Sports

Statcast at 10: From MLB's secret project to inescapable part of modern baseball

Published

2 weeks ago

July 10, 2024

Statcast at 10: From MLB's secret project to inescapable part of modern baseball

By Stephen J. Nesbitt, Rustin Dodd and Eno Sarris

The email landed in Cláudio Silva’s inbox on the evening of Dec. 6, 2011. One of the first things he noticed was the three letters in the subject line: MLB.

Baseball?

Silva was an NYU professor who specialized in data science and computer graphics. He had once worked at AT&T Labs and IBM Research. Those were initials he understood. But MLB? Silva grew up in Fortaleza, Brazil, a coastal city where baseball had little relevance. When he got his doctorate at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, he never bothered to learn the rules.

The email was written by Dirk Van Dall, who was working with Major League Baseball Advanced Media (MLBAM), the league’s digital arm. It was forwarded to Silva by Yann LeCun, another NYU professor and one of the world’s foremost experts on machine learning. Silva read the first few lines. It concerned a secret project in the works. “MLBAM is working with a vendor on technology to identify and track the position and path of all 18 players on the field,” Van Dall wrote. The problem, he continued, was that the resulting firehose of data would need to be compressed, coded and organized on the fly for use by broadcasters, analysts and coaches.

Van Dall didn’t mention the project could revolutionize the sport, transforming the way teams evaluate players or how fans watch games. Nor did he use the project’s eventual name: Statcast.

Silva wasn’t sold. Sharing the email with Carlos Dietrich, another Brazilian graphics expert, Silva said, “It seems interesting. But it has no academic value.”

Still, Major League Baseball wasn’t a brand to brush off. Plus, compared to other corporate pursuits, this project seemed unusually laid back. When Silva and Dietrich agreed to consult, the league gave them no non-disclosure agreements or legalese, just a CD containing player-tracking data from a game earlier that year — Aug. 2, 2011: Kansas City Royals 8, Baltimore Orioles 2. That, Dietrich would say, was the day “Statcast actually started.”

That data set spawned years of research, testing and technological innovation. Two Brazilians who barely understood baseball created a data engine — code name “black box,” because no one else knew how it worked — upon which would be built the structural bones of Statcast, the tracking system that turbo-charged another wave of the sabermetric revolution.

It’s been 10 years since a primitive version of Statcast debuted at the 2014 Home Run Derby. The “Statcast era” has been one of profound change. New stats have been developed and popularized as a result, and the modern baseball vernacular has swelled, with phrases like exit velocity and launch angle entering common parlance. The firehose of data has swelled analytics staffs, transformed scouting and player development, and punctured cherished beliefs. (You thought you knew how power was produced? Think again.) Statcast is everywhere — produced and promoted by the league — but not for everyone. It enthralls analytically inclined fans and irks others.

Billions of data points have been distilled into insights that have made baseball a smarter game. But a better one? That’s up for debate.

“Something of the old school feels lost,” Cubs pitcher Drew Smyly said.

“The old-school game is the past,” countered Mets designated hitter J.D. Martinez. “We can’t play this game like that anymore.”

Ten years before the email, on a Saturday night in Oakland, Derek Jeter ranged across the diamond to field an errant relay throw and flipped the ball to catcher Jorge Posada in time to tag Jeremy Giambi and preserve the New York Yankees’ lead in Game 3 of the American League Division Series. At MLB’s Park Avenue offices the next morning, debate raged. What if Paul O’Neill had been in right field instead of Shane Spencer? What if Spencer’s throw had hit either cut-off man? What if A’s manager Art Howe had pinch-run Eric Byrnes for Giambi? Where had Jeter come from?

And why, asked one league executive, can’t we measure all of that?

The seed for the Statcast project was planted.

Statcast’s red and blue circles have become familiar to a large subset of baseball fans.

“We wanted to get into the DNA of what allows plays to happen,” said Cory Schwartz, now MLB’s vice president of data operations. “But before you run, you have to walk. You have to start with the pitch, the origin of the action.”

