Athletes who make up the Ponte Preta S21 futsal down team will take part in research in the Biomechanics, Futsal and Training discipline at the Faculty of Physical Education (FEF) at Unicamp, coordinated by professor Sérgio Cunha. The team won the final of the 2023 Brazilian Futsal Down Cup, held in Cabreúva (SP), on July 15th. The rapprochement between the team and Unicamp is considered another victory by its coordinator, Maurício Carvalho, who is the father of one of the athletes.
Carvalho says that, in a lecture given by his son Rafael, in 2021, at the City Council of Valinhos (SP), Edison Duarte, professor of the Adapted Physical Education discipline at FEF, was present. At the end of the lecture, the professor invited Carvalho to visit the University and talk to Cunha about the work carried out with the athletes from the down futsal team.
At the same time, still during the remote classes period, Cunha students presented, within the scope of the Biomechanics, Futsal and Training discipline, a research project on the Ponte Preta S21. The coincidence of the initiatives led to the team's definitive meeting with Unicamp, boosting other studies on the topic and a partnership that now culminates with the new research, to be started in the second semester.
Cunha explains that the idea of this research is to prove the benefits of playing futsal and offer benchmarks for performance and motor coordination for athletes and coaches. To this end, the professor proposes capturing images of athletes' knee movements during training, to measure the angles of these movements. This process is carried out using machine learning techniques that allow the classification of angles and movements by color. In the end, individualized performance graphs will be generated that can be made available for Ponte Preta S21.
Unicamp's Executive Secretariat for Communication (SEC) followed one of the team's training sessions at the FEF gym. Fathers and mothers of athletes, athletes Ariane and Ricardo, Cunha and Duarte, Unicamp student Gabriel Pogetto, Carvalho and coach José Antônio de Oliveira spoke about the importance of the work carried out. Those involved with Ponte Preta S21 also narrated its story, which began in 2019 and was full of victories on the court and in family life. Among the most recent are the victory of the 2023 Copa do Brasil and Unicamp's interest in the project involving the team, today with more than 80 child and adult athletes, training weekly in Campinas.
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