Joanna Lohman, the Washington Spirit’s most experienced player who enjoyed a terrific 2016 season, tore her left anterior cruciate ligament in the National Women’s Soccer League opener Saturday. She is the fourth member from last year’s finalists in the past eight months to suffer the same serious knee injury.
Lohman, a Silver Spring native, was hurt in the 19th minute of the Spirit’s 1-0 defeat to the North Carolina Courage at Maryland SoccerPlex. She remained in the match for several minutes before departing. Lohman, 34, will undergo surgery in a few weeks and miss the remainder of the season.
Alexander Nylander’s first season in professional hockey consisted of 65 games with the Rochester Americans of the AHL.
But if the eighth overall pick in the 2016 NHL draft is going to take the next step and earn a spot in the Buffalo Sabres lineup, the highly skilled teenager needs to make the most of another kind of season.
“He knows he needs a big summer,’’ Buffalo general manager Tim Murray said. “His issue is strength. It’s not skill, it’s not hockey sense, it’s not how to play the game, it’s strength. And that’s the easiest thing to fix. So, if he puts in the time this summer, I expect him to come back and challenge for a skill position on this team.”
… This has been something of a theme in Davies’ young career: confront a big situation and bulldoze it as though he’d seen it professionally a hundred times before. Eleven months ago, Davies became the youngest goal-scorer in USL history. Four months later, he started his first MLS league match and opened his first team account with a goal against Sporting KC in the CONCACAF Champions League. Five months after that, in March, he scored again in the CCL, this time in an eventual triumph over the New York Red Bulls in the quarterfinals. All the while, he’s bumped the eminently dangerous Kekuta Manneh from the starting lineup (Vancouver would eventually trade Manneh to Columbus) and become a key threat in his own right. I hazard a guess that there are few teams in the league who would not start him tomorrow. At 16.
The Whitecaps and coach Carl Robinson specifically have done their best to keep the hype lid firmly snapped closed over Davies since he made his debut last year. That’s laudable work, all things considered, but when performances speak this loudly it’s also largely a moot point. Davies’ hype is out. Now the question is merely where it’ll lead him.
The Los Angeles Dodgers once again want you to forget everything you think you knew about starting pitching. The franchise that has given us Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Fernando Valenzuela, Orel Hershiser and Clayton Kershaw is willingly de-emphasizing what used to be the bedrock of winning baseball: reliable, innings-eating starting pitchers.
Rich Hill has a recurring blister problem. Julio Urias is throwing three or four innings per start in Triple A. Scott Kazmir is throwing mid-80s in extended spring training. Brock Stewart has a bum shoulder. Jair Jurrjens, who hasn’t pitched in the majors in three years, is getting a tryout in the Triple A rotation.
All that, and yet everything is perfectly fine for a 7-7 team that plans to use at least a dozen starting pitchers this year. Welcome to a world in which MLB teams put an average of six pitchers on the disabled list every day, and the 200-inning pitcher has never been more rare.
… A “break” is a brief cessation of work, physical exertion, or activity. You decide to “give it a rest” with the intention of getting back to your task within a reasonable amount of time. But when you “give it a rest,” what part of your brain actually needs that break?
For “think-work,” it’s the prefrontal cortex (PFC), the thinking part of your brain, according to an eye-opening blog by author Nir Eyal here. When you are doing goal-oriented work that requires concentration, the PFC keeps you focused on your goals. The PFC is also responsible for logical thinking, executive functioning, and using willpower to override impulses. That’s a lot of responsibility—no wonder it needs a break!
Now you know that breaks can help you keep your goals in the spotlight. But research tells us that there are numerous other benefits of downtime. Of course, as everyone knows, breaks can bring you fun, relaxation, conversation, and entertainment, but we’ll focus on evidence that links periods of rest with greater work productivity.
… [George] Shultz, who’s now 96, told me that his hour of solitude was the only way he could find time to think about the strategic aspects of his job. Otherwise, he would be constantly pulled into moment-to-moment tactical issues, never able to focus on larger questions of the national interest. And the only way to do great work, in any field, is to find time to consider the larger questions.
The psychologist Amos Tversky had his own version of this point. “The secret to doing good research is always to be a little underemployed,” Tversky said (as Michael Lewis describes in his latest book). “You waste years by not being able to waste hours.”
Likewise, Richard Thaler, the great behavioral economist and a Tversky protégé, self-deprecatingly describes himself as lazy. But Thaler is not lazy, no matter how much he may insist otherwise. He is instead wise enough to know that constant activity isn’t an enjoyable or productive way to live.
The Brooklyn Nets and NormaTec, the leading sports recovery technology company, have aligned to revamp the Nets’ training room at Barclays Center, which has been named the Recovery Room Powered By NormaTec.
The Brooklyn Nets’ training room serves as the team’s base for recovery and rehabilitation. Through this alliance, NormaTec has provided PULSE PRO Recovery Systems for each Nets player to use before and after games, and during training.
Altra’s Torin IQ were inevitable. Sensors integrated into articles of clothing have long been acknowledged to be the next step in wearable tech, and the Utah-based footwear maker just happened to beat most of its competition to the finish line with a pair of running shoes that bake tracking directly into the sole.
But unlike the scads of smart clothing that’s almost certainly on the horizon, the IQs are designed to address the very real issue of repetitive stress injury. It’s what turns running from a terrific full-body cardio workout to a veritable disintegrator of body parts.