That part became possible in the late 2000s when PITCHf/x — a system of cameras tracking pitch velocity and movement — was installed in each big-league ballpark, inundating clubs with data and ultimately spurring a pitching revolution. Conversation inside the former Oreo cookie factory in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood that served as MLBAM headquarters turned to the next frontier: a full-field tracking system.

“The holy grail has always been if you know where the players were,” said Joe Inzerillo, who led MLB’s multimedia efforts at the time. “Knowing where the ball is in baseball is great. But knowing where the players are and where the ball is unlocks all of this other data you can start to look at.”

Having edited video for the Chicago White Sox in the 1980s, Inzerillo understood the value of automating work that was usually being done manually by clubs, like creating spray charts to position fielders and craft pitching plans. But the technology to do so was in a nascent stage. Sportvision, which ran PITCHf/x, had an expensive camera array that yielded unreliable results. European soccer clubs were using various machine vision setups, but in baseball the ratio between the size of the playing surface, the players and the ball made it challenging to capture minute movements accurately.

“We didn’t want to do something people would historically look at and say, ‘Oh my God. What were they thinking?’” said Inzerillo, now an executive vice president and chief product and technology officer at SiriusXM. “If we couldn’t measure it accurately, if it wasn’t scientific, we didn’t want to put it out.”

The solution for Statcast came from a pairing of two European companies. The Swedish company Hego had a 4K camera setup that would provide a stereoscopic view of the field. (When it was clear the project was too large for Hego’s two-person operation, Hego merged with graphics giant Chyron.) Trackman, a Danish golf company that broke into baseball with a ball-tracking device engineered by a man who’d used radar to track missiles, agreed to assemble a large array of radar panels for each stadium.

In 2013, Salt River Stadium in Scottsdale Ariz., was the testing ground for the next generation of baseball tech: Sportvision and ChyronHego cameras alongside Trackman radar. The Statcast system would need to work day or night, in weather conditions ranging from downpour to sun glare to dense fog. Silva and Dietrich installed extra equipment to validate the vendors’ output. They found that Sportvision’s results were rife with errors because it smoothed curves and made assumptions for missing data.

ChyronHego amassed a war chest of data and presented it to MLB executives in New York. They built a baseball diamond in a spreadsheet and showed how, when they input a line of data, players appeared, in position, on the screen. “At that moment,” former Hego CEO Kevin Prince said, “baseball management rocked back on their chairs and said: F— me.”

MLB had its holy grail: radar to track the ball, cameras to track players.

As data began to trickle in during Statcast’s experimental stage, then-MLBAM CEO Bob Bowman and his staff began writing down everything that could be quantified in a single baseball play. They listed more than 100 ideas. They then whittled it to about 20 “golden” metrics that would comprise Phase One of the public Statcast rollout, everything from exit velocity to sprint speed to secondary leads to fielder range.

“So much of baseball record-keeping is (an) accounting of what happened,” Schwartz said. “So and so hit 30 home runs or had 200 strikeouts. That’s backwards looking. But skills analysis enables you to look forward and look at whose skills will potentially lead to better results. That’s what baseball scouts and talent evaluators have been trying to do since before our dads were here.”

Statcast would measure process — evaluating a player’s skills with more accuracy than the eye test.

Constructing each metric took careful consideration, plus a little bit of a sniff test. The initial leader for catcher pop time — how long it takes a catcher to receive a pitch and get it to second base — was Los Angeles Angels backup Hank Conger. “No offense to Hank Conger,” Schwartz said. “We knew that wasn’t right.” MLBAM intern Ezra Wise, now an analyst for the Minnesota Twins, was dispatched to watch Conger. Wise learned Conger short-hopped most throws, and the pop-time “stopwatch” halted as soon as the ball hit any object, grass or glove. Once the metric was adjusted to measure the throw to the center of second base, Conger slid to the bottom of the leaderboard and J.T. Realmuto popped to the top.

Statcast had no name when it was introduced by Bowman at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in March 2014. The system was in alpha testing that season, active in just three stadiums — Citi Field in New York, Miller Park in Milwaukee and Target Field in Minneapolis. It was also installed in Kansas City and San Francisco ahead of the 2014 World Series. In Game 7, Giants second baseman Joe Panik made a diving stop and turned a game-defining double play. Statcast not only concluded that Panik had a slightly negative reaction time — he was moving toward the ball’s eventual path 10 feet before it met Eric Hosmer’s bat — but that Hosmer would have been safe if he hadn’t slid into first base.

