… The East Side Red Raiders were the first organized team Whiteside had joined since he was 6 years old, and he had little idea how to harness his newfound height and play inside rather than outside the paint. He averaged 18 points, 10 rebounds and 5.5 blocks. The next summer he joined AAU’s United Celtics back in Carolina, skyrocketing onto national recruiting rankings, and two years after that [Chris] Chaney’s storied Patterson program, at a boarding school nestled in the Appalachian Mountains that doubled as a basketball factory, where 5 a.m. wake-ups and team runs through the woods were the norm.
“Mom,” Hassan whispered during a call home that year, “I think Coach Chaney crazy.”
But Chaney knew NBA talent when he saw it, and in Whiteside he had a project he could build from the ground up. Chaney also knew the recruiting game, and on a team ranked as the No. 1 prep school in the nation that season – featuring D-I talents Vincent Council (Providence), DeAndre Kane (Iowa State) and Arselan Kazemi (Oregon) – Whiteside was a classic “wait-and-see” kid.
The aim of this study was to investigate whether the speed associated with 90% of maximal heart rate (S90%HRmax) could predict speeds at fixed blood lactate concentrations of 3 mmol[middle dot]L-1 (S3mM) and 4 mmol[middle dot]L-1 (S4mM). Professional team-sport players of futsal (n = 10), handball (n = 16) and basketball (n = 10) performed a four-stage discontinuous progressive running test followed, if exhaustion was not previously achieved, by an additional maximal continuous incremental running test to attain maximal heart rate (HRmax). The individual S3mM, S4mM and S90%HRmax were determined by linear interpolation. S3mM (11.6 +/- 1.5 km[middle dot]h-1) and S4mM (12.5 +/- 1.4 km[middle dot]h-1) did not differ (p > 0.05) from S90%HRmax (12.0 +/- 1.2 km[middle dot]h-1). Very large significant (p < 0.001) relationships were found between S90%HRmax and S3mM (r = 0.82; SEE = 0.87 km[middle dot]h-1), as well as between S90%HRmax and S4mM (r = 0.82; SEE = 0.87 km[middle dot]h-1). S3mM and S4mM inversely correlated with %HRmax associated with running speeds of 10 and 12 km[middle dot]h-1 (r = 0.78 - 0.81; p < 0.001; SEE = 0.94 - 0.87 km[middle dot]h-1). In conclusion, S3mM and S4mM can be accurately predicted by S90%HRmax in professional team-sport players.
When the J.League was launched each club was mandated to have a commitment to youth development. Beginning in 1994 the J-Youth Cup was launched as a vehicle for club sides to play matches at junior level. By the turn of the century the emphasis on youth football was further enshrined when the league insisted every current and future club must establish junior or school teams in addition to under-15 and under-18 sides and their reserve sides.
Players saw a clear progression from junior sides to the top teams, and the club model quickly became the preferred path for youngsters aiming for a professional career. Almost every club across the country now has several graduates from their youth teams that regularly feature in the senior side.
The key to staying injury-free, we’ve been told for years, can be found somewhere in the vicinity of the belly-button.
“When we talk about core stability, you immediately have visions of people training their abdominal muscles,” says Dr. Patrick McKeon, an athletic therapist and professor of exercise science at Ithaca College in New York.
And it’s true that training these muscles, along with hip and back stabilizers, helps keep the rest of the body aligned while running, jumping, walking down the street, or even just sitting in a chair. But that’s only part of the equation needed for stability, according to McKeon.
“We also have a foot core,” he says. “The muscles in the foot behave in the same way.”
It is 9.30 on a Saturday morning. Twenty-two male and female volunteers aged between 16 and 65 are crammed into a classroom at the Warwick School in Redhill, Surrey, as the course tutor, Neil Cumming, makes his introductions.
“The first rule of coaching? Be on time,” he says with a wry smile as one latecomer sneaks through the door and makes his apologies.
This is the first of 20 FA level one coaching courses that will be organised by the Surrey Football Association in 2015, with a staggering 25,000 people forecast to achieve the qualification this year in England alone.
