… For me, this injury was particularly hard to swallow. There was no root cause, no initial trauma or fall. It just happened, even though I had done everything right. I ate right, slept right and trained right. I did everything I was supposed to. And I still got injured. And the funny thing is, even if I could go back and do it all again, I know that I’d do everything the same. This left me with a sense of hopelessness that is very difficult to put into words, and even more difficult to handle.
When you lose the thing that you love more than anything in the world, you cry and you grieve. For me, I entered the stages of grief, which imposed not just the physical burden that comes with injury, but a huge mental burden as well.
… While it’s unclear why Harden didn’t look like himself on the court, a simpler explanation seems a whole lot more plausible:
Harden was running on empty, gassed from a grueling regular season.
Harden registered a listless performance Thursday against the Spurs, scoring just 10 points on 2-of-11 shooting with six turnovers and a disqualifying six fouls. He barely ventured into the paint, settling for 3-pointers on nine of his 11 field goal attempts. The Rockets as a team registered just nine 2-pointers on the night, the lowest for a game in NBA history.
Ross Hodge caught the latest installment of Jonathon Simmons’s improbable story on television Thursday night, watching as Simmons, a second-year swingman for the San Antonio Spurs, darted through the lane in the first quarter and dunked on the Houston Rockets. It was a sign of more destruction to come.
It almost looked as if Simmons had jumped off a trampoline. The sequence made Hodge nostalgic. He thought back to his two seasons coaching Simmons in junior college.
“He had a couple of those moments where you were like, ‘O.K., that’s different than a lot of guys,’” Hodge recalled in a telephone interview. “But it’s unbelievable, man. He’s making a lot of people proud, and he’s giving a lot of kids hope — a lot of kids who are in junior college, a lot of kids who are still trying to make it.”
It’s not a stretch to say Harry Giles had the worst college basketball season of any player in the 2017 NBA Draft pool. The Duke forward entered the season as a top-10 recruit in college basketball, and there was plenty of reason to believe he was going to be Duke’s best player this year. He debuted at fourth on our first big board of the year, and there were outlets who considered him for the top-3. Giles entered college with impressive physical tools and a resume of solid production in high school events, and despite a history of ACL tears in both knees, looked the part of a high-motor big who could be a sort of “Blake Griffin at the 5” player.
However, that never materialized. An arthroscopic procedure on his right knee in late 2016 delayed his debut until December, and Giles never got off the ground in a bit of a lost season at Duke. Stuck behind ninth-year senior Amile Jefferson inside, Giles struggled to find ways to make an impact, and his athleticism appeared to have taken a step back, which ruined his timing.
The voice is incredulous, as if the commentator is unable to compute what his eyes are telling him. “Look at the clock!” he urges as a tiny Jamaican sprinter, Brianna Lyston, powers clear of the field to win the 200m in 23.46sec. “She absolutely demolishes the record … she has just produced something out of this world!”
It is rare that the sporting exploits of a 12-year-old go viral. But Lyston’s performance at this year’s Champs, Jamaica’s boys’ and girls’ inter-schools championships, was so spectacular that TV stations and newspapers across the globe rushed to proclaim her as the heiress to Usain Bolt.
Usain Bolt: ‘I feel good because I know I’ve done it clean’
Of course that was premature. But to put Lyston’s time into context, it would have been good enough for fourth in the senior British Olympic trials last year,
Every June, Italy’s latest batch of aspiring coaches convenes on Coverciano, a secluded, well-heeled suburb of Florence, to complete the final stage of their education.
There are normally a couple of dozen of them, largely drawn from the ranks of recently retired players. Over the course of the previous year, they have spent two days a week studying toward the qualification that enables them to work at the very highest level of soccer in Europe. It is, officially, called the UEFA Pro License. At Coverciano, they call it Il Master.
They are following in illustrious footsteps. Antonio Conte, who can win the Premier League title on Friday, did this course. Many years ago, so did Claudio Ranieri, who won that title last year. This year, graduates of Coverciano will win the championships of Germany, Russia and Italy.