By 2015, with the Trackman-ChyronHego set up in all 30 MLB ballparks, Statcast insights began infiltrating broadcasts and game coverage, where data like launch angle could be used to explain a home run explosion during that season’s second half. Yet the data wasn’t available anywhere fans could find it until MLB contacted Daren Willman, a software architect at the Harris County District Attorney’s Office in Houston. Willman had created a site called Baseball Savant that provided pitcher matchups, leaderboards and an advanced-stats search function. MLBAM hired Willman and acquired his site before the 2016 season, then added writer Mike Petriello and statistician Tom Tango, who had extensive experience developing baseball metrics.

With a site, a savant, a statistician and a sportswriter dedicated to Statcast, the league was ready to take Phase One public.

It didn’t take long to see their work impacting the game on the field. One day, MLBAM staff passed around an article in which an MLB hitter mentioned he was working on his launch angle.

“We were like, OK, now Statcast is in the canon,” Inzerillo said.

The Statcast era was born in the same manner that Hemingway described bankruptcy: gradually, then suddenly. As the system churned, front offices leveraged the data to turbo-charge their analytics departments. Hitters revamped their swings to put the ball in the air. The numbers on batted balls and defensive positioning confirmed the value of defensive shifts, which only increased their use. In the early years of Statcast, Dietrich, the NYU engineer, recalled sending teams charts and data on defensive formations. “You could see clearly the defensive formations changing through the years,” he said. “I don’t know if it was in response to the data we were providing, but probably (it was) because they never had that data before.”

The defensive shift had been around since Ted Williams in the 1940s. But for decades, it remained an undervalued tool. As teams turned to the tactic, Statcast’s cameras offered a level of new precision. In 2016, left-handed batters were shifted 30.3 percent of the time in bases-empty situations. That rate more than doubled over the next six seasons, to 61.8 percent. As singles disappeared, baseball moved to stop the tactic in 2023, mandating that two infielders had to be on each side of second base when a pitch was released.

If there was any doubt about the growing influence of Statcast, one only had to consider that exit velocity, launch angle and shifting were the parts that were public. So much remained proprietary — still invisible and underground — where teams were free to take the numbers and build their own models.

“It’s completely changed the game,” said one assistant general manager, under the condition of anonymity. “For a long time, we had very little capability of quantifying what our eyes told us to be true.”

From a technical standpoint, Statcast remains a marvel, a shorthand for the broader proliferation of bat-tracking technology and biomechanics that are changing player development. When MLB introduced bat speed metrics earlier this year, Martinez, the analytically inclined veteran hitter, looked at the numbers and questioned the accuracy of the data. Others just questioned the point.

“I would argue that swinging as hard as you can to hit the ball as hard as you can to get the miles per hour promotes more swing and miss,” Roberts said, “which doesn’t help me win a baseball game.”

Few major leaguers made better use of baseball’s newest analytical tools than J.D. Martinez. (Billie Weiss / Boston Red Sox / Getty Images)

For some players, there is only so much utility in the Statcast leaderboards. Blue Jays outfielder George Springer came up in an Astros organization that embraced technology. But he never gravitated toward the metrics. They can show bits and pieces, he said, but often they don’t show “the true measure of a player.”

Spend time in major-league clubhouses, and it’s not unusual to see players poking around Baseball Savant. Dodgers starter Tyler Glasnow looks at Statcast regularly, using the numbers as a second point of validation: There is how he felt on the mound, and then there is the underlying data. But across the room, fellow starter James Paxton offered a pithy rejoinder: “I can tell you if it sucked or if it was a good pitch just by looking at it,” he said. “I don’t need the computer for that.”

Some players are neither Statcast boosters nor cynics. They’re just baseball fans. Kevin Kiermaier, Toronto’s four-time Gold Glove outfielder, doesn’t use Statcast as a roadmap to self-improvement. He sees it as an avenue to learn cool stuff.

