… The Road Back: Part 2 focuses on core individuals in the Pacers organization, their thoughts about the injury and Paul’s drive to return. Paul has devoted himself to getting back on the court, and he may be there sooner than most are anticipating.
A day after Boston Celtics third-year big man Jared Sullinger pledged to transform his body while rehabbing from a season-ending left foot fracture, president of basketball operations Danny Ainge came down hard on Sullinger for his lack of strides in conditioning.
… Vanney, who holds a USSF “A” Coaching License, recently underwent the Elite Formation Coaching License course, a joint venture between MLS and the French Football Federation. Vanney called the program the “master’s degree in teaching soccer,” one that helped shape his coaching style.
It’s a style born of many influences. Vanney credits Sigi Schmid, Bruce Arena and Bastia head coach Gérard Gili as some of his own teachers, but his signature style revolves around the clarity and understanding of roles, something he learned from his head coach at Marcos de Niza High School, Jack Smythe.
Business is not a sport. But great coaching is just as important to success in the office as on the field. Over the years, HBR has interviewed some of the world’s top athletic coaches. We mined our archives for a few of their best insights that apply to employees and players alike.
Monitoring athletic preparation facilitates the evaluation and adjustment of practices to optimize performance outcomes. Self-report measures such as questionnaires and diaries are suggested to be a simple and cost-effective approach to monitoring an athlete’s response to training, however their efficacy is dependent on how they are implemented and used. This study sought to identify the perceived factors influencing the implementation of athlete self-report measures (ASRM) in elite sport settings. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with athletes, coaches and sports science and medicine staff at a national sporting institute (n = 30). Interviewees represented 20 different sports programs and had varying experience with ASRM. Purported factors influencing the implementation of ASRM related to the measure itself (e.g., accessibility, timing of completion), and the social environment (e.g., buy-in, reinforcement). Social environmental factors included individual, inter-personal and organizational levels which is consistent with a social ecological framework. An adaptation of this framework was combined with the factors associated with the measure to illustrate the inter-relations and influence upon compliance, data accuracy and athletic outcomes. To improve implementation of ASRM and ultimately athletic outcomes, a multi-factorial and multi-level approach is needed.
Athlete self-report measures (ASRM) are a common and cost-effective method of athlete monitoring. It is purported that ASRM be used to detect athletes at risk of overtraining, injury, or illness, allowing intervention through training modification. However, it is not known whether ASRM are actually being used for or are achieving these objectives in the applied sport setting. Therefore, the aim of this study was to better understand how ASRM are being used in elite sports and their role in athletic preparation. Semistructured interviews were conducted one-on-one with athletes, coaches, and sports science and medicine staff (n = 30) at a national sporting institute. Interview recordings were transcribed and analyzed for emergent themes. Twelve day-to-day and 7 longer-term practices were identified which contributed to a 4-step process of ASRM use (record data, review data, contextualize, and act). In addition to the purported uses, ASRM facilitated information disclosure and communication among athletes and staff and between staff, and improved the understanding and management of athlete preparation. These roles of ASRM are best achieved through engagement of athletes, coaches, and support staff in the systematic cyclic process.
The athlete’s ability to sprint at high velocities is an integral component in the related fields of Sports Rehabilitation and the Performance Enhancement Training of athletes. A principal objective of the rehabilitation process is to restore the athlete to their previous level of athletic performance including the athlete’s pre-injury running velocity. With regard to the athlete’s performance enhancement training, a necessary component of training, when appropriate, would be to enhance the athlete’s abilities in linear velocity. The review of the various rehabilitation and/or performance enhancement training programs often leads to the inquiry, as well as reveals the lack of an appropriate programmed sprinting volume as often the majority of the running volume prescription is “tempo” in nature. The Rehabilitation and Strength and Conditioning (S&C) Professional must ensure that the athlete incorporates an appropriate and proficient amount of sprinting volume into their rehabilitation and performance enhancement program designs. Based on the athlete’s medical history, physical quality levels, biological age, training history, etc., these appropriately prescribed sprinting volumes will vary from athlete to athlete. Nonetheless it is essential to include appropriate high velocity sprinting volumes into the athlete’s rehabilitation and training program design.
The following are some of the simple explanations for prescribing suitable sprinting volumes for the athlete.
There are sweeping changes now taking place at the intersection of health care and Silicon Valley. If the first step was the embrace of digital health by big tech companies and the creation of new wearable devices for tracking fitness and health, then the next step could be the creation of a revolutionary new direct-to-consumer health care model. This would take advantage of cheap plastic dongles hooked into your smartphone that offer the type of diagnostic power once reserved for hospital laboratories.
… in order to cope with the demands of training and competition, the nutrition of players has to be designed to cover their energy expenditures and to sustain good health. Central in nutritional planning for team-sports players is the quantity and type of carbohydrate in their diets because of the essential contribution made by this macronutrient to energy metabolism during high-intensity exercise (Burke et al., 2011). Therefore, the aim of this article is to explore the links between carbohydrate nutrition and team-sport performance by examining the available research literature on this topic.
Innovation expert Michael Schrage makes a pretty bold claim in his new book, The Innovator’s Hypothesis. So bold in fact that he slapped it on the cover in subtitle form: “How Cheap Experiments Are Worth More than Good Ideas.” Fittingly enough, considering this is a website that prides itself on spreading big ideas, Schrage appears in today’s featured Big Think interview and argues from an economic standpoint that there’s very little value to be found in good ideas.
… Forward-thinking coaches have always explored new ways to analyze and attack the game, to test their hypotheses against any available data. There is simply more data than ever available now, and a more intensive effort to harness it.
That’s what statistical analysis is really about.
But the public debate has become wildly distorted, because some loud skeptics—Barkley, Brown and countless cranky old newspaper columnists—have promoted a thoroughly warped image of the advanced stats movement, with criticism built on a foundation of straw men, misperceptions and mythology.
Issue number 100 of the CIES Football Observatory Big-5 Weekly Post presents the map of the 100 clubs that have trained the most footballers playing in 31 European top division leagues. The notion of training clubs refers to teams where players have been for at least three seasons between the ages of 15 and 21.
At the head of the table is Ajax Amsterdam. The Dutch team has trained 77 players employed by the 468 teams of the 31 leagues included in the analysis. At second and third place are Partizan Belgrade (74 players) and Barcelona (57). This data confirms the outstanding know-how of these clubs in the training of youth players.
… Although teams guard the inner workings of their analytics operations as if they were protecting nuclear missile launch codes, there’s almost no public and little private information about what — if anything — the Lakers have done or are doing on this front.
“If you ask the analytics people who work in the NBA, ‘Who does work for the Lakers?’ Nobody knows,” said Ben Alamar, director of production analytics at ESPN.