… Seven games into the season, Berhalter has a bona fide starter in the 22-year-old Steffen, who is tied for fourth in Major League Soccer with 21 saves and who has a 1.14 goals-against average through the Crew’s 4-2-1 start.
The Coatesville, Pennsylvania native exudes a calm that is uncommon for keepers his age, Berhalter said, and an ability to recover from mistakes — an attribute he didn’t always show before the team’s trip to Charleston, South Carolina.
“That shows just how valuable real-game experience is,” Berhalter said. “You can have ideas about these guys, but until they really get battle-tested you don’t know.”
… For the first time in more than two decades, uncertainty surrounds the Yankees. Major League Baseball’s winningest franchise has long been a symbol of sustained excellence in sports, but this year, following a season in which the Yanks missed the playoffs, a changing of the guard is in order. A crop of young talent has invaded the starting lineup. Along with fellow rookies Greg Bird and Gary Sanchez, [Aaron] Judge anchors a storied franchise that is both contending and rebuilding. Fans have already dubbed him “New York’s next great power hitter.” Hope is in the air. For the time being, patience is too. But will the first-round draft pick live up to the hype? So far, so good.
A week before Opening Day, at the Yankees’ spring training complex in Tampa, Brian Cashman, the team’s general manager, leans onto the top step of the dugout. As the boss tells it, Judge is still finding his way, but “if he hits, he’s going to hit big. He has potential to be a huge difference maker in the middle of this lineup.”
Heleo, Scott Barry Kaufman and Bonnie St. John from
… Scott: Resiliency is already its own buzzword, but micro-resiliency has not yet become a household term. Can you talk a little about the difference between macro and micro-resilience?
Bonnie: We need macro-resilience for something really big, like rebuilding a town after a hurricane or recovering from cancer or divorce, for getting back to normal, back to life.
Micro-resilience looks at smaller problems. The solutions are smaller too. We’re looking at small things that you can do, in the midst of a busy day, while you’re on a conference call or while you’re commuting. All to answer the question: “How can I be more resilient this afternoon than I was this morning?”
Strength and conditioning (S&C) coaches offer expert guidance to help those they work with achieve their personal fitness goals. However it is not always practical to operate under the direct supervision of an S&C coach and consequently individuals are often left training without expert oversight. Recent developments in inertial measurement units (IMUs) and mobile computing platforms have allowed for the possibility of unobtrusive motion tracking systems and the provision of real-time individualised feedback regarding exercise performance. These systems could enable S&C coaches to remotely monitor sessions and help individuals record their workout performance. One aspect of such technologies is the ability to assess exercise technique and detect common deviations from acceptable exercise form. In this study we investigate this ability in the context of a bodyweight (BW) squat exercise. IMUs were positioned on the lumbar spine, thighs and shanks of 77 healthy participants. Participants completed repetitions of BW squats with acceptable form and five common deviations from acceptable BW squatting technique. Descriptive features were extracted from the IMU signals for each BW squat repetition and these were used to train a technique classifier. Acceptable or aberrant BW squat technique can be detected with 98% accuracy, 96% sensitivity and 99% specificity when using features derived from all 5 IMUs. A single IMU system can also distinguish between acceptable and aberrant BW squat biomechanics with excellent accuracy, sensitivity and specificity. Detecting exact deviations from acceptable BW squatting technique can be achieved with 80% accuracy using a 5 IMU system and 72% accuracy when using a single IMU positioned on the right shank. These results suggest IMU based systems can distinguish between acceptable and aberrant BW squat technique with excellent accuracy with a single IMU system. Identification of exact deviations is also possible but multi-IMU systems outperform single IMU systems.
When Nishant Kishore came to Rollins School of Public Health in 2014 to pursue an MPH, word got around that he knew how to develop mHealth platforms and applications, a skill that— judging from the response it received — is akin to being able to accurately predict the stock market. Classmates approached him to ask for tutorials, and he began meeting with small groups of interested students to share some tips and tricks on using mobile devices to support public health.
Kishore quickly realized the appetite for this knowledge was ravenous, so he and then-second year MPH student Roxanne Moore founded a new student organization, the Rollins mHealth Collaboration (RmC). The goal was twofold—to train students how to build mHealth systems in their first year and to line the students up with internships or job opportunities in their second year.
“This is a big up-and-coming field. There are a lot of organizations around the world looking for these sorts of skills, but I don’t know of a good training protocol anywhere,” says Kishore, who is now a data manager for the Malaria Zero project at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as well as the owner of his own mHealth consulting firm, EpiTech. “The training that is available focuses on when it’s appropriate to use mHealth and how to implement an existing program in the field. The mHealth Collaboration is the only group I know of that is specifically training people how to build these platforms.”
… “It’s usually around 60-some high schools I go visit on any given couple-week period,” said [Jovan] Dewitt, whose assigned recruiting areas as a member of the UCF football coaching staff are greater Fort Lauderdale and a sliver of Atlanta. “Some schools will have 10 or 12 kids, some schools will have 20 kids I have to know about, some schools will only have one or two.”
According to NCAA Research, high school football players in Florida earn the most college scholarships, per capita, of any state. Dewitt is expected to know every FBS-worthy player in Broward County’s pool and beyond, and the list will grow by the end of the NCAA’s spring evaluation period on May 31. Dewitt understands this, which is why a couple years ago he created a phone app to make the task more manageable.
The app’s architecture allows Dewitt to enter written information as well as audio and video from every interaction he has with a prospect or someone connected to the prospect and share it in real time with any fellow staffers whom he’s given access to the app.
What links Newcastle United, NASA, IBM and Padraig Harrington? The answer (to what sounds like a naff pub quiz question, I know) is Dr Brian Moore and his eight-year-old company Orreco.