“You sit here and watch Shohei Ohtani and Oneil Cruz hitting the ball 119 mph,” Kiermaier said. “That’s incredible. I’m glad we are able to know that. Like, ‘How hard do you think he hit that?!’ ‘I don’t know!’ Now we know.”

What once felt radical is now commonplace. When Statcast debuted in 2015, Padres All-Star outfielder Jackson Merrill was 11 years old. Once upon a time, ESPN could air an alternate Statcast broadcast and it could feel like programming from the future. Now, ESPN’s David Cone can fluently discuss barrels and predictive metrics on Sunday Night Baseball, the network’s flagship broadcast.

“The stuff that we did in 2016 that was so new is just mainstream now,” said Petriello, a commentator on the Statcast broadcasts. “You can turn on any broadcast and hear people talking about Barrels and win probability, and that’s wild.”

In 2020, Statcast’s Trackman-ChyonHego setup was replaced by an optical tracking system from Hawk-Eye Innovations, a company best known for automating line calls in tennis replay. Hawk-Eye initially installed in each stadium 12 cameras running at 50 or 100 frames per second, then, in 2023, replaced five of those with 300 frames per second cameras, which allowed for the bat and biomechanics tracking.

The bat-tracking metrics — including each hitter’s swing speed and length — were once among the 100 ideas MLBAM listed more than a decade ago. As technology improves, more measurements have become possible. Limb tracking is likely next.

“There’s kind of a natural evolution,” said Ben Jedlovec, who worked in data quality for MLB for six years, “from what happened — the guy hit a home run — to how it happened — a fastball on the outside corner, a (certain) swing speed — to how the player made that happen. How did their body have them throw 99 mph? How did the hitter’s body mechanics help him time that pitch?”

Along with the three-dimensional visualizations Statcast already has, and the advent of virtual reality, there are also visualizations made possible by the advent of limb tracking. A full-field tracking system can inform comprehensive models that help us tackle questions that at first do not seem possible.

“Let’s go back to Jeter,” Schwartz said.

Today we’d be able to measure exactly how much ground he covered. We’d know exactly how strong Spencer’s arm was compared to O’Neill’s. We’d calculate the probability of Byrnes scoring from first based on his foot speed, Spencer’s arm strength and accuracy, and each fielder’s positioning. We could produce an entire other reality and see what would’ve happened to that play if any of the circumstances were just a little different.

“You can start to tinker around with things,” Schwartz said, “and see what kind of outcomes you might have gotten.”

Instead of virtual reality, these alternate realities could help the analytically-inclined fan better appreciate what they did see in that game, and the probability of an extraordinary outcome on the field. Players might be able to use limb tracking to improve their mechanics to achieve better outcomes. We’re all likely to hear and read more about how these athletes move through space in the coming years. How that knowledge filters down to us can be customized to our preferences.

If alternate reality simulations sound … out there, it’s worth connecting them to where this started. A decade later, the creation of Statcast stands as a triumph for the league and a fulcrum for the sport. But for those who worked on Statcast, it remains a brilliant accident, a random confluence of fledgling companies, novel tech and part-time engineers.

“Picture a situation where you are my manager,” Dietrich said. “I walk into your office and say, ‘Man, I have this idea. I’ll create a tracking system with this huge set of 3D cameras and a radar to capture the ball. The company that will make the 3D cameras doesn’t exist yet. The other company that will implement the radar works with golf. We’ll call these two guys that never worked with anything related to sports, and they’ll implement this metrics engine, and after a few years, we’ll have this multi-million dollar tracking system that will give us results we never saw.

“I think I would be real lucky if I had the job by the end of the day. Because it makes no sense at all.”

(Top Illustration: Dan Goldfarb / The Athletic; Top photos: Patrick Smith / Getty Images; Darren Carroll / Getty Images; Jamie Sabau / Getty Images)

Sports

Explained: The rules for under-18s competing in the Paris Olympics

Published

3 hours ago

July 27, 2024

Press Room

Explained: The rules for under-18s competing in the Paris Olympics

As the eyes of the sporting world turn to host city Paris, extra focus will fall on the hundreds of children competing at the 2024 Olympic Games.

While some sports — including diving, gymnastics, wrestling and boxing — have minimum ages for when athletes can take part, others, such as skateboarding, surfing and table tennis, have no restrictions.

