… In an interview with ESPN on Tuesday afternoon, Thomas was forceful in his belief that the labrum injury that ended his season in the Eastern Conference finals against Cleveland would not have a long-term impact on his career.
“There’s never been an indication that I wouldn’t be back, and there’s never been an indication that this is something messing up my career,” Thomas told ESPN. “Maybe I am not going to be back as soon this season as everyone wants me to be, but I’m going to be back, and I’m going to be the same player again. No doctor has told me anything different than that.”
Out of the mouths of teenage hoop phenoms can come wisdom. Chester High guard Michael Smith, at a basketball camp this past week sponsored by former Chester great Jameer Nelson, hit it on the head when asked about how Nelson still is in the NBA at age 35.
“We don’t know,’’ Smith said at Girard College with some of the best young guards in the region.
How could they? All are less than half Nelson’s age. His own teenage son was there, one of their peers. The three-day Jameer Nelson Lead Guard Invitational Camp was designed to give the invitees a window into the working life of a veteran pro. The young guys started with a little boxing workout. Nelson, now with the Denver Nuggets, put on the gloves, too.
“Kind of similar, but we’re a little more physical,’’ boxing trainer Henry Racich said about this workout compared with what he and Nelson have done in offseasons during Nelson’s 13 years in the NBA. “We do some body work. I’ll lean on him and have him throw punches and I’ll counter to the body.”
… “No matter if you were black, white, Chinese, green, blue, whatever,” Jones says, “he was cool with everyone. Derek was someone who’d actually sit down and talk.”
Teammates listened, watched, followed.
This is how Carr builds a belief.
On the field, he then played an entire season with a sports hernia. The injury zapped his mobility. He was sacked 26 times. He didn’t say a word.
“I never heard him say, ‘Ah, take me out!'” teammate Josh Harper says. “It’s very painful, but at the same time, he was out there every day, every practice, no reps off. Still working hard.”
Adds then-Fresno State coach Tim DeRuyter: “He’s got that thing in his mind that tells him nothing matters except for this moment right now. Pain? It doesn’t matter.”
… “Cycling has given me so much, and I want to give back,” Armstrong said. “I did not achieve my success alone, and I know others can’t either. I’m really pleased USA Cycling asked me to help them improve their athlete development and support, and I look forward to joining their impressive high-performance team. My goal is to help others achieve their full potential.”
Performance directors work directly with athletes on developing objectives, monitoring progress, optimizing training and competition schedules, and fully leveraging all available resources from USA Cycling, the US Olympic Committee, and USA Cycling technical partners, according to today’s USA Cycling announcement. Those resources include world-class coaching, state-of-the-art equipment, wind-tunnel testing, nutrition guidance, sports psychology, and more.
Sleepiness, reduced concentration and performance – more and more people are suffering from the consequences of a chronic lack of sleep. Researchers at the University of Zurich have now demonstrated a further consequence: the people affected are subject to more intensive risk-seeking behavior without even noticing. The scientists advocate for sufficient sleep.
… SA: What’s one of the most significant developments in recent years?
ANSON DORRANCE: This is an interesting wrinkle and at UNC we’ve just benefited from it: The rest of the world has realized that the best player development band for players ages 17 to 22 is the American college game.
The professional clubs in foreign countries, they realize that the best path for their players is not apprenticing on their pro teams, it’s coming to the United States.
People across the world are starting to discover that American college is an extraordinary player development platform.
… “I have my own way of doing things,” Hornibrook said. “There are some things that Farmer did that I thought were really good; Farmer had a ton of experience.”
One such change Hornibrook is keen on implementing is forming a team focused on mental fitness just as much as physical fitness. After sending his own kids to college, Hornibrook knows the stresses that can come at a place like Cornell, especially for the newcomers to his team.
As for the physical fitness, “there’s been a stronger emphasis [during] training on making sure that we’re ready to play from a physical perspective,” he said. “That was something that I don’t think we were as good at as we needed to be.”
And when it comes to mental health, Hornibrook said “I coach people before I coach players. You’re not just a soccer player. You’re somebody’s daughter, you’re a student.”
New research by Columbia scientists offers fresh insight into how the brain tells the body to move, from simple behaviors like walking, to trained movements that may take years to master. The discovery in mice advances knowledge of how cells in the motor cortex — the brain’s movement center — communicate with muscles, and may help researchers better understand what happens in injury or disease, when the mechanisms that underlie movement go awry.
These findings were reported today in Neuron.
“All movements, from the most basic, like walking, to the most skilled, like playing the piano, require an extraordinary choreography between the brain and the body — a process that we still do not fully understand,” said Thomas M. Jessell, PhD, codirector of Columbia’s Mortimer B. Zuckerman Mind Brain Behavior Institute and the paper’s senior author.