… Metro spoke with Troyanos this week about what goes on in the medical tent on race day, some of the common reasons runners require help and what those athletes they should expect to feel right after crossing the finish line.
How many runners end up at a medical tent and for what reasons?
It varies, and the key factor in that determination is weather. We’re trying to get an understanding of what Monday’s weather is going to look like. Based on heat, humidity, those types of issues, our injury rates will go up as the heat goes higher…[Local runners] are used to running in cold, damp miserable weather. In the heat you have to slow down, you can’t think you’re going to go out for a personal best.
Background The role of lower extremity (LE) muscle strength for predicting traumatic knee injury in youth athletes is largely unknown.
Aims The aim was to investigate the influence of LE muscle strength on traumatic knee injury in youth female and male athletes.
Methods225 athletes (40% females) from sport senior high schools in Sweden were included in this case–control study. The athletes recorded any traumatic knee injury that had occurred during their high-school period in a web-based injury form. A one repetition maximum (1RM) barbell squat test was used to measure LE muscle strength. The 1RM was dichotomised to analyse ‘weak’ versus ‘strong’ athletes according to the median (weakmedian vs strongmedian).
Results 63 traumatic knee injuries, including 18 ACL injuries, were registered. The majority of injured female athletes were in the weak group compared with the strong group (p=0.0001). The odds of sustaining a traumatic knee injury and an ACL injury was 9.5 times higher and 7 times higher, respectively, in the weakmedian group compared with the strongmedian group in females (p ≤0.011). A relative 1RM squat ≤1.05 kg (105% of bodyweight) was established as the best cut-off value to distinguish high versus low risk of injury in female athletes. No strength–injury relationships were observed for the male athletes (p ≥0.348).
Conclusions Weaker LE muscle strength predicted traumatic knee injury in youth female athletes, but not in males. This suggests that LE muscle strength should be included in injury screening in youth female athletes. [full text]
Amsterdam Collaboration on Health & Safety in Sports from
Rounding upon her PhD thesis, Ingrid Vriend just got a positive reply form Sports Medicine on her review that summarises the target level of published sports injury prevention studies. Prevention of sport injuries is crucial to maximise the health and societal benefits of a physically active lifestyle. To strengthen the translation and implementation of the available evidence base on effective preventive measures, a range of potentially relevant strategies should be considered. The aim of this review was to identify and categorise intervention strategies for the prevention of acute sport injuries evaluated in the scientific literature, applying the Haddon matrix, and identify potential knowledge gaps.
As the conversation continues about head injury prevention in the sport of soccer, the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), Major League Soccer (MLS) and U.S. Soccer will host an event, or ‘medical summit’, called “Head Injury in Soccer; From Science to the Field,” on April 21-22 in New York, according to a U.S. Soccer press release on Tuesday.
The summit will bring together medical professionals and soccer administrations across different leagues and organizations. The structure of the summit will include a day-and-a-half of presentations by doctors and researchers who are experts in head injury and concussions in soccer.
Millions of times a year, Americans are prescribed a week’s worth of steroid pills, hoping to ease a backache or quell a nagging cough or allergy symptoms.
A new study suggests that doctors and patients might want to pay more attention to the potential side effects in the fine print.
People taking the pills were more likely to break a bone or have a potentially dangerous blood clot or bout of sepsis in the months after their treatment, compared with similar adults who didn’t use corticosteroids, researchers from the University of Michigan report in BMJ.
… All indications suggest that, if a bullpen revolution is really to occur in baseball, it isn’t simply going to be a matter of a single pitcher recording a ton of innings. Exhibit A in an argument against the reality of an Andrew Miller Revolution is that Andrew Miller himself is only on pace for around 88 innings this season. What Miller did in the postseason last year is likely to remain a product of the postseason.
There might be a different sort of bullpen revolution occurring in Ohio, though. Only, this one isn’t happening in Cleveland. Rather, it’s unfolding about four hours southwest on I-71. If there is a bullpen revolution brewing, it’s happening in Cincinnati.
… Gossage recently lashed out against modern closers — including all-time saves leader Mariano Rivera — arguing that they aren’t used in the right situations and that cheaply earned saves exaggerate closers’ value compared to the pitchers of his day. “I would like to see these guys come into more jams, into tighter situations and finish the game. … In the seventh, eighth or ninth innings. I don’t think they’re utilizing these guys to the maximum efficiency and benefit to your ballclub,” Gossage said. “This is not a knock against Mo [Rivera],” he continued later.1 “[But] I’d like to know how many of Mo’s saves are of one inning with a three-run lead. If everybody in that [bleep]ing bullpen can’t save a three-run lead for one inning, they shouldn’t even be in the big leagues.”
Gossage is right about pretty much all of that. A pitcher probably shouldn’t get much credit for handling just the final inning when his team has a three-run lead. Moreover, the top relief pitchers today are less valuable than they were in Gossage’s heyday in the 1970s and ’80s. In large part, that’s because managers are trying to maximize the number of saves for their closer, as opposed to the number of wins for their team. They’re managing to a stat and playing worse baseball as a result.
But there’s a solution. Building on the work of Baseball Prospectus’s Russell Carleton,2 I’ve designed a statistic and named it the goose egg to honor (or troll) Gossage.