Premier Team Research Articles

Shoulder injury incidence and severity through identificationof risk factors in rugby union players

This study aimed to analyze shoulder injury incidence and severity to reduce players' risk of sustaining injuries and missing playing time. Ninety-five South African Premier team rugby Union players (mean: 25 years of age) took part in the study with injury data collected through the use of injury reports. This study found that approximately two of every five participants sampled incurred a primary shoulder injury with dislocation being the most prevalent. Twenty-one (80.8%) of the participants that experienced a primary shoulder injury also sustained a secondary shoulder injury with rotator cuff tears being most predominant. Only three players were found to have suffered tertiary shoulder injuries. The injuries were mainly related to tackling during training and matches. Twenty players were found to have adhered to a strength and conditioning program prior to their injuries and 14 of the injured participants received or adhered to a prehabilitation program. Eight of the injured players also suffered from recurrent injuries with dislocations being the most common. RESULTS indicated that specific positions in rugby are at higher risk of shoulder injuries than others and that with the correct preventive measures put in place, the severity of injuries can be reduced.

Optimizing the Sunday Singles Lineup for a Ryder Cup Captain

The Ryder Cup competition between Team USA and Team Europe is the premier team event in professional golf, largely because of the drama associated with head-to-head matches on the final day (Sunday). The captain of each team must determine the exact sequence of his 12 golfers in the 12 Sunday singles matches, and neither captain is precisely aware of the other captain's intended lineup. Because the losing captain has often been criticized for choosing what the critics deem to be a poor lineup, we develop a quantitative methodology that a captain can use to determine his Sunday singles lineup to maximize the probability that his team is in possession of the Ryder Cup upon completion of the competition. As part of our effort, we develop a statistical model for estimating the three possible outcomes (win, lose, tie) of each singles match. Using the 1989–2008 Ryder Cup competitions as examples, we find that using our statistical model within our methodology indicates that the Sunday singles competition is not greatly impacted by the lineup selected by the captain. However, we define another example that indicates our methodology can be of great benefit if a player's performance is affected by who his singles match opponent is.

A Case Study of Recreational Golfers' Interest in the 2008 Ryder Cup

The ryder Cup is the premier team competition in golf and is often described as the third biggest sports event in the world. Despite this, the match has received scant attention from scholars in event management and other associated disciplines. This case study examines recreational golfers' interest in the ryder Cup and attempts to discover what they perceive to be the defining characteristics of the match, in order to develop a better understanding of the positioning of the event. while there has been an increase in research focusing on major sporting events, little work has explored the ryder Cup and less still has looked at the views of recreational participants in a sport. The research identified that respondents generally identified positive characteristics with the match but also found that the ryder Cup was of less interest to them than a range of other major golf and sport events. The limitations of the case study and an outline of further research in this area is also discussed.

Golf, Tourism and the 2010 Ryder Cup: (De)constructing Images of Wales

The Ryder Cup is the premier team competition in the sport of golf. Contested on a biennial basis between the best players from the USA and Europe, it is now one of the biggest sporting events in the world. Wales hosted the competition for the first time in 2010 when the Celtic Manor Resort in Newport staged the event. The 2010 Ryder Cup provided an important opportunity for Wales to promote and position itself in the international sporting arena and to develop its profile as a tourist destination. Through reference to various promotional and policy documentation, this research looks at just how the country was portrayed in the lead up to the event and what this means for golf, tourism and the (re)presentation of Wales. The work addresses the role of image in the marketing of Wales as a tourist destination and considers some of the problems stakeholders face in developing a distinct and identifiable product.

1921: the Yankees, the Giants, and the battle for baseball supremacy in New York

Lyle Spatz and Steve Steinberg. 1921: The Yankees, the Giants, and the Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2010. 538 pp. Cloth, $31.95 The early 1920s were a critical time for America and baseball. World War I was finally over, the acrimonious fight in the US Senate over the ratification of the Versailles Peace Treaty had ended with the Treaty's rejection, prohibition became the law of the land, and women won the right to vote. Warren G. Harding captured the presidency in a landslide victory, promising a return to normalcy after two decades of progressive activism and involvement in a foreign war. At the same time, baseball confronted two of its darkest moments: in August 1920 Yankees pitcher Carl Mays beaned Ray Chapman, killing the popular Cleveland shortstop, and the following month came the revelations that eight members of the Chicago White Sox had conspired to throw the 1919 World Series. At this crucial time in baseball history, two teams, the New York Giants and the New York Yankees, challenged each other for supremacy over the future of the game and for the loyalty of New York baseball fans. In this book, veteran authors Lyle Spatz and Steve Steinberg argue convincingly that the 1921 baseball season was a turning point in the sport's history. That year, each league experienced tight, exciting pennant races, and for the first time, both New York teams won championships. The Giants captured their seventh pennant under their longtime manager, the pugnacious John McGraw. The Yankees, also-rans since they entered the league in 1903, won their first flag behind their manager, the introspective Miller Huggins, and the home-run hitting of the incomparable Babe Ruth. All the World Series games would be played at the Giants' home field, the Polo Grounds, where the Yankees had been tenants since 1913. McGraw, who despised the American League, Babe Ruth, and his style of play, epitomized the scientific or inside baseball that had dominated the game for the past twenty years. Ruth, who had hit 54 home runs in 1920 and then 59 in 1921, single-handedly revolutionized the way the game was played. The low-scoring, pitching-dominated game that McGraw had helped to create gave way to the high-scoring, big-inning, offense-oriented game that Ruth invented. Because of their winning ways, McGraw and the Giants had long dominated the city's baseball scene. But beginning in 1920 the Yankees challenged that supremacy. The upstart Yankees became the first team in baseball history to draw more than 1000,000 fans, and the team outdrew their landlords by almost 360,000. Ruth and the Yankees lost the 1921 World Series to McGraw and the Giants five games to three, but they won the hearts and minds of New Yorkers and also of millions of Americans elsewhere. In 1921, the Yankees replaced the Giants as baseball's premier team, and the Yankees dominated the game for the next fifty years. Spatz and Stenberg divide their book into three parts: the Preseason, the Season, and the Postseason. The Preseason traces the major developments in the history of the two New York teams with an emphasis on those events that influenced the 1921 season. In the Season, the authors provide a detailed chronological narrative of the 1921 pennant races in the two leagues. One or two consecutive chapters describe the Yankees and the American League race, and the next one or two chapters switch to the Giants and the National League campaign. …

