport underwent significant change in the United States resulting in an increase of participation opportunities and funding at the interscholastic, intercollegiate, professional and international levels. Yet, media outlets continued to ignore women and, at best, portray them in gender stereotypical ways. Considering the lack of progress for women in sports media coverage, this study employs sport historian Jaime Schultz’s ‘points of change’ framework in order to identify those moments that constituted an ideological shift in the process of covering women’s sport. Drawing upon oral history interviews with journalists who wrote about women’s sport in the 1970s and 1980s, this research provides a deeper look into how journalists experienced and addressed the shifting gender ideologies of the time period. Journalists’ memories, accompanied by their articles, reveal how media practitioners negotiated meanings about femininity and athleticism in response to events that challenged deeply embedded assumptions about gender and its intersections with ethnicity, race and sexuality. This exploratory research, thus, identifies several ‘points of change’ – or points of struggle, conflict and resistance – and calls for a re-periodization of the history of women’s sports coverage.     

‘The emblem of one united body … one great sporting Maple Leaf’: The Olympic Games and Canada's quest for self-identity

For Canadians, the enduring late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century debate between adherents of sustained British imperialism and those champions of Canadian sovereignty closed in December 1964 by dint of a Canadian Parliamentary act establishing a new national symbol, one that henceforth removed the British ensign from national flag and federal governmental identifications and replaced it with a simple red maple leaf embossed on a white background between two panels of red. This is the primary identification symbol, the logo, indeed the brand, by which Canada is now recognized throughout the world. The birth of the red maple leaf logo's legitimization in both national and international context points to a role played by the Canadian Olympic Committee, the embryo saga of which was superimposed on the initiatives of the nation's first Olympic team, the aggregation of male athletes that competed in the London Games of 1908. This work argues that the introduction of the red maple leaf as a national symbol of Canada, with respect to the logo's initial international debut at the Games of the Fourth Olympiad celebrated in London in 1908, provided the first in a series of succeeding international Olympic occurrences that lent sustenance to a greater Canadian movement towards neoliberal promoted national self-identity and a commensurate beginning of the erosion of what most Canadians would refer to as ‘Britishness’.     

The ‘aggressive style’: genesis of an ambiguous resource for Swiss hockey and football players

In this study, we investigated what drives players to endorse an aggressive style in Swiss ice hockey and football. We selected a sample of 16 players on the basis of their penalty statistics. We used semi-directed retrospective interviews to collect players’; biographic narratives. The results show a socialization process into an aggressive style, supported by the dominant gender and socialization norms of the sport, which is under the influence of the structure of the sports organization. However, there are large differences between players, with only some of them adopting an aggressive style. Although many studies have underlined the influence of moral disengagement, the present results suggest that time also matters and that the diversity of career paths may explain the diversity in attitudes. Socialization differences in the sports field, bodily capital, a career path marked by thwarted reputation are the key factors that drive players to adopt an aggressive style.     

‘It’s like equality now; it’s not as if it’s the old days’: an investigation into gender identity development and football participation of adolescent girls

This article explores the influence participating in football has on the development of adolescent girls’ gender identity, an area which currently lacks academic attention. Data are taken from an ethnographic study with a group of adolescent girls and boys and compared to Jeanes’ research. A social constructionist framework was deployed with links to both critical theory and feminist literature. Qualitative and participatory methods were used to fully engage with the complex issue of gender identity. The girls within this study were aware of the normative gender expectations linked to ‘being a female’ but did not find this restrictive. The girls moved between many changing identities and organized their ‘web of selves’ accordingly. The apparent need to measure success by the parameters of male standards created a barrier to girls’ identity development.     

The ‘uptake’ of a sport-for-development programme in South Africa

This article reports on the ‘uptake’ dynamics and resultant manifestations of a school-based, incentive-driven, sport-for-development programme in the South African context of poverty. The ecological systems theory of Brofenbrenner, the theory of complexity and a neo-liberal framework underpin the social constructions of local meanings associated with programme participation and involvement. Thirty-nine primary schools in the Western Cape Province and four schools in the Eastern Cape Province deliver the programme in partnership with a local foundation. A representative sample of 15 schools, from rural and urban (township) impoverished communities, were selected for a baseline study. A mixed-method approach of the Sport-in Development Impact Assessment Tool was adapted to collect comparative data through 57 interviews, 35 focus group sessions (with 75 teachers and 176 learners) and 159 questionnaires completed by learners and 29 by school and cluster coordinators. Various models of implementation render nuanced findings at meso-, exo- and micro-levels, where interrelated systems, demographic and developmental influences translate into culturally informed sense-making, pro- and anti-social associative behaviours, praxis, institutional empowerment and status-conferring identity constructions. All partners promote a neoliberal approach that limits changes to the underlying social systems, and mostly promote individual and group attributes within the institutional and social world settings of participants.