The Cruyff Plan was an overhaul of Ajax’s academy and its coaching methods, instigated by Johan Cruyff and implemented between 2011 and 2015. It ended in acrimony but only after the game’s greatest thinker had shared his final vision for football with the world.
Cruyff died last year but that vision endures. Wim Jonk and Ruben Jongkind are taking the ideas they developed at Ajax on the road. Adam Bate caught up with Jongkind to find out how Ajax’s velvet revolution was born, where it went wrong and what happens next…
… This year, Beilein’s quest to empower his players to think critically about their decisions took a unique turn when he left it up to them to choose whether or not to continue their season. The airplane chartered to transport the team to the Big Ten Tournament took off in high winds, and the pilot made an emergency landing that left players shaken, and some injured. The team decided they would travel to Washington, D.C., anyway to play their first game of the tournament—a tournament they went on to win.
For The Atlantic’s series, “On The Shoulders Of Giants,” I spoke with Beilein about tailoring mentorship to each player and preparing them for life in college sports and beyond. The conversation that follows has been edited for length and clarity.
… Six years ago, Östersunds FK were scrapping in the fourth tier of Swedish football. Today they’re in the country’s premier league and, after beating Turkish giants Galatasaray FC, and the more fancied Greek outfit PAOK, they qualified as one of only three Scandinavian teams that will take part in the group stages of the Europa League this season.
Driving the club forward is Graham Potter, the only English manager left in European football this season, whose innovative approach to man-management has seen his side gain three promotions in five years to become the Cinderella story of 2017.
Potter has created an environment that routinely pulls his players out of their comfort zone. The squad have collectively written a book, staged an art exhibition and have performed a live rendition of Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake to a standing ovation.
“If all we do is play football, it’s something the players are comfortable doing,” Potter told the Daily Mail last year. “It’s part of our values, trying to help them become better people – exposing them to things they haven’t done before.”
The Ionic needs to be a big product for Fitbit. Sure, the company’s CEO assured me that it’s not make or break, but after years of research and development and tens of millions in acquisitions, Fitbit needs a hit. The company’s hedging its bets a bit by bringing on third party launch partners like Starbucks and Pandora for its new app store, and is teaming up one key company for a limited version of the smartwatch.
Starting next year, Fitbit will be offering an Adidas-branded special edition of the smartwatch. The details are pretty scant on precisely what the partnership means, but the whole thing suggests some pretty unavoidable comparisons to Apple’s long-standing partnership with Nike that gave us last year’s Apple Watch Nike+.
… Many of the Hadza live solely on the animals they kill, along with honey, berries and a few other wild foods. For the first 95 percent of our species’ history, there was no other way to live.
So the Hadza have been closely scrutinized for clues about the hunter-gatherer way of life: how they find their food, how much energy they use — even how much sleep they get.
On Thursday, scientists described another way in which the Hadza are exceptional. Their gut microbiome — the bacteria that live in their intestines — swings through a predictable annual cycle.
Inside Higher Ed, Evan Tucker and Michael Nelson from
… Division III student-athletes also resemble Division I athletes in important ways. They travel to away games, missing whole blocs of class. They lift, practice and watch film just about every day. In season, that’s about a 35 hour per week commitment; in the off-season, it can run as high as half that. They think their professors don’t understand how hectic their schedules are, and often they are right.
Misconceptions die hard but in the service of extinguishing at least some of them, the two of us — Evan, a four-year football player and biology major at Rhodes College, and Michael, a political science professor there — offer these two lists, one spelling out what athletes wish professors knew and the other listing what professors wish athletes knew.
… Five years on, Toronto FC is the model franchise of Major League Soccer, what every other team in the league aspires to be. The investment from MLSE in players the calibre of Sebastian Giovinco, Jozy Altidore and Michael Bradley has helped. It’s not the only factor, though.
Tim Leiweke started a revolution within the club. He was a man of great ambition, famously asking, “Why can’t we be great?” He was the first head honcho of MLSE that put TFC on equal footing with the Maple Leafs and Raptors, raising the profile of the soccer club within the organization. Love him or hate him – and he has many critics – there can be no denying that Leiweke’s short tenure at MLSE was a major turning point for Toronto FC.
GM Tim Bezbatchenko, the chief architect of TFC’s renaissance, has shown great vision and acumen in building one of the deepest teams in league history with hidden gems (Victor Vazquez), MLS veterans (Drew Moor and Justin Morrow) and promising young prospects (Marky Delgado and Raheem Edwards). Now approaching his three-year anniversary, Greg Vanney has grown into his role over time and become one of the best coaches in MLS, establishing his firm imprint on the team and setting a tactical foundation that brings out the best in his players.