Moore is a cheerful, unassuming 40-something: the type of bloke you’d expect to enjoy a pint with. He could also become one of the most influential figures in sport (although you suspect he’d cringe at such a description).
Ever since he was a PE and sports science student at St Mary’s University in Twickenham, Moore’s passion has been to find out what goes on “under the hood” of elite athletes.
… [Katlin] Beck followed those orders, started to feel better, and returned to campus that fall hoping to restart her rowing career as a sophomore. An athletic trainer suggested that she consult with a third IU doctor before returning to regular team practices. This one disregarded the prior two diagnoses, telling Beck her pain likely was caused by problems with her hamstring muscles. Beck eased into modified practices, but her pain lingered. Her coaches seemed to doubt her injuries, she said, and as was standard, she and other injured rowers were isolated from teammates and even denied team gear for not meeting practice goals.
Athletes at Indiana and most universities are instructed to see athletic department and school-approved medical staff instead of personal physicians, even for such benign maladies as cold or flu symptoms. But Beck’s frustration had reached a tipping point after nearly 15 months of pain, so she made an appointment with Indianapolis spine specialist Dr. Greg Poulter.
“Head Injury in Soccer: From Science to the Field” in New York City was an amazing Concussion Summit organized by U.S. Soccer, NWSL and MLS.
The two-day summit, held on April 21-22, focused on current research, prevention and management of concussions and head injuries.
The sharing of the most up-to-date information on concussions in soccer — the singular, most pivotal topic we can improve upon through discourse — was the focal point of this summit.
On a cold day in February 2011, doctors and athletic trainers from the NFL’s 32 teams gathered at a hotel ballroom in downtown Indianapolis. Under scrutiny for its handling of prescription drugs, the league had invited the Drug Enforcement Administration , and an official named Joseph T. Rannazzisi made the trip from Washington armed with more than 80 slides of charts, photographs and bullet points about federal laws that govern how the doctors can medicate professional football players suffering from pain and injuries.
The presentation was called “NFL Physicians Briefing: Obligations and Responsibilities under the Controlled Substances Act and Code of Federal Regulations.” It did not unfold as planned.
The NFL doctors grew defensive, then angry, according to participants in the room, as Rannazzisi lectured them on their duties and responsibilities in the context of the opioid epidemic that was sweeping the country. The doctors felt they were being compared to pill pushers, and the meeting became confrontational. “He was treating everyone like a criminal,” said one doctor in attendance.
Telesco was an early adopter of the Microsoft spreadsheet program in the mid-1990s during his time as a scouting assistant with the Carolina Panthers, and he still relies on it today.
Everything can be organized and sorted, tracing the origin of a decision. And if you were to trace the origin of Telesco’s path to being the general manager for the Los Angeles Chargers’ first draft in their new city, it would point to a tiny college just east of Cleveland.
In the wake of the Cleveland Indians’ run to the American League pennant last fall, a run built largely on the backs of bullpen ace Andrew Miller and his fellow late-inning relievers, many in the industry wondered whether Manager Terry Francona’s model — using his best relievers for multi-inning stints in the highest-leverage situations of most games — could be replicated in the regular season.
The answer seemed to be: not really. With the everyday nature of the regular season (as opposed to the frequent off-days in the postseason), you would risk burning out your best relievers by using them too frequently, and for too long.
But in the early days of the 2017 season, we can already discern a Franconian shift taking place in reliever usage. More teams appear to have identified one or more bullpen aces, who increasingly are being used for longer stints in high-leverage situations.
With that in mind, you may want to get to know the name Chris Devenski, if you haven’t already.
… Whether hacked or not, players are responsible for their social media accounts, and the fallout is enough that NFL teams have made it part of their evaluation process.
“So now it’s evolved, to my understanding, where every team has at least one or two people monitoring all social media now for all rookies,” said Denver-based sports agent Peter Schaffer, who represents clients such as Cleveland Browns left tackle Joe Thomas and Denver Broncos tailback C.J. Anderson. “The Instagram, the Snapchat and Facebook, all the stuff, it’s now all final policy.”
Schaffer realized six years ago that social media was a blind spot with NFL scouting.
… n 2000, just two years before Lewis and Beane’s Moneyball season, there had never been, in the history of the major leagues, greater competitive balance. For the first time, not a single team finished with a win-loss percentage above .600 or below .400. Stated another way, for the first time, the difference between the best teams in baseball and the worst teams was narrower than it had ever been.
In 2001 and 2002, the Anaheim Angels and the Arizona Diamondbacks, teams from small markets, won the World Series. The Minnesota Twins, despite their modest budget, had two fine seasons, and the New York Mets performed poorly despite spending big.
Lewis – and all those baseball executives whining about how much they had to pay the players – were correct about the widening gaps between the richest and poorest market teams if they meant the difference in payroll. But this didn’t necessarily tally with the state of competition in the field.
The Relative Age Effect (RAE) documents the inherent disadvantages of being younger rather than older in an age-banded cohort, typically a school- or competition-year, to the detriment of career-progression, earnings and wellbeing into adulthood. We develop the Tails of the Travelling Gaussian (TTG) to model the mechanisms behind RAE. TTG has notable advantages over existing approaches, which have been largely descriptive, potentially confounded, and non-comparable across contexts. In Study 1, using data from the UK’s Millennium Cohort Study, we investigate the different levels of RAE bias across school-level academic subjects and “personality” traits. Study 2 concerns biased admissions to elite English Premier League soccer academies, and shows the model can still be used with minimal data. We also develop two practical metrics: the discrimination index (ID), to quantify the disadvantages facing cohort-younger children; and the wastage metric (W), to quantify the loss through untapped potential. TTG is sufficiently well-specified to simulate the consequences of ID and W for policy change.