Chapter 1 of Michael Eisner’s book Working Together is sub-titled ‘Where I learned 1+1=3 (if not much more)’. If you ignore the irony in this statement from a man best-known for his narcissism (evident on the very cover of this book – as his co-author’s name is a quarter the size of his own!) There is much wisdom in it … as it relates to how creativity and effectiveness can increase beyond the sum of parts when rooted in a productive partnership.
Unfortunately, the sub-title of the first chapter of this book is pretty much where the wisdom waned – but it does lead me into the subject for this post: how working in coaching partnerships – or teams – can be more effective than working alone, and the potential pitfalls to watch out for.
… Allen believes in training athletes in a way that allows them to approach race day as if it were “just a normal day” of hard training so that anxiety or stress is minimized. Key to this process is taking the body to its limit repeatedly—but methodically—in training so that on race day the body is familiar with the effort and can push through to new levels of performance.
“My whole strategy is helping people reset the gauge of what fast is or what long might be or what steep is so that on race day the response is, ‘Oh, I’ve done this before,’” explains Allen. “Especially for an Ironman, one of the biggest keys is keeping the day feeling as low-stress as possible. You’re able to keep your aerobic metabolism going—you don’t switch over to burning 100 percent carbohydrate because you’re totally stressed out. Once you do that, you run out of gas.”
It all seems so simple. Football is played now at speeds faster than ever. Technology has never been more effective. So why not employ the NFL’s massive revenue to ensure that games are adjudicated as accurately as possible?
So goes the thinking behind a proposal that would add dedicated high-definition video cameras in each stadium, supplementing broadcast equipment and providing officials with all necessary angles to view replays. The NFL has pledged to study the idea, submitted last month by the New England Patriots, but early vibes centered around cost and infrastructure concerns. Patriots coach Bill Belichick was not amused, saying at the NFL owners meetings: “It’s disappointing every year to hear we can’t afford it as a league.”
Can that be possible? Could adding cameras truly be cost-prohibitive for a league that projects more than $12 billion in revenue this year? I spoke to several industry insiders with knowledge of both the technology and stadiums involved to find out.
Steve McClaren was ahead of the game when he explored a new idea at Derby County in the 1990s. Science in football has boomed since, as a gathering at the FA will show this weekend
Overuse injuries are the great equalizer, taking out the elite and weekend warrior alike. Most runners experience their share of injury, and although many of these conditions can be nagging, few are more so than plantar fasciitis.
But while plantar fasciitis is common—comprising 10 percent of all running injuries—its underlying cause is still a matter of debate and it remains very difficult to treat.
Back in 2004, the first owner of the Tampa Bay (Devil) Rays, Vince Naimoli, noticed how much money he was paying out to players on the DL. The team’s payroll was relatively low, so Naimoli believed any loss was even more impactful to his team than to any of the others. He instituted a program to reduce that loss, bringing in Dr. James Andrews – yes, that one – to spearhead the program as Medical Director.
Over the next decade, the Tampa Bay Rays have been one of the least injured teams in baseball, in terms of both days lost, dollars lost and injury cost, a calculated measure designed to smooth the effects of baseball’s salary system and relative payrolls. The Rays have been perennial contenders for the awards for best medical staff. Even in the midst of an ‘epidemic’ of pitching arm injuries, the Rays have had only one Tommy John surgery at the major league level over the past five seasons.
Dr. Bert Mandelbaum, a U.S. Soccer Federation team physician for more than two decades, has been a pioneer in researching ACL injury trends and creating injury-prevention programs.
SOCCER AMERICA: How confident are you that ACL injuries can prevented if coaches implement injury prevention warm-ups such as PEP or FIFA 11+?
BERT MANDELBAUM: I can’t say, and I will never say, that there’s any one injury that we could have prevented.
I do know though that if we take the collective, that once we do programming, we can prevent ACL injuries anywhere from 70 to almost 90 percent — if we do the program. It’s been shown time and time again.
Sports Medicine Research: In the Lab & In the Field from
Take Home Message: Patients who sustained an anterior cruciate ligament tear often suffer quadriceps weakness, altered spinal-reflexive excitability during the first few weeks after the injury, and altered corticospinal excitability a few months after the injury.