… at the end of possessions, he’s often left a spectator while a point guard or Danilo Gallinari and Wilson Chandler dance to create their best look. He’s handled the ball with less than four seconds left on the shot clock only 29 times this season, per Synergy “It is tough,” Murray said, his mouth curling into a grin. “You’re a scorer, you see the shot clock go down, you need somebody to bail you out, you’re just normally that guy that goes to get the ball. Now it’s just knowing when to go get it and when to stay back, and when to re-space and where to re-space. All that little stuff as a two-guard is up and down.”
Murray managed to strike that balance with Tyler Ulis at Kentucky, and only one-third of his attempts this season have come off catch-and-shoot opportunities, per NBA.com’s tracking data. He’s learning when and where to attack closeouts and break down defenses with his handle from the wing. “If you come into the league and the best thing you can do is catch and shoot, the league’s not going to let you catch and shoot. You’re going to be uncomfortable,” Calipari said.
… Lichaj hopes to be a part of the U.S. men’s national team for World Cup qualifiers in March, and more importantly for the tournament in Russia in 2018. Last week, U.S. coach Bruce Arena said the Nottingham Forest fullback is among the players under consideration for a call-up in March.
“It excited me, and it gave me more motivation. Because that’s definitely something I want, to get back in the team,” Lichaj told FourFourTwo. “I feel like I can provide something, whether it’s starting in the squad or on the bench. I think I can provide something to the U.S. team for the qualifiers and for the upcoming World Cup.”
It was a leap of faith when Lichaj first went overseas for a few trials with English clubs.
The sun was setting when Juan Martín del Potro was finishing up his second practice session Sunday, the overhead lights creating eerie shadows across the stadium court at the Delray Beach Tennis Center.
It was the day before the start of the Delray Beach Open, the ATP Tour event at which del Potro made a triumphant return last year after 11 months away from the game because of wrist surgeries. He chose to begin his 2017 campaign here too. Del Potro was so exhausted after leading Argentina to its first Davis Cup championship last November that he felt he needed to skip an early-season event in Auckland, New Zealand, and the Australian Open in order to recover mentally and physically.
After reaching the semifinals here last year, del Potro rose from No. 1,042 in the world to No. 38, ending the season by winning a tournament in Stockholm, his first title in 15 months. His greatest achievements of last season gained him no ranking points: a silver medal at the Rio Olympics, where he beat a teary Novak Djokovic in the first round and Rafael Nadal in the semifinals, and two five-set Davis Cup victories matches. The first of those matches, against Andy Murray in the semifinals against Britain, lasted more than five hours, and the other was against Marin Cilic in the final in Zagreb, Croatia.
Last Tuesday afternoon in the Swiss resort village of Zinal, 5,500 feet above sea level in the Alps and surrounded by peaks more than twice that high, U.S. alpine ski racer Mikaela Shiffrin began planning for Olympic Games that are still a year away. Her support team of five—two coaches from the U.S. Ski team, a trainer, a ski technician and, most importantly, her mother/assistant coach Eileen—gathered and began organizing the days, weeks and months between now and the opening ceremony on Feb. 9, 2018 in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Minutes after that meeting ended, Shiffrin was both emboldened and mildly overwhelmed. “We’re not even done with this year’s World Cup season,” said Shiffrin in a Skype interview. That is true. Shiffrin has at least nine races left in the 2017 season, including two stops in the U.S.: March 10 and 11 in Squaw Valley, Calif., and the World Cup Finals March 15-19 in Aspen, Colo.
When he’s not pitching from the mound at Target Field, Minnesota Twins pitcher Trevor May can be seen hunched in front of his computer. Staring into a camera hiked on his computer monitor with big stereo headphones, May is bringing fans closer to the game.
Well, at least to video games.
May, 27, has always been a talented pitcher. But he’s also a talented gamer.
