… “When I got to summer league, I was going to practice early, trying to stay as late as possible, and I was one of the only guys doing that, trying to earn a training camp roster invite,” McAdoo said. “I didn’t have to go in there and average 20 points and 10 rebounds … but what I did was enough to get the Golden State Warriors’ attention, and it ended up with me getting an invite to training camp.”
McAdoo eventually earned a roster spot with the Warriors and now has two NBA championship rings. It’s a path to success that dozens of undrafted players dream of.
“Everyone’s looking for an opportunity,” said Alford, the son of UCLA head coach Steve Alford. “I look at it as, I want to prove that the teams that passed on me are missing out. I look at the names ahead of me and I’m thinking I’m better than a lot of those guys. That’s just competitive nature.”
… He and his wife, Kalin, also a former Rockford High School cross-country star, moved back to their hometown with their two young children. They live about two hours from the Brooks-Hansons crew, based in Rochester, Michigan. While details aren’t yet worked out, there is talk that he will bunk with the rest of the team on occasion, especially as marathon training season is underway.
Below, he talks about living and running in Michigan and what the future holds for him as a more mature runner.
Sidney Crosby sat in the grass at the bottom of Citadel Hill in Halifax, Nova Scotia on Thursday morning, elbows resting on his knees, sweat running from his backwards hat, cooling down from a morning workout with Andy O’Brien.
This same scene has played out every summer between Crosby and O’Brien ever since 2002, when Crosby was just 14 years old.
… Katie Eberling has recently started training at the Olympic Training Center at East Tennessee State University. For the past few years, she has been working to become a pilot for the U.S. bobsledding team. After months of training and competing until January, the Selection Committee will make its final choices for who will be part of the team at the 2018 Winter Olympics in South Korea.
“It takes a long time to be really good at driving,” Eberling said. “For me, I feel like I’m still developing as a pilot and working toward that goal.”
Neiko Primus had been in the gym for close to two hours, his shoelaces scraping the worn wooden floor and his bony arms tired from shooting, before he challenged a taller, stockier kid to a game of one-on-one.
“Oh, look look look,” Michelle Mundey, his mother, whispered from the other end of the court. “That kid is at least 13, maybe 14.”
“Oh, he doesn’t know what he’s getting into,” said Byron Jones, who had just finished working Neiko out. “Watch. Just watch. Neiko is going to cook him.”
Daily Sunday Mail (UK), Ian Herbert and Nick Harris from
Martina Navratilova offers a blunt assessment of the state of Johanna Konta’s game as the Briton considers the improvements she must make if she is to win a Grand Slam.
‘Very aggressive, but a little one dimensional,’ is the judgment she offers. But she is equally uncompromising about the British nation’s impatience for success. ‘Look at a graph of tennis improvement and it’s one of these: up and down,’ says Navratilova, gesturing a line which rises and dips.
‘You make a big jump, you level off. You make a big jump, and she made that big jump last year. But then you’re expecting another big jump too soon.
Everson Griffen’s right cleat toes an orange line, as the two-time Pro Bowler coils his spine in preparation for attack. The man standing opposite Griffen, meeting his eye level from 10 yards away, is equal parts ball carrier, enigma and kinesiologist.
Shawn Myszka dances toward Griffen, chopping his feet twice and stabbing his right foot into the ground as Griffen closes in pursuit. Myszka turns to his left, lowering his eyes in time to study Griffen’s footwork as he pivots to match his target. The prey, at this point, has become the coach.
… Long gone are the days when players returned to training overweight or underprepared – sports science has seen to that. The evolution of the game has demanded that. Carrying a few extra pounds into that first day is a recipe for disaster, and playing catch up will catch you out as every player wants to hit the ground running. Simply put, nobody wants to get left behind.
There was one pre-season where I was struggling with a calf problem, which took several weeks to properly diagnose. Unfortunately, I was away on tour in Austria when the decision was made that I needed to see a specialist at the earliest opportunity. The 16-hour train journey via Germany and France may have been a scenic way to travel home but it’s certainly something I wouldn’t want to do for a second time.
Pre-season will look different at every club in the country but whoever you’re working under, you can guarantee that both your physical and mental capabilities will be pushed to the very limit. Some managers like to think out of the box to avoid monotony and keep the group on its toes. Experimentation is not always easy once the regular season has kicked off so testing new systems and formations in games are common practice when boundaries can be pushed with regards the methods of training.
“Working with data at the core of a product requires a level of understanding of data modeling, data infrastructure, and statistical and machine learning. It goes beyond understanding the results of experiments and reading dashboards — it requires a deep appreciation for what is possible and what will soon be possible by taking full advantage of the flow of data. If the traditional PM operates at the intersection of business, engineering, and user experience, the data PM must also have domain knowledge of data and data science.”
Taking a systems approach to data thinking allows you not only to solve problems more efficiently, but to more deeply understand (and critique) the data machinery that ubiquitously affects our day-to-day lives.
After hours of trawling Premiership club websites, messages to players, coaches and agents and more time spent with Microsoft Excel than can be healthy, the finishing touches have finally been put to a database of the 500 current senior Premiership players.
In reality, only around 480 of those catalogued players will be on full senior deals, with a few handfuls of senior academy players slipped into senior squad lists for the 2017/18 season – or perhaps having agreed senior deals yet to be announced by the clubs – but in all those instances, they are players who regularly feature for their respective senior sides.
So, which academy has the most graduates playing in the Premiership?
Over the past couple of days I’ve been trying to figure out how to create a Tableau workbook that aggregates all our USWNT data in a similar fashion to the NWSL 2016 Tableau workbook. The main challenge has been figuring out how to best show and compare stats from USWNT that, quite frankly, are all over the place due to how varied the quality of opponents has been.
… “You said some of the people in the media they don’t like tough guys, and they say stuff, ‘They don’t like it, we don’t believe in this and that.’ This is the trend between people that know the game and people that don’t know the game. There’s many people in the media that cover the game that talk about hockey and stuff but they don’t know anything. And you read them and they want to make it look like they do, but they don’t. The stats you just said right there (on the health of the 2016-17 Oilers) gives you an indication right there of what’s been going on with that team. Why do you think McDavid got 100 points this year? Do you see how much room he’s getting? Yes, there’s a little bit of stuff there and there sometimes, but most of the time he was healthy because of that presence. But you know what those guys are doing, those media? They are going with the wave of…”
“Analytics,” Stauffer interjected.
“They should be talking about the results,” Laraque continued.