… When Long wanted to ready himself for that 2008 draft, he didn’t want to go the traditional route, didn’t want to leave his friends on campus, didn’t want to jeopardize a relationship with then-girlfriend (and now-wife) Megan, didn’t want to be obligated to follow a set of conventional wisdom rules he didn’t think were necessary. So with the help of his friends at Rutherford-based 16W marketing, where co-founder Steve Rosner had represented Howie Long for years, Chris didn’t simply hire Rosner as his own agent, he practically moved in with him.
In situating himself close to Bergen County’s famed Parisi speed skill, Long set himself up to work half a week with legendary trainer Martin Rooney before doing his regular running and weight-lifting regimen back on Virginia’s campus.
Following the departure of his superstar teammate, Russell Westbrook was left to lead
the Oklahoma City Thunder all by himself. That’s when something special happened.
… Experts believe Brady’s on-field situational awareness, allied to a formidable offensive line and a few touches of good fortune, have enabled him to avoid the injuries that have hampered many other quarterbacks.
Brady’s only serious career injury was torn knee ligaments that forced him to miss most of the 2008 season.
“Unless he gets a major injury, (he can continue playing) a lot of years,” Mike Hahn, director of the Bowerman Sports Science Clinic at the University of Oregon, told Reuters. “How many is a lot: five-to-seven?
… With the legendary left-back set to stay in the Spanish capital for at least the remainder of the 2006-07 season, the club’s intention would be to send Marcelo to the Real Madrid Castilla team, where he could ease into the footballing style of this new continent by playing against second tier opposition. However, first team coach Fabio Capello would have none of it.
Instead, Marcelo was to remain with the senior squad, meaning he’d work up close and personal with the man he had the monumental task of one day replacing. “Even though I didn’t play much and was often left off the squad list, I learned a lot from that time,” the player would later say of his Italian coach’s decision to make him an apprentice in the Galáctico-laden squad.
“He had this mix of timidness and self-confidence,” Capello’s physical trainer Massimo Neri would later recall of that transition period. “He was quick, technically good and had great athleticism. I remember that he was polite and respectful and that in his first month he spoke little, but he listened a lot.”
JOHN WALL IS fighting to stay awake through a haze of painkillers. Next to his bed is a walker to get himself to the bathroom. For longer distances, there’s a wheelchair. His left knee is bandaged and recovering from having a bone spur removed from his kneecap, his right knee looks the same after a “cleanup scope.” He is wearing a gown.
In the chair next to his bed is a coach he has never met before, who walked through his hospital room door a day after surgery.
“So John, let’s say there’s 37 seconds left and we’re up two points and you’ve got the ball, what do you do?” he asks.
“Coach, are you seriously doing this right now?” Wall asks, eyes half open. “You take the two-for-one.”
Minnesota United FC, New York City FC, LAFC and the Portland Timbers feature prominently in US Soccer’s sweeping new expansion of the Development Academy, the youth league that includes MLS academy teams and other top clubs across North America.
Announced Friday, the news marks the DA’s second-largest expansion in terms of total teams since it was founded in 2007. It includes 17 new member clubs accepted into the DA, 108 existing clubs receiving promotions into additional age groups and two new geographical regions – the Portland and Seattle markets – being introduced at the Under-13 and U-14 age groups.
Perhaps the most anticipated sporting event in America, the Super Bowl stands as the pinnacle of success in the NFL. The Falcons and the Patriots have steamrolled their way through the regular season and playoffs via explosive offense play, timely defensive stops, and exceptional coaching. Equally important to the Falcons and Patriots success, however, is their uncanny ability to stay injury free in a game made famous, at least in part, for its level of aggression and high impact. And as the scatter plot shows, healthier teams with fewer players on the IR outperformed teams with higher IR totals.
In football there are few plays more thrilling than a last-second field goal attempt: both teams line up with the clock one or two ticks from zero. The ball is snapped and the crowd roars as the kicker charges forward in an effort to drive the ball through the yellow uprights, the fate of his team hanging in the balance. Yet why do some kickers rise to the challenge whereas others choke under pressure? It may have more to do with their mental state than physical ability, one psychologist says.