If there’s one organisation whose name is a byword for innovation right now, it’s probably Team Sky. In just six years, this professional cycling team has achieved what many initially thought was an impossible ambition: the first British Tour de France winner in history (Bradley Wiggins in 2012), a feat repeated just a year later when Chris Froome took the title. Innovation and new ideas have played a huge part in Team Sky’s success, so I was really excited to get the chance as part of my work at Solverboard to chat to Simon Jones, Head of Performance Support and Innovation at Team Sky.
What emerged for me really clearly while talking to Simon was that Team Sky inspires a huge amount of enthusiasm from its fanbase and has a really dedicated team, but that the key is to focus that energy around the problems that really need solving. The concept of marginal gains, now widely understood but absolutely revolutionary when first implemented, relies on identifying multiple areas where improvement is needed, and then finding many small scale solutions rather than huge revolutions.
Dr. Inigo Mujika, (ESP) talks about “Peaking in Team Sports (or, Let’s do the WIST: Sport Science to Enhance Water Polo)” at the FINA World Sports Medicine Congress 2016.
Five research teams will receive a total of $100,000 through the NCAA Innovations in Research and Practice Grant Program, designed to enhance college athletes’ psychosocial well-being and mental health.
The program is aimed at funding projects that will bring tangible benefits to college athletes when used by individuals or by NCAA member schools’ athletics departments. This year’s grant recipients will produce work that touches a wide range of areas, including mindfulness training, career development, promoting resiliency, and mental health support for injured student-athletes.
… What most parents, ball coaches, and players are seeking, as they often will directly reference, is methods that most likely lay beyond their current abilities or necessities as a novice athlete; they mostly speak of the highly specific and specialized movements that they seen on the internet.
But, this doesn’t mean that “sport specific” isn’t an appropriate goal at this level. It is simply used in the wrong context: the novice trainee – i.e. the majority of all high school baseball players – needs predominantly general strength-training.
The sport specific context that we should be after at this level is the one which accommodates training to avoid contraindications for the overhead throwing athlete.
College football two-a-day practices appear to be ending. For safety reasons, the NCAA Sport Science Institute has recommended eliminating the popular two-a-day preseason practices and reducing contact at all practices, including limiting full contact to once a week during the season.
The recommendations, which are endorsed by 16 medical organizations and five football organizations, would put college football more in line with NFL rules adopted several years ago. NCAA members received the 17-page document last week at the NCAA Convention and now must decide whether to create legislation to fit the recommendations. If two-a-day practices end, the preseason could be extended by one week to accommodate the lost practice.
The importance of defining a clear direction for player development helps a club plan for the future and remain focused on reaching their end goal as an organization. Not getting lost in the mix of the day to day tactical strategies is key for success.
GoalNation’s Chris Rael spoke with Feyenoord Rotterdam (NL) on the importance of coaching education, its influence on player development at the youth level and their special take on what works best.
The best coaches learn from others, look for fresh ways to stay innovative and inspire their teams by not being afraid to try new ideas.
In speaking with some of the top coaches in lacrosse, common threads emerge from each, but one sticks out — they are never too old to keep learning, especially from leaders outside of the sport.
“Lou Holtz was most influential,” said Kevin Corrigan, the 29th-year head coach of Notre Dame lacrosse said of the former Fighting Irish football coach. “He taught me about team management, about handling your business in a professional manner, about Notre Dame, the right kind of kids to recruit, about having a clear vision and communicating it, and about the importance of fundamentals.”
… ussoccer.com: What are some of the responsibilities you will have as the High Performance Director for U.S. Soccer?