Harvard Business Review; Annie McKee and Kandi Wiens from
… Some people don’t get burned out. They continue to thrive despite the difficult conditions in their workplace.
Why? The answer lies in part with empathy, an emotional intelligence competency packed with potent stress-taming powers. Empathy is “compassion in action.” When you engage empathy, you seek to understand people’s needs, desires, and point of view. You feel and express genuine concern for their well-being, and then you act on it.
Harvard scientists are beginning to provide answers to one of the thorniest questions in psychology: How do we think?
Human thought generally can be divided into two modes, the visual and the verbal. When you think about your next vacation and imagine sitting under a palm tree and sipping a cold drink, you’re probably thinking visually. If you’re thinking what you’ll say when you make a presentation at work, you’re likely thinking in words and sentences, creating inner speech.
But are the two always separate? Can you utilize one without the other popping up? A new Harvard study suggests that the answer depends on which mode of thinking you’re talking about.
Allison Schmitt hates public speaking. But the Olympic swimmer shared her story of battling depression in a packed auditorium Thursday night as part of National Children’s Mental Health Awareness Day.
“I get sweaty hands; I feel like I’m going to throw up. I never want to speak in front of people,” said Schmitt, the eight-time Olympic medalist. “When it comes to mental health, I love it. A whole new me comes out. I think it’s because I’m so passionate about it. I can speak from the heart and I really want to spread the word that it’s OK not to be OK. I want to spread the message that it’s OK to ask for help.”
Schmitt and Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time with 28 medals, were chairpersons of the event, which was hosted by the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) at George Washington University.
When I first became mentally ill, with panic disorder and depression in my twenties, it felt like a fast descent into a bewildering new reality. That sense of bewilderment was made worse by a lack of understanding about what was happening. And then by being terrified of the labels I was given. I stigmatised myself, and that was dangerous.
Chris Gimenez is an effective communicator. It’s not the primary reason the journeyman backstop keeps finding a job, but given the importance of that trait to his position, it’s certainly a factor. Along with versatility and catch-and-throw skills, forging a relationship with a pitching staff is very much one of his strong suits.
Gimenez is wearing a Minnesota Twins uniform now, one year after playing a meaningful role on Cleveland’s AL championship club. It wasn’t his first season on a winner. Prior to joining the Indians, the 34-year-old veteran suited up for Texas Rangers and Tampa Bay Rays teams that tasted October baseball. As you might expect, he had quality role models at each of those stops.
Gimenez talked about the value of not sugar-coating communication and the importance of embracing analytics, at the tail end of spring training.
… The mental model I use for NBA prospects is of three broad, more or less independent attributes that qualify them to get into the league — height, athleticism and skill. Height is self-explanatory. The other two attributes, while widely recognized as valuable by basketball talent evaluators, are a bit harder to define and measure. Broadly speaking athleticism includes abilities like speed, leaping, lateral quickness, strength and all of those “gross motor” functions, with skill being even less directly observable, but expressed on the court by shooting ability, court vision, handle, catching, and passing.
We can look at that extra tall population to flesh that model out a bit. While, it’s a bit hard to nail down exactly how rare the heights of 6-foot-10 or taller are, the numbers are in the hundreds for the US. The census bureau estimates that are about 32 million males 19 to 35 in the US. Using a calculator based on CDC numbers indicates that only 1 in about 128,000 US males are at least 6-foot-10. Or applied to the relevant aged population there are about 250 men in the US that tall in total, which is fewer than the total 450 NBA roster spots.
Beth Comstock is the Vice Chair of GE and is the leader of GE’s efforts to accelerate new growth. Every month, she leads a discussion with a game-changing author and thinker in GE’s Changemaker Book Club, streamed live on Facebook. Recently, she joined Joi Ito, director of the MIT Media Lab and co-author of Whiplash: How to Survive Our Faster Future, for a conversation on the effects of collective intelligence and AI on business leadership and why we shouldn’t have to ask for permission.