Skateboarding, which made its Olympics debut at the Tokyo Games in 2021 (delayed a year because of the Covid-19 pandemic), attracts a particularly young field, with Finland’s Heili Sirvio and Hasegawa Mizuho of Japan, who are 13, and Zheng Haohao, a Chinese athlete who is just 11 years old, appearing in the French capital.

So what are the rules on under-18s performing at the Games? How do these differ between various sports? Where do these children stay and how are they looked after?

What is the minimum age requirement for the Olympics?

There is no specific age limit to compete at the Games. Age restrictions are set by the international federations in charge of each sport, rather than the International Olympic Committee (IOC).

Arguably the most famous performance by a child at the Olympics was Romanian gymnast Nadia Comaneci receiving a series of perfect 10 scores from the judges at the 1976 Montreal Games when she was 14.

Comaneci was 14 when received a perfect score at the 1976 Olympics (AFP via Getty Images)

Several Olympic sports have no age restrictions, at either end of the scale. In skateboarding at these Games, for example, Great Britain & Northern Ireland have 16-year-olds Sky Brown and Lola Tambling competing alongside Andy Macdonald, who turns 51 next week.

However, for most other sports, there is a minimum age. For example, female gymnasts must now be at least 16 — and there have been growing calls for that to be raised to 18, in line with their male equivalents — while divers must be at least 14, as was the case with Team GB’s Tom Daley at the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, China. In judo, it’s 14, and in wrestling it’s 18.

In boxing, the minimum age is 19 and the maximum is 39. Special permission was given to Finland’s Mira Potkonen who was 40 in Tokyo after the Olympics were delayed by a year due to the pandemic. She went on to finish third in the women’s lightweight category, becoming the oldest boxer to win a medal at the Games.

The men’s football event is essentially an under-23s competition, but each 18-strong squad is allowed three overage members.

In the UK, athletes have to be at least 20 for marathons/race-walking and 18 to take part in throwing events, the heptathlon and decathlon and the 10,000m. Athletes as young as 16 can appear in other track events so long as they have “demonstrated a consistent level of performance, as well as previous experience at major international competition, which suggests that selection for senior competition is appropriate for their long-term development”.

In Paris, this is set to include 17-year-old Phoebe Gill in the women’s 800m. She could become the youngest British track athlete at an Olympics for more than 40 years.

How are child athletes protected at the Games?

At the Tokyo Olympics, the IOC brought in chaperones for under-16 athletes.

This time, the IOC is encouraging each national team to have a safeguarding officer and is offering two extra accreditations for welfare officers.

Athletes aged under 18 are allowed to stay at the Olympic Village, home to around 10,000 competitors across the Games, situated in the Saint-Denis area of northern Paris, near the Stade de France. However, whether they actually do so is down to each individual country.

Athletes under 18 will have to pair up with a buddy when they walk around the Olympic Village (Maja Hitij/Getty Images)

Scott Field, director of communications for Team GB, explained how careful attention is being paid to who their youngest athletes share a room with.

“We have a welfare plan that dictates how sports should manage where and who athletes room with, in the Olympic Village or other accommodation,” Field told The Athletic. “Under-16s would have a chaperone with them, who must also accompany them when outside of the Olympic Village/their satellite accommodation.

“We have an extensive welfare guide that supports young people in their stay at the Olympics. We also have a dedicated group of designated safeguarding officers who are on hand to provide welfare support throughout the Games.”

Australia has decided the three youngest athletes in its 460-strong team — Arisa Trew and Chloe Covell, both 14, and 15-year-old Ruby Trew, who are all skateboarders — will stay in a hotel rather than the athletes’ village, UK newspaper The Guardian has reported.

Those under-18s who are in the Olympic village will not share a bedroom with an adult. The apartments will have a supervisor, and the under-18s will have to pair up with a buddy when they walk around the athletes’ village. They will have a supervisor with them for any trips outside the village (requiring consent from parents), or they can be checked out by their parents.