JB: The broad landscape is to try to continue the development of high performance within the Federation, including the areas of nutrition, strength and conditioning, sports medicine, the education program of coaches, and working with the Development Academy and the college system as well. We want to identify the things that we can build and improve on already from what’s going on at the Federation. Also, we want to look externally around the areas that we can have a larger impact on within the millions of players playing across America, giving them the right nutrition advice, the right instructions for recovery, inputting advice and standards across what soccer should be reaching for the Development Academy, colleges, MLS, and also the players playing at the grassroots level. I
Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness from
BACKGROUND:
The purpose of this study is to evaluate the changes of muscle strength in lower limbs and knee valgus alignment using the Prevent Injury and Enhance Performance Program (PEP program) to prevent ACL injuries in female soccer players during an entire season. METHODS:
A longitudinal and prospective study was done in twenty female soccer players at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, from a senior team. During 24 weeks the training program was applied three times a week as a part of the team workouts. Video analysis of dynamic knee valgus alignment and maximal strength of quadriceps, hamstrings and gastrocnemius were evaluated pre and post training. RESULTS:
Quadriceps and hamstring strength increased on the right pelvic limb (p<0.001). In addition the quadriceps/hamstrings ratio decreased from 3.38 to 2.3 in the right side, and from 1.99 to 1.09 in the left side. The mechanics of jump improved in 20% of the female soccer players. Muscle strength in quadriceps and hamstrings increased in right pelvic limb (p<0.001), and the quadriceps/hamstrings ratio decreased from 3.38 to 2.3 in right side and from 1.99 to 1.09 in left side. Although injuries did not decrease during this period no ACL injury was registered.
CONCLUSIONS:
Until now there are no reports about muscle strength and jump technique assessment with the application of the PEP program. The neuromuscular training and muscle balance are important to prevent ACL injuries. We advise that this program is integrated to women ́s soccer training.
No matter the sport, no matter the age or competitive level, speed is the great equalizer. All-things-being-equal, more sports place a bounty on speed than any other athletic characteristic. Elite distance runners have long-known that speed-endurance (which is truly what the distance events have become in elite sport) is built upon available speed (e.g., speed is the first limiting factor to speed-endurance).
What we know about speed and how to train for it, harness it, and repeat it consistently (speed-endurance) is ever-evolving in the sports performance and applied sport science field. Equally evolving are the ways and means with which we measure and monitor speed in our athletes. What we do know about working in elite distance running is that optimizing speed has become key to improved performance through the trappings.
Using power meter technology from RPM² is one way our coaches are leveraging data to ensure optimum realization of potential in our athletes, regardless of sport, age, gender, ability level, or disability. Data is fast-becoming the second “voice” of the athlete, and to hear it, understand it, and use it to better the performance outcomes is our charge as performance coaches.
Foot and ankle injuries are common in sports, particularly in cleated athletes. Traditionally, the athletic shoe has not been regarded as a piece of protective equipment but rather as a part of the uniform, with a primary focus on performance and subjective feedback measures of comfort. Changes in turf and shoe design have poorly understood implications on the health and safety of players. Evidence Acquisition:
A literature search of the MEDLINE and PubMed databases was conducted. Keywords included athletic shoewear, cleated shoe, football shoes, and shoewear, and search parameters were between the years 2000 and 2016. Study Design:
Clinical review. Level of Evidence:
Level 5. Results:
The athletic shoe is an important piece of protective sports equipment. There are several important structural considerations of shoe design, including biomechanical compliance, cleat and turf interaction, and shoe sizing/fit, that affect the way an athlete engages with the playing surface and carry important potential implications regarding player safety if not understood and addressed. Conclusion:
Athletic footwear should be considered an integral piece of protective equipment rather than simply an extension of the uniform apparel. More research is needed to define optimal shoe sizing, the effect that design has on mechanical load, and how cleat properties, including pattern and structure, interact with the variety of playing surfaces.
When human joints develop OA, they can make audible clicking noises during movement due to damage, otherwise known as crepitus.
In the early stages of the disease, these rubbing noises are confined to higher, non-audible frequencies and so the researchers are looking at ways to capture these noises.
