Routine and drive have helped Isaiah Thomas blossom from the last pick in the 2011 NBA draft into a two-time All-Star, who will play Sunday night in the showcase game and who is now chasing a league scoring title.
… So what’s pulling them to Europe? First and foremost, clubs steeped in tradition — and cash — through their men’s soccer business are increasing investment in women’s soccer.
They can also offer elite training grounds and a culture and environment consumed by the sport as a whole, if not women’s soccer. Lloyd, Morgan and Buchanan (Paris Saint-Germain) will get to compete in the UEFA Women’s Champions League quarterfinals next month. (NWSL teams do not play internationally.)
“It’s a unique opportunity for me to go abroad, play over here and be faced with a new and different challenge,” Lloyd said. “The facilities are fascinating, and it’s an unbelievable football club to be a part of.”
Dom Dwyer is a 26-year-old forward with national team aspirations and a Western Conference-best 50 goals over the last three MLS seasons. Yet he says his career in the U.S. may have ended after a brief four-minute appearance if not for a league many casual soccer fans know little about.
“I might not have gotten a chance in the MLS. And that’s really what it’s about,” said Dwyer, who grudgingly accepted a demotion to the Orlando City of the third-tier United Soccer League after playing just one MLS game as a rookie for Sporting Kansas City.
Richie Marquez tells a similar story. A four-year starter at the tiny University of Redlands, Marquez struggled with the huge step up in competition after being drafted by Philadelphia in the 2014 MLS SuperDraft. So the Union loaned him to the Harrisburg City Islanders of the USL, where Marquez led the league in minutes played while leading the Islanders to the league championship game.
Before Natasha Hastings, a gold medal-winning Olympic sprinter, started training dozens of college athletes for the NFL draft this past Monday, she had one concern. It was a reasonable one.
“My concern coming in was even though I had the credentials to train the players,” Hastings said, “I was a woman.”
Hastings found a lot of uncertainty in that dynamic.
“I wasn’t sure how football players would react to a woman leading them,” she added. “Would they respect me? Would they care if I was a woman?
For all the triumphs they have claimed in a decade filled with success after success, there are still some results that are looked at with added pride. The humiliations inflicted on Real Madrid at the Bernabeu, for instance, or the relentless manner in which they won the World Club Cup against Santos and River Plate.
Yet, Barcelona’s fourth Champions League win will always be their finest. It came against Manchester United in a game that was nowhere near as close as the 3-1 score line seems to suggest. United struggled to get close to the ball whilst Barcelona did as they pleased. Only some casual finishing limited the damage.
It was a game that moved Sir Alex Ferguson to claim that “they’re the best in Europe, no question about that. In my time as a manager, I would say they’re the best team we’ve faced. Everyone acknowledges that and I accept that. It’s not easy when you’ve been well beaten like that to think another way. No one has given us a hiding like that.”
This morning, I was worried about my legs burning, not growing stiff.
I’m sitting on a stationary bike in a basement lab, as Ernie Rimer squats beside me to measure the distance between my toes and ankle, between my ankle and my knee, between my knee and my hip. He pulls out a protractor — a device that will give anyone a mild panic flashback to high school geometry — to determine what angles my feet and knees create as I’m sitting on the bike.
Utah’s sports scientist insists this is all very exciting stuff: I’m Subject No. 2 in a study that will start as soon as he can start recruiting others, a study that Rimer thinks could change the way we think about ACL recovery.
I’m stuck more in the trappings of the moment: I’m wearing spandex in front of five people, and parts of my lower body are starting to fall asleep. I remind myself that progress — scientific, and other meaningful kinds of progress — takes time. It takes thoughtful design, precise measurements and critical interpretation of results. And real progress can make a difference.
Everyone knows about the Beep Drill. The Cleveland Indians can call it whatever they want – Warrior Dash tends to be the preferred nomenclature – but as players ascend through the minor leagues and learn more about what it’s like in big league camp, they all hear the stories of what happens on the first day on full-squad spring training, and the fear kicks in.
Baseball camp isn’t like football, with two-a-days in the blazing heat meant to turn men into men. Baseball is much lazier, much less demanding, which is what makes the Beep Drill something else. There is sweating. There is sprinting. There is betting. There is taunting. There is even the occasional barfing. Above all, the Indians believe, there is bonding.