Victor Zagorodnov: Getting high on glaciers [drilling equipment

Victor Zagorodnov designs lightweight and highly efficient ice-drilling equipment for use at very high altitudes. He works at Ohio State University's Byrd Polar Research Center, in Columbus, and "on the fly" on mountain peaks in South and North America, in the Himalayas, and on Mt. Kilimanjaro. As an engineer and scientist with the world's premier team of experts on tropical glaciers; helps advance a science that is revolutionizing knowledge about the earth's past and future; stretches his physical and mental faculties to the limit under challenging conditions.

Reciprocal Grandeur: Babe Ruth and Yankee Stadium

Joe Louis, Pope Paul VI, Robert Merrill, Y. A. Tittle, Billy Graham, Marianne Moore, Johnny Unitas, Josh Gibson, Jackie Gleason, Pele, and Muhammad Ali, not to mention Yankee superstars Gehrig, DiMaggio, Mantle, Stengel, Rizzuto, Berra, Jackson, Mattingly, Jeter--these names represent a mere handful of the many notables who have contributed to the history of Yankee Stadium. But however great the stadium's pantheon of stars may be, no one has done as much to build the legacy, legend, and lore of the big ballpark in the Bronx as George Herman Ruth. When on opening day of 1923, Fred Lieb of the New York World baptized the stadium House That Ruth Built, he foresaw the reciprocal grandeur between the Babe and Yankee Stadium that would enlarge the reputations of both ballplayer and ballpark and endure beyond the Babe's death and the stadium's renovation. On opening day of 1920, the Yankees still enjoyed a reasonably cordial relationship with Charles Stoneham's and John McGraw's Giants, New York's premier team and the Yankees' landlord in the Polo Grounds. In fact McGraw, five years earlier, had helped Yankee owners Jacob Rupert and Tillinghast Huston purchase the club. (1) However, when the newly acquired Babe Ruth began blasting home runs at a pace that would give him 54 for the season--25 more than his record 29 for Boston the year before--fans began filling the Polo Grounds in record numbers to see New York's team. With Ruth's home run total nearly doubling, the Yankees' attendance did the same as they became the first team to draw over a million fans, 350,000 more than their landlords. (2) In response to the Yankees' success, in what may be a story as apocryphal as it is fitting, it is reported that John McGraw or Charles Stoneham said, Yankees will have to build a park in Queens or some other out-of-the-way-place. Let them go away and wither on the vine. (3) The Yankees, however, did not need an eviction notice from the Giants to see that the Polo Grounds was an inadequate showplace for the talents of their new slugger. As early as August 1920, with the Babe on a pace to hit more homers than most teams, Rupert and Huston met with American League owners who supported their proposal that the team build a new park because the then limited capacity of the Polo Grounds had necessitated turning away thousands of fans on several dates. (4) Evidently, the magnates recognized Ruth's drawing power as a boon to all of the league, not only the Yankees. After working out a two-year extension of their lease with the Giants, Rupert and Huston began to plan the construction of a facility large enough for the game's largest hero. From 1921 until 1923 when the stadium opened, Ruth's exploits on the diamond and escapades off it launched him to celebrity status as towering as his home runs. In 1921, in likely the best year ever by any player, he swatted 59 into the seats, drove in 170 runs, scored 177 more, powered a slugging average of .846, batted .378, and walked 144 times for an on-base percentage over .500. At a time when even the game's top stars were not earning $20,000, Ruth's statistics won him a contract for $52,000 for 1923--I always wanted to make a grand a week, he said. (5) Such a phenomena was Ruth that scientists at Columbia University eagerly examined him and declared the coordination between his brain and muscles 30 percent superior to that of the average person. (6) Off the field he was the nocturnal pal of movie stars Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, the enfant terrible of speakeasies and brothels around the league, a frequent visitor to traffic court, and, despite these antics, the idol and friend of children across the nation. So big was Ruth that he even defied the order of Kenesaw Mountain Landis when the iron-fisted commissioner barred him from playing in a barnstorming tour after the 1921 season. Suspended until May 20, 1922, as a result, and nagged by injuries and suspensions for arguing with umpires, Ruth still went on in his shortened season to lead the league in slugging average at . …

The Indianapolis ABCs: history of a premier team in the Negro Leagues

The Indianapolis ABCs were formed around the turn of the century, playing company teams from around the city; they soon played other teams in Indiana, including some white teams. Their emergence coincided with the remarkable growth of black baseball, and by 1916 the ABCs won their first major championship. When the Negro National League was formed in 1920, Indianapolis was one of its charter members. But player raids by the Eastern Colored League, formed in 1923, hurt the ABCs and by the Depression the team was fading into oblivion. The team was briefly resurrected as a Negro league team in the late 1930s, but was otherwise relegated to the semiprofessional ranks until its demise in the 1940s. Through contemporary newspaper accounts, extensive research and interviews with the few former ABC players still living, this is the story of the Indianapolis team and the rise of Negro League baseball. The work includes a roster of ABC players, with short biographies of the most prominent.