Dr Davide Crivelli, of the School of Engineering, told BBC News: “The idea has got huge potential to change the way we diagnose osteoarthritis…”
… Generally, power converters, which take an input voltage and convert it to a steady output voltage, are efficient only within a narrow range of currents. But at the International Solid-State Circuits Conference last week, researchers from MIT’s Microsystems Technologies Laboratories (MTL) presented a new power converter that maintains its efficiency at currents ranging from 500 picoamps to 1 milliamp, a span that encompasses a 2,000,000-fold increase.
“Typically, converters have a quiescent power, which is the power that they consume even when they’re not providing any current to the load,” says Arun Paidimarri, who was a postdoc at MTL when the work was done and is now at IBM Research. “So, for example, if the quiescent power is a microamp, then even if the load pulls only a nanoamp, it’s still going to consume a microamp of current. My converter is something that can maintain efficiency over a wide range of currents.
There have long been suggestions that the Reds could leave Melwood in order to merge their senior and academy setups, to ensure a smoother passage to the first team.
This was magnified following the appointment of Jurgen Klopp, with the German taking a heavy focus on the development of young players.
Just like real doctors and nurses, online health tools with good — but controlled — communication skills can promote healthier lifestyles, according to researchers. However, if their tone is conversational, these tools may lull users into a false sense of comfort, they add.
In a study, people who experienced a back-and-forth interaction with an online health risk assessment website were more likely to follow the health behaviors suggested by the tool, according to S. Shyam Sundar, Distinguished Professor of Communications and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory.
The 2017 NFL Pro Bowl is a tradition that stems back to its inception in 1938. While the teams have changed drastically since then, the NFL Pro Bowl has become a tradition of competitive fun and entertainment for players, NFL front offices and fans. 2017 was the first year since 1980 (minus 2009) that the game was held within the continental United States. This venue change hoped to bring more fans, more attention and enhanced exposure of the game itself.
One of the attention grabbers for me during the Pro Bowl weekend occurred off the field. This year, The University of Central Florida (UCF) hosted the 2017 Pro Bowl Concussion Symposium and Health Screening. The purpose of this symposium was two-fold. First, retired NFL players were invited to partake in health screenings for free to help identify any neurological, cardiovascular or other issues plaguing them due to their playing time in the league. Second, the NFL Players Association partnered with the UCF Psychology Department to present all of the latest research and treatment options related to concussions in the world of sports, and more specifically, the game of football.
On the day he hoped would save his elbow, Garrett Richards laid face down on a table with his back exposed. A doctor guided a needle into the iliac crest of his pelvic bone and began to extract bone marrow. Richards was wide awake, the blessing of local anesthesia saving him from physical pain but not the anxiety that crept into his head: Is this really going to work?
Within a few minutes, the harvested marrow was hurried to a centrifuge, spun to separate the good stuff, mixed into a slurry of platelet-rich plasma and readied to inject into Richards’ damaged right elbow. Rather than the standard tear across his ulnar collateral ligament, Richards’ ran lengthwise along the middle of his UCL, a rare manifestation of an increasingly commonplace injury that almost always ends with Tommy John surgery. Not in this case. While he could have chosen that route, he wanted to explore first the efficacy of the aforementioned good stuff: stem cells.
Today, Garrett Richards is darting 98-mph fastballs again. “I feel as good as I ever have throwing a baseball,” he said.
New study of top clubs including Manchester United finds nearly 40% of players suffer tooth decay.
The new research claims professional footballers suffer poor oral health overall.
Footballers from top clubs including Cardiff City and Swansea City have a track record of poor dental health which affects their on-field performance, new research has found.
Nearly four out of 10 professional players have dental cavities, while one in 20 was found to have irreversible gum disease.
All along the coasts of Florida and in the heart of Arizona, Major League Baseball teams are preparing for the start of spring training. Soon, the camps will be populated by hundreds of players ready to start their preparation for the 2017 season. And when pitchers and catchers officially report this month, they will begin the weekslong shuttle to ready their arms for Opening Day.