The IOC added this year’s Olympics will have “the most comprehensive package of mental health and safeguarding tools, initiatives and services than any other sporting or Olympic event in history”. This includes having more than 160 accredited welfare officers from 87 national Olympic committees at the Games, a new AI-powered monitoring service to protect athletes from online hate, and two safeguarding officers in the Olympic Village.

What concerns has this led to?

In recent years, sexual-abuse cases, doping scandals and faking ages have shone a light on the concerns around the exploitation of child athletes.

This was seen most recently with the doping case involving Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva, who was 15 when she won gold at the 2022 Winter Olympics in Beijing. It emerged she had previously tested positive for trimetazidine, a heart medication banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), and Valieva received a four-year ban, backdated to her positive result in December 2021.

Her young age fuelled a debate as to why only she had been punished, and not the Russian doctors who gave her the drugs. The Court of Arbitration for Sport revealed Valieva had been given 56 different medications and supplements between the ages of 13 and 15.

Travis Tygart, the United States’ anti-doping chief, said the number of medications given to her was “sickening”. Olivier Niggli, the director general of the WADA, described it as “shocking”, and said Valieva was “sacrificed” to protect those responsible.

Valieva won gold in Beijing but was later banned for four years (Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)

Under WADA’s code, under-16s are “protected persons”, which means they are subjected to lighter penalties, adding to the fears around exploitation.

Valieva’s case led to the International Skating Union raising the minimum age for athletes in its most high-profile competitions from 15 to 17, a change that would be phased in over three years before the next Winter Olympics in Italy in early 2026.

Meanwhile, the U.S. gymnastics sex abuse scandal saw Larry Nassar, a former doctor for USA Gymnastics, convicted and sentenced to over 300 years in prison in 2018 after being accused of abuse by more than 250 athletes, including four-time Olympic gold medallist Simone Biles. In the UK, a report into gymnastics in 2022 found there had been an epidemic of abuse, which included young athletes being starved and made to hang from the rings used in one of the sport’s events as punishment.

Going further back, X-ray bone analysis in 2009 revealed 3,000 young Chinese athletes had faked their ages — giving them an unfair advantage in competition.

Former WADA deputy director general Rob Koehler is now director general of Global Athlete, a group that has concerns about children competing at the Olympics at all.

“If you look at the Valieva case, it clearly indicated that young kids should not be going to the Games,” Koehler told The Athletic. “In any other professional sport, and this is professional sport, there are age limits — for example, in the NHL (the top ice-hockey league in the U.S. and Canada), before you can be drafted. They should use the Youth Olympics for youth athletes. That’s where there’s extra attention, time spent on education and time spent on culture.

“The WADA code also treats under-16s differently. That alone means you lose all the harmonisation and the quality.

“Do you want a 15-year-old child to have that much pressure on them at the Olympic Games? It’s a tough place to be.

“We think there needs to be age limits and they should be put in straight away.”

(Top photo: Skateboarder Zheng Haohao will compete in the Paris Olympics at age 11; He Canling/Xinhua via Getty Images)

Sports

NCAA releases details of proposed $2.78 billion settlement with former athletes

Published

3 hours ago

July 27, 2024

Press Room

NCAA releases details of proposed .78 billion settlement with former athletes

The NCAA and its power-five conferences filed a plan to pay out nearly $3 billion to former athletes in a settlement of an antitrust class-action lawsuit.

The proposed deal also paves the way for schools to directly compensate athletes while attempting to regulate payments from boosters.

“NCAA college athletes have waited decades for this moment, and their right to receive the full value of their hard work has finally arrived,” said Steve Berman, managing partner and co-founder of the Hagens Berman law firm. “We are incredibly proud to be in the final stages of historic change.”

Trophy and banner displayed during the NCAA Division III Women’s Ice Hockey Championship at Kenyon Arena on March 19, 2022, in Middlebury, Vermont. (Nancie Battaglia/NCAA Photos via Getty Images)

“College athletes will finally be able to share in the billions of dollars their compelling stories and dynamic performances have generated for their schools, conferences, and the NCAA,” the filing said. “This is nothing short of a seismic change to college sports following more than four years of hard-fought victories in this case.”

The $2.78 billion would be paid out over a 10-year period. Payouts will be determined based on the sport and length of athletic career, with most football and men’s basketball players able to receive nearly $135,000 each.