On Saturday morning, the Indians held their second Beep Drill of the spring. One is for pitchers and catchers, this one for position players. The conceit is simple. They line up on a back field, listen for a beep from a speaker, run 21 yards to a cone, turn around and run 21 yards back, trying to cross the line before another beep. After a break, they do it again. And again. And again. Until the last player is standing.
he prolific rise of athletes entering the NBA Draft following one year of collegiate competition is presenting new challenges for clinicians, training staff and coaches. One of the most pressing issues that teams face is successfully transitioning rookie players through a full season without injury. While the importance of progressive overload and optimal recovery in this process is well understood, the best ways to collect and analyze player performance data is not well defined. Moreover, rapid advancements in technology are continuing to expand the ways player data can be collected. New objective measurements of player data are appealing, but successfully integrating these new technologies to both monitor players and create effective interventions for recovery is the true challenge facing NBA training rooms.
When you look out at the vast ecosystem of teaching and coaching, you see two main species: people who are focused on building skill, and people who are focused on building people.
Most coaches and teachers are in the skill-building business. They spend their time thinking about how to get better. They understand technique and strategy and information. They specialize in the “how” — that is, giving people tools to improve.
People builders, on the other hand, are focused not just on on skills, but on connecting with the learner and guiding the growth process. They use a toolkit of emotional skills to build relationships. They operate on a deeper level, specializing in tapping into the “why,” accessing the deepest wells of grit and motivation that drive progress over time.
… Stairs has communicated with the Phillies’ front office a few times since he got the job. The Phillies have been building a substantial analytics department, using Statcast™ and other metrics to identify the strengths and weaknesses of hitters.
The Phillies are not alone. Teams like the Cubs look at those numbers, and their philosophies have filtered into the clubhouse. Cubs pitcher Jon Lester even told The New York Times last year, “There’s no slug on the ground.”
That is where metrics like average exit velocity and average launch angle come into play.
“It’s more about certain guys hitting too many ground balls, or why isn’t the ball coming off their bat more solidly when they’re so strong?” Stairs said of those conversations with the front office. “We haven’t gotten too deep into the details, but you have to take baby steps.
A stiff-arm in a football game is a signature move, a classic technique for ball carriers to use their momentum to bulldoze a tackler out of the way.
It’s so revered that it’s enshrined as the pose for the figure atop college football’s most iconic award, the Heisman Trophy.
And, when a star player for The University of Alabama with an injured arm instinctively stiff-armed an opposing player in the 2015 Southeastern Conference Championship Game, he was able to do so thanks to doctors, athletic trainers, engineering students, professors and a 3-D printer.
Elite-level athletes and professional sports teams are continually searching for opportunities to improve athletic performance and gain a competitive advantage on the field. Advances in technology have provided new avenues to maximize player health and safety. Over the last decade, time–motion analysis systems, such as video recording and computer digitization, have been used to measure human locomotion and improve sports performance. While these techniques were state of the art at the time, their usefulness is inhibited by the questionable validity of the acquired data, the labor-intensive nature of collecting data with manual hand-notation techniques, and their inability to track athlete position, movement, displacement, and velocity. … This area has seen an exponential increase in published literature over the last decade (Figure 1). Here, we highlight a few applications for the growing wearable device field that detect various biomarkers (impact forces, stress, and strain) and biovitals (sweat and temperature) for sports medicine. No longer are wearable devices a novelty. Progress in wearable sensors, analytics, and reliability has positioned the field for translation into the clinical setting.
Adidas’ recent signing of the world’s second best player Lionel Messi (according to recent awards events) to a lifetime deal may be a reflection of their overall brand positioning when it comes to winning. An analysis of Europe’s big club competition winners over the past 10 seasons finds that 51.4% of teams wore Nike kit, while Adidas were in second place with 28.5% of teams wearing their kit.
The analysis by Voucher Codes looked at the last 10 and the top five leagues in Europe, plus the Europa League and Champions League – a total of 70 competition winners.
The two giants of the sports appareil market are way ahead of next placed Puma and Umbro who are joint third in the standings with 5.7% each.
… This is a story about one of those scouts, Fred. I tell Fred’s story whenever I overhear a fan talking about scouting as a dream job.
When I first met him, in the early 2000s at the World Junior Championships in Pardubice, in the Czech Republic, his scouting career was off to a promising start. He was in his early 30s, in his first N.H.L. gig.
As a player, he was short and, to be polite, stubby. On the ice, he had lived by his wits. Scouts grade prospects on “hockey sense,” an intuitive understanding of the way the game should be played. Scouts, of course, would be helpless without it. As a player and scout, Fred had hockey sense in spades.
Though he never played in an N.H.L. game, Fred believed he had found his niche as a scout, and now wanted to get made, to become a part of the fraternity, to have not just a career but a good career, to be a 25-year, maybe a 30-year hockey man.