Where does a basketball player find the perfect shot? In a gym? A high-tech sports science and medical lab? On a paddleboard on the ocean? In marriage? Mind? Body? In a system that accentuates three-point shooting?
For Atlanta Hawks guard Kyle Korver, the best three-pointer shooter in the NBA, it is all of those places and more.
But let’s start on the Pacific Ocean two summers ago.
More than 1,000 former NFL players are addicted to painkillers. Many are without health insurance, or any semblance of a support system. In this VICE Sports exclusive series, players tell their stories of being negligently supplied with various substances by NFL teams and describe the long-term repercussions they have suffered as a result. In Episode 1, NFL veteran and ESPN commentator Marcellus Wiley discusses his use of toradol and the renal failure that he suffered as a result. [video, 8:28]
I remember attending my first competitive youth soccer tryout a few years back. One of the club directors was taking me through the plans for the day as I kept glancing over at the group of boys I was about to evaluate.
Sensing my nervousness he said, “Just find the best athletes and we will teach them how to play soccer.”
Soccer is far and above the sport with the highest participation rate in the world, deeply rooted in culture in Europe, Africa, and South America. Most recently, it has also found an astonishing rate of growth in the non-traditional market of North America, where Major League Soccer is looking to continue expansion, and has established a dedicated following throughout the continent.
This increased interest has created a trickle-down effect to the sport at the grassroots level, where participation continues to grow, and has led to the creation of the Development Academy by the U.S. Soccer Federation, and a comprehensive Long-Term Athlete Development pathway and accompanying high-performance EXCEL programs by the Canadian Soccer Association. Mirroring successes in player development that academy programs of European soccer clubs have had, both Canada and the United States have moved to a 10-month long league format for their high-performance development programs, where teams practice an average of 3-4 times a week, playing 1-2 games on the weekend. This is not much different than what many collegiate and professional clubs complete in a given week.
While these academy programs place a large emphasis on technical skill development (and in my opinion, that should be the number one priority), sometimes physical preparation can be cast aside at both the developmental and high-performance level.
This past weekend, over 350 soccer coaches from across Canada descended on the University of Toronto campus to attend the National Soccer Coaches Conference, presented by Bell. The conference took place over four days, and included classroom lectures and on-field practice sessions from renowned coaches such as Dutch periodization specialist, Raymond Verheijen, Canada’s men’s national team coach, Benito Floro, and Toronto FC head coach, Greg Vanney.
Oscar Tabárez is kicking time in the teeth. He’s spitting in its eye, elbowing it in the stomach and telling it to go to hell. At an age where no one would blame him for hanging everything up and walking away, at a time in his life where he has accomplished so much that you wouldn’t begrudge him for one second for wanting to kick back and inhale a breath of serenity in the monotonous days of retirement, he’s doing just the opposite. And it might just define his career.
Tabárez has been planning Uruguay’s future without him since he retook the job of national team manager in 2006. In between making the semi-finals of the 2007 Copa América, the semi-finals of the 2010 World Cup, winning the Copa América in 2011, as well as getting past England and Italy in the group stage of last summer’s World Cup, Tabárez has been working on a legacy beyond those accomplishments: revamping the Uruguayan youth system.
The truly iconic football clubs are defined by their ability to dominate on and off the pitch. Perhaps no other enterprise is as results-driven as football and Liverpool Football Club, long the goliaths of English and European football, boast one of the most recognizable brands in the world. But long before a homegrown player takes that famous walk through the tunnel under the renowned This is Anfield sign on to that hallowed pitch, the journey begins at The Academy. The Academy opened in 1998 and is located in Kirkby in the northern part of Liverpool.
True football development requires a club to invest time, energy, resources to create not only talent footballers, but true ambassadors for the club’s reputation, brand, and values. At Liverpool, it an academy system that boasts a list of graduates whose names are synonymous with Liverpool Football Clubs. Men like Billy Liddell, Phil Thompson, Robbie Fowler, Steve McManaman, Jamie Carragher, and Steven Gerrard are but a few of the stellar devotees to the red half of Merseyside.
“To what extent does the role of a coach affect an athlete or team’s behaviour or success?”
This question was posed to me last week on Twitter and got me thinking about the importance of a coach on the development of a footballer and the team as a whole.