However, the highest estimated payout is expected to be nearly $2 million, thanks to “Lost NIL Opportunities,” according to the law firm.

A view of NRG Stadium as Nathan Mensah, #31 of the San Diego State Aztecs, and Adama Sanogo, #21 of the Connecticut Huskies, jump for the ball to start the game during the NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament National Championship game at NRG Stadium on April 3, 2023, in Houston, Texas. (Logan Riely/Getty Images)

GEORGIA FOOTBALL STAR RODARIUS THOMAS BEING HELD WITHOUT BAIL AFTER ARREST ON FAMILY VIOLENCE CHARGES

The deal covers three antitrust cases — including the class-action lawsuit known as House vs. the NCAA — that challenged NCAA compensation rules dating to 2016. The plaintiffs claimed that NCAA rules denied thousands of athletes the opportunity to earn millions of dollars off the use of their names, images and likenesses.

The NCAA lifted its ban on athletes earning money through endorsement and sponsorship deals in 2021.

The agreement does not settle the issue of whether college athletes should be deemed employees, but it does include language that would suggest the deal would be subject to change if “a change in law or circumstances permits collective bargaining.”

“This settlement is an important step forward for student-athletes and college sports, but it does not address every challenge,” the commissioners of the Atlantic Coast Conference, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12, Southeastern Conference and NCAA President Charlie Baker said in a joint statement. “The need for federal legislation to provide solutions remains. If Congress does not act, the progress reached through the settlement could be significantly mitigated by state laws and continued litigation.”

The NCAA logo shown on the basket pad before the Second Round NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament game between the Marquette Golden Eagles and the Colorado Buffaloes at Gainbridge Fieldhouse on March 24, 2024, in Indianapolis, Indiana. (Mitchell Layton/Getty Images)

The filing still needs to be approved by a judge, but attorneys say they will file a motion for preliminary approval and, if granted, a public website will go up in about two months, where former college athletes can determine how much they are eligible to receive.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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Sports

Swimming has a diversity problem. Can this generation of Olympians change that?

Published

4 hours ago

July 27, 2024

Press Room

Swimming has a diversity problem. Can this generation of Olympians change that?

PARIS —

When Maritza Correia McClendon started swimming in Puerto Rico, she stood out because of her talent, not the color of her skin.

“There’s a lot of diversity in Puerto Rico,” said McClendon, who is Black and Latino, as are one in five people on the island.

Then her Guyanese-born parents moved to Florida when she was 8. Though she had become even faster in the pool, that was no longer the first thing people noticed about her.

“I remember a parent telling me, ‘What are you doing here? You should go do track or you should go on a basketball court,’” she said. “They were almost shaming me for being that outcast on that pool deck.

“That is definitely traumatizing. It’s still hard for me. I do definitely still struggle with that confidence factor.”

McClendon overcame that to become the first Puerto Rican of African descent to make the U.S. Olympic swimming team, the first Black female to win an Olympic medal for the U.S. and the first Black American swimmer to hold a world record.

2024 Paris Summer Olympic Games

In an effort to get others to follow her lead, McClendon is now among a growing number of former swimmers, coaches, officials and administrators working to make the sport more accessible and welcoming for people of color, from the grassroots level, where she was once shunned, to the Olympic team, where she shined.

The Paris Games has the opportunity to provide a big boost in those efforts when the swimming competition begins Saturday. Although only two of the 46 pool swimmers who will compete for the U.S. in Paris are Black — and none are Latino — those two, Shaine Casas, a three-time world champion, and Simone Manuel, a two-time Olympic champion and five-time Olympic medalist, have a chance to inspire a generation.

“If you’re not seeing somebody that you can relate to as a swimmer, then who’s going to be your role model?” said Steve Roush, executive director of Southern California Swimming, the grassroots affiliate of USA Swimming and the largest of the nation’s 59 local swim committees. “When you’ve seen over the last few years people like Simone Manuel, interests in the Black population say, ‘Hey, I guess we can swim. I guess there are spots for us.’ If they’ve never seen a Black on an Olympic or national team, then it’s really hard for them to think, ‘That’s what I want to do.’”