It is a rite of spring and for those involved in keeping those pitchers healthy, these first few days of spring training are a cause of serious worry.
“The first week of camp, for us internally in baseball,” says Mike Reinold, a former head trainer for the Boston Red Sox, “is always the worst week of the year.”
The NBA Development League will be renamed the NBA Gatorade League starting next season, and also as part of a multiyear expanded partnership announced Tuesday, the Gatorade Sports Science Institute will collaborate with the NBA G-League.
GSSI will work with the NBA G-League to enhance player sports performance and recovery, and its scientists will partner with the league on player nutrition and training programs, incorporating technology and innovations in Gatorade testing, product and equipment.
The league that was designed to develop NBA players has often been used as a testing ground for everything from rule changes to wearable devices. And now Gatorade will have a wealth of athletes that can try out the company’s latest innovations.
… You might be thinking, proteins are not thought to be sweet. Whenever we hear the word “proteins,” we usually relate it to an animal product, such as meat, milk, or cheese. However, sweet proteins are less common in nature. They are produced by a few tropical plants—all come from the rain forests of Africa and Asia. One is commercially available (thaumatin) and approved by the FDA for specific use to modify and enhance flavors (FEMA GRAS Number 3732, “GRAS” meaning “generally recognized as safe”). Others are highlighted for future markets. Table 1-1 describes the source plants, their geographic distribution, and the chemical name of the sweet proteins derived from them.
… “In December we missed players and did not have the best schedule. You could see the difference physically.”
Liverpool’s title bid has collapsed in recent weeks as they have dropped to fifth, 11 points behind leaders Chelsea after 25 games.
“It was a few things. On a few things we had an influence and on others we did not have an influence — we conceded goals, offside against us, penalty against us,” Klopp rued.
Illinois Institute of Technology basketball coach Todd Kelly walked through the weight room, checking on his players’ progress.
But instead of bulking up their muscles, they were breaking down data.
“They were looking at the springs and the coils and the weight, and I was like, ‘What are you guys doing?'” Kelly recalled. “They said, ‘We’re looking at the coils and trying to figure out the resistance.’ I said, ‘You’re supposed to be lifting the weights, not analyzing how it operates.’
… Data from Stratagem, counting men between the ball and the goal when a shot is struck, make Burnley stick out like a sore thumb and adds a layer to explain here. In Stratagem’s sample for this Premier League season, around 14% of shots have fewer than two defenders between the place the shot is taken and the goal, and another 14% has more than 4 defensive players. All the other shots (72%) fit between these two parameters and have two, three or four defenders between the shooter and the goal.
For Burnley, they’re rarely caught short, with only 9.3% of the chances they concede occurring when there are fewer than 2 players between shooter and the width of the goal. On the other side of things, they’ve packed the defence with 5 or more players on 19.38% of occasions. The closest team to them on this count is Manchester United, on 15.68%; Burnley are leading by a distance.
You don’t have to go back too far in Major League Soccer to see that high-priced signings were almost the exclusive purview of attacking players. It made sense. In a salary-cap league, that was where teams — especially those willing to shell out money for the league’s highest paid players — could get the most bang for the buck. But this offseason, there has been a noticeable shift in where teams allocate their precious financial assets.
So far this preseason, based on releases of player signings as well as information from league sources, MLS teams have made 15 signings on the defensive side of the ball — including goalkeepers, defenders and holding midfielders — whose financial commitment exceeded this year’s Designated Player threshold of $480,625. That’s at least double the number of signings in both 2015 and 2016.
In addition to that total, two other defenders, the LA Galaxy’s Jelle van Damme and D.C. United’s Steve Birnbaum, saw their contracts renegotiated. Both received raises: Van Damme became a DP while Birnbaum’s deal involved the use of targeted allocation money (TAM) to bring him below the aforementioned threshold.