While considering this question I thought of something a very experienced coach and ex-professional told me about a young player becoming a pro. In his opinion he believes that certain players are will become professionals, no matter what. He believes that regardless of the environment, coaching or obstacles in their way, certain players will make it. This is a man who has been part of the world of football for several decades, who has played with many talented players and worked with many youngsters who went on to become professionals. This got me thinking greatly being a coach of ‘elite’ players whose ambition is to become professionals.
… Last fall and earlier this winter I had the chance to wear-test a soon-to-be-released device called Stryd, a sophisticated-yet-simple tool that could soon become the first true wearable power meter for running. Stryd (Stryd.com) is being developed by a Boulder, Colo., startup spearheaded by Li Shang, Ph.D., an electrical, computer and energy engineering professor at the University of Colorado, and Robert Dick Ph.D., an electrical engineering and computer science professor at the University of Michigan.
What can a power meter tell a runner? Just as in cycling—a sport that has used power as a training and racing metric for years—a runner’s total power output can be quantified with a single number and, when accessible in real time (either audibly through earphones or visually on the screen of a phone or watch) can give a fairly direct indication of how hard that runner is working at that particular moment.
In December a Boulder based company with only a handful of employees announced that they had put together a running power meter. They’d taken the same concepts from the cycling world, but moved it into the running world. In doing so, they’d be the first true consumer running power meter.
For those not familiar with power (in cycling anyway), it’s a metric that normalizes effort expended. For example, on windy days your pace would be impacted by a headwind (slower), whereas your HR would be higher. How do you easily compare those across multiple runs? That’s where power comes into play. It removes the variables of HR or wind and is one standard you can validate against. Power is typically expressed in wattage (i.e. 215w), though you often compare different people using watts/kilogram (to account for weight differences).
Of course, there’s been many thoughts and ideas put forth on running power. But all of these ideas have centered heavily on a measurement device at your shoe. Such as an insole or the like. Not with Stryd. For that, it’s merely a little pod that you clip on your running shorts.
Ted Harper did his best to hide in plain sight. Standing in a sea of people next to Tom Brady’s podium at Media Day, he wore nothing that identified him as a member of the Patriots staff except for the credential dangling from around his neck.
The protein shakes he held — one in each hand — gave him away, though.
For three seasons, Harper has been New England’s team nutritionist.
… Are these changes in the attitude toward nutrition rubbing off on the players, or just coming as directives from the coaching staff?
[Susan M. Kleiner:] It’s a huge change over the years from when I started. When I began, it was the retired athletes who were worried about their nutrition. They weren’t training in the same way anymore, but they weren’t eating differently. They gained a lot of weight, and they were at tremendous risk for heart disease and stroke. Today, many of the young players take nutrition in college as part of their health and fitness education as they go through the athletic department. There are many players who come from schools who had sports nutritionists who worked with the team. They’re coming in with an education. Most of them understand that it will make a difference in their performance and even more probably understand it’s going to make a difference in the length of their playing life. And that translates to dollars for them.
Today, so many of the elite players are all working with nutritionists. When a young player has a role model, they want to know what that guy is doing. Most are trying at least to change their diets. I think the owners are even starting to notice that the teams that focus on nutrition do better in the long run.
Dr. Suzanne Konz of the Marshall University College of Health Professions is heading to next month’s NFL Combine to assist in the medical evaluation of more than 300 professional football hopefuls.
Konz, director of the biomechanics laboratory and an associate professor in the college, said this is her seventh year attending the combine to conduct isokinetic testing on collegiate athletes from across the U.S.
The NHL recently announced they will soon provide advanced statistics such as Corsi and Fenwick as part of their NHL.com offerings. However, in this age of maturing hockey analytics, the metrics quantifying the impact of player injuries on a team are very frequently ignored.
CHIP (Cap Hit of Injured Player) and our TMITT metric (Time Missed Impact To Team) are arguably not on anyone’s radar. Yet. We compare them head to head here.
There are a myriad number of ways to measure a player’s value to their team. Which is best? The answer is that it depends on the player, their role, and their performance (past and future). How well do they score? Eat minutes? Hit? Stop pucks? Thankfully, we can measure the past.