USA Swimming says less than 5% of the athletes registered with the federation are Black or Latino. Those groups account for 31% of the U.S. population. The level of representation on the Olympic team is no better. The reason for that has little to do with talent.

“It’s not an athletic thing,” said Nic Askew, coach of the swim team at Howard University, the only HBCU to compete in the sport. “Anyone of any race and culture can be an amazing athlete in anything. But when you look at the history and the neglect, it absolutely is more social and socioeconomic.”

Until the last half of the 20th century, Black people and Latinos were commonly prohibited from using public pools and beaches. When those bans were lifted, the lack of swim facilities in inner-city neighborhoods became a new impediment to the sport.

“It’s very, very expensive,” McClendon said. “Not only for the person to learn how to swim, but also for the community to keep a pool open. The cost of the water, the chemicals, lifeguards. Every part of it tends to be very expensive.

“That’s a big hurdle. Another one is generational trauma. When our parents were growing up in segregation, they weren’t even allowed to go to the pool. So there became a fear of going to the water.”

That lack of access has had consequences that stretch beyond making an Olympic team. According to a 2021 study conducted by the USA Swimming Foundation and the University of Memphis, more than two-thirds of Black children do not know how to swim. The number is 45% for Latino children. As a result, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found the rate of drowning deaths among Black children aged 10-14 is 7.6% higher than whites of the same age while the rate for Latinos rose 25% between 2019 and 2022.

“Swimming,” McClendon said, “is the only sport that is also a life-saving skill.”

Yet as long as children of color don’t see themselves represented there, they will continue to believe swimming is not for them. That makes the Olympics — and especially the presence of athletes such as Casas, Manuel and Cullen Jones, the first Black American swimmer to break a world record — so important.

Casas, 24, a former world champion in the backstroke, will swim the 200 individual medley in Paris. That event begins Aug. 1. Manuel, who turns 28 next week, will swim the 4×100 freestyle relay Saturday and the individual 50 freestyle next week. She won gold medals in the 100 freestyle and the relay in Rio de Janeiro in 2016 and won a relay bronze in Tokyo three years ago.

Shaine Casas swims during the men's 200 individual medley preliminaries at the U.S. Olympic swimming trials in June.

If both can repeat their success in France, it could provide a big boost to make swimming more diverse in the U.S.

Progress is being made on other fronts as well. In Paris another barrier will fall — and another example will be created — when Anthony Nesty, a former gold medalist for Suriname and the coach at the University of Florida, becomes the first Black head coach of a U.S. Olympic men’s swim team. At the grassroots level, Roush said nearly a fifth of Southern California Swimming’s 20,000 athletes are Latino, a record for the region.

“The participation’s there,” he said. “I think we are reflective of the diverse ethnicity within Southern California. But these numbers aren’t reflective of what’s out there on the national scene.”

Making those numbers reflective of the population at large is important for a number of reasons, said Richard Lapchick, president of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport at the University of Central Florida.

Tennis, for example, shed its country club image when Serena and Venus Williams began to dominate the sport. That has not only brought more fans and more revenue to the sport, it has brought more and diverse participants as well, with the number of people playing the sport in the U.S. increasing by 33% between 2020 and 2023.

Not surprisingly that growth was most dramatic among people of color with the number of Latino players growing by 90% over that three-year period while Black participation increased by 46%.

“In any area, if you’re not raising a population that is representative of the entire country, you’re excluding [many] that could have been [great],” Lapchick said.

“Part of the reason why it would be helpful if [swimming] was more diverse, there are people who won’t pay attention to swimming because they look at it as a sport that’s exclusive rather than inclusive.”

Without the Williams sisters, we might never have gotten Coco Gauff. And without Black Olympic gymnastics champion Gabby Douglas, we might never have gotten Simone Biles. Over the next nine days, Casas and Manuel have a chance to do the same for Black and Latino swimmers. That opportunity is a fleeting one that only comes around once every four years.

“The one time historically that swimming is at the top of the media or a topic of conversation is during the Olympics,” Askew said. “But the Olympic cycle is every four years. So to be able to see athletes like Shaine and Simone now, it’s phenomenal.

“This is a space that a Black person can be at this elite level.”