“Choking” is a term that has seeped into the vernacular to describe those big moments when athletes—or any individuals in a stressful situation—are unable to perform well under pressure. Choking, however, has little to do with failing to pull off the unbelievable (a 60-yard field goal in a blizzard, for example) nor does it describe a random off-day, performance-wise. Rather, Sian Beilock, a neuroscientist who authored the 2010 book, Choke: What the Secrets of the Brain Reveal about Getting It Right When You Have to, defines the phenomenon as a “worse performance than you’d expect given someone’s skills and experience, precisely because they find the situation to be pressure-filled or stressful.” For example, a kicker taking the field during a big game and bungling an easy 25-yard field goal he had made thousands of times before. So what happens when someone chokes?
University of Rochester, Rochester Review, Karen McCally from
Ten years ago, the popular business reporter and author Daniel Pink began researching why an increasing number of people were leaving jobs in large organizations to work for themselves. He encountered—“in a pretty cursory way,” as he explains it—work on human motivation by Rochester experimental psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan.
Two years later, Pink began researching how people might be motivated to do creative work. He returned to the work of Deci and Ryan. What he found, he says, was “an absolute treasure trove of research on human motivation”—much of it generated from initial research led by the two professors in Rochester’s Department of Clinical and Social Psychology. In his 2009 book, Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us, Pink placed Deci and Ryan front and center.
“Deci and Ryan, in my view, are the sun around which all this other research orbits,” Pink says. “They’re true pioneers. Forty years from now, we’ll look back on them as two of the most important social scientists of our time.”
What motivates us? How do we get motivated? And why do we describe some people as motivated and others not?
ith player safety under the microscope, the NFL and the Texas Medical Center held a competition Saturday for startups making innovative products geared toward improving the game.
Nine companies competed in three categories — communicating with the athlete, training the athlete and materials to protect the athlete — presenting pitches to a panel of judges that included doctors, CEOs and current and former NFL players.
GoRout won the communicating-with-the-athlete category, Mobile Virtual Player won for training the athlete and Windpact won for its materials to protect the athlete.
“I think what captivated the judges and grabbed our interest is these are translational ideas,” said Jeff Miller, the NFL’s executive vice president for health and safety initiatives. “You can imagine these things being on a field of play, whether at the NFL level or at lower levels of our sport relatively quickly.”
When tomorrow’s Super Bowl 51 (pardon me, “LI”) hits TV screens nationwide, Fox viewers will be treated to unique, immersive glimpses from the field, using Intel’s 360 Replay virtual camera. But even more intriguing is what’s happening behind the scenes—more and more teams, including Super Bowl contenders the New England Patriots, are convinced that virtual reality will change the way players prepare for the big game.
The Patriots, who face the Atlanta Falcons, are one of six teams now using a VR training system designed by Palo Alto startup StriVR. Others include the Dallas Cowboys, Minnesota Vikings, and Arizona Cardinals. The system, inspired by work done at Stanford’s VR lab, uses 360-degree video to put players—primarily quarterbacks—through their paces, with less physical risk and wear-and-tear than on-field practice, and more interactivity than just watching game video.
… what else is there for Manfred to do? The game has labour peace, competitive balance and, bar stadium issues in Tampa and Oakland, is in boffo financial condition. The use of performance-enhancing substances is no longer a hot-button issue—you can say it’s under control if you want, but I’m still in a “fool me once” phase—and while they aren’t perfect, baseball at least has guidelines in place to deal with domestic violence. True, there is a sense that something’s amiss internationally but that’s hardly a core issue for Manfred.
No, pace of play—or, as Manfred wisely refers to it “pace of action”—is the way in which Bud Selig’s heir can make an indelible mark on the game. It is an issue: the average time of game dropped by six minutes in 2015 compared to 2014 after baseball decided to enforce existing rules preventing batters from stepping out of the box and put a clock on the amount of time between innings so that play began once commercial breaks were over. It was a start … but not enough for the commissioner, who saw the average major league game increase by four minutes last season.
High Speed Video is a great way of analyzing your Running Form. While high end equipment is extremely expensive, the latest smartphones are quite capable and the software is freely available. I’ll focus on using the Kinovea software, though I’ll look at some of the mobile apps in the near future.
Teams have never tried harder to be on the bleeding edge, but the information they discover has never expired so soon. Forget hacking: When front-office talent is always liable to leave, how can clubs keep their secrets safe?