There are a hundred projection systems out there, and all of them are great. ZiPS, Steamer, Marcel—I could go on and on…but none of them will be right. They’ll all be accurate; these are good systems, designed by smart people, but in the end, the old trope about the game being played on grass, not paper, is true.
The fact is, we can’t possibly know everything about a player, let alone have enough inputs in a projection system, to account for all the variables. What we try to do in projecting players is project the results that take into account as many of the variables as possible, but I believe that is where there might be an edge.
An edge? I think every fantasy player (or gamblers, and let’s be honest, the Venn diagram on those two has a big overlap) suddenly pricked up his or her ears. While projection systems probably get most of it right—90 percent seem high to anyone?—there are those decimal point jumps that we get from season to season, from iteration to iteration, or even from generation to generation.
In today’s day and age, most NBA fans have executed a “trade” of some sort. Whether it’s in a fantasy league, video game or trade machine, modern fans can put their general-manager hat on and complete mock deals. For the most part, this has led to a better understanding about how trades work. For example, diehard fans are more informed when it comes to the Collective Bargaining Agreement, how salaries must line up in order for a trade to be completed, the value of certain assets and even how players deal with rumors since social media gives us a peak into their lives.
However, in talking to many general managers and other executives on the condition of anonymity, there are still many misconceptions about how deals get done in the NBA. We asked these individuals what it’s really like to be a front-office employee in today’s NBA and how trades actually get completed behind the scenes.
There are a lot of people working on every transaction
The Pittsburgh Steelers will spend the rest of this work week hammering out how they rate the NFL’s top free agents.
It’s one of the more concrete parts in a process of cementing the team’s 2017 roster was already years in the making, but will string along throughout the upcoming months. Steelers general manager Kevin Colbert outlined the team’s methods in a meeting with local media members.
Wearing a gold jersey and gold shorts, Nojel Eastern stood out at a recent Evanston High School basketball practice. And not just because the senior and future Purdue Boilermaker is an ESPN Top 100 recruit.
While the rest of the team was dressed in the Wildkits’ black and orange practice uniforms, Eastern sported the gear given each week to the player with the best practice stats each week.
Although statistics have long played a role in basketball, the movement toward analytic technology has changed the way high school coaches and players view the game. But coaches are still learning how best to use this information, and a debate has begun regarding how much analytics should be used in high school basketball in Illinois.
… While no one out there can say with absolute certainty where the game is headed over the next century, here’s a look what we can expect on the way there.
In the 2016 NHL playoffs, the Eastern Conference champion Pittsburgh Penguins, coached by Mike Sullivan, defeated the Western Conference champion San Jose Sharks, coached by Peter DeBoer, in a best of seven series to win the fourth Stanley Cup in their franchise’s history. In a series like this, with many ups and downs for both teams, the coach, serving as a spokesman for his team to the media, is under especially high pressure. Can this pressure be gleaned through a text analysis on their words in pre- and post-game interviews? Are there differences between the two coaches in terms of how they relay their mindset to the public? In my eternal attempt to shoehorn hockey concepts into data science problems, I will spend some time here showing how to apply some basic text analysis techniques to a set of NHL coach pre- and post-game press interviews scraped from the web.
Analysis of textual data has been growing in interest in data science circles. While the techniques I will demonstrate here can’t really be described as rigorous from a statistical standpoint, and will really only scratch the surface as far as answering the questions I posed, hopefully this will provide a nice introduction to a growing and interesting area of data science, and can serve as a jumping-off point for some more in-depth analysis. I will also illustrate some of the numerous pitfalls that can occur in even a simple text-based analysis.
Squad-building is never a straightforward task; while accounting for size, you also have to consider cost, value and potential future performance.
It’s also useful to consider the distribution of performance across the team; how good does our best player have to be relative to our tenth-best player, is there a cost to inequality in talent in the squad, and how does that all relate to our budget?