It’s not that I don’t understand it. Of course I get it: This is a business. Danny is a businessman, and he made a business move. I don’t agree with it, just personally, and I don’t think the Boston Celtics got better by making this trade. But that’s not my job. That’s Danny’s. And it’s a tough job, and he’s been really good at it. But at the end of the day, these deals just come down to one thing: business. So it’s no hard feelings on that end. I’m a grown man, and I know what I got into when I joined this league — and so far it’s been more blessings than curses. I’m not sitting here, writing this, because I feel I was wronged. I wasn’t wronged. It was Boston’s right to trade me.
Plus, in a lot of ways, I actually think this was a good lesson. Not only for me, but for the league as a whole.
U.S. figure skating star Gracie Gold is stepping away from the sport to seek professional help with the Olympics a little more than five months away.
The 2014 Olympic team bronze medalist and two-time national champion did not specify in a statement Friday to U.S. Figure Skating what sort of help she needs.
“My passion for skating and training remains strong,” the 22-year-old skater said. “However, after recent struggles on and off the ice, I realize I need to seek some professional help and will be taking some time off while preparing for my Grand Prix assignments. This time will help me become a stronger person, which I believe will be reflected in my skating performances as well.”
… In May, three months prior, Monterrey 70.3 exemplified this belief. It certainly wasn’t a perfect race, but I felt alive. My run legs took over. I shut off my brain. I let my heart and spirit sing like it was my last career race. Big points were on the line for Ironman 70.3 World Championship qualification, but I allowed no pressure to interfere, and quickly trotted myself forward—catching, catching, catching—until landing a 4th place pro finish, a half marathon PB, and more than enough world champ points. The greatest takeaway came after the race when Mark observed, “I’ve never seen you run like that before. You looked….so happy.” I would take this ‘happy’ momentum with me into my Roth build up.
Everything was dandy.
Three weeks prior to Roth, my run training came to a screeching halt.
Dr. Nate Watson here. I am a sleep specialist, past president of the American Academy of Sleep Medicine (AASM), professor of neurology at the University of Washington and co-director of the University of Washington Medicine Sleep Center. Recently, the AASM launched an online calculator to help you find your customized ideal bedtime and improve sleep habits. I am here to help you sleep better to improve your life! (This is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your physician or other qualified health provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition.)
For Josh Pastner, there is no offseason. When the buzzer sounded in the NIT Championship Game on March 30, his season was not over. It was just beginning. While a large portion of his job is coaching during the season, an equally important part occurs when no basketball is being played: recruiting.
This year’s recruiting class consists of four incoming freshmen, a graduate transfer and a transfer from the University of Tennessee, a pleasant surprise after losing three seniors who had significant roles during the 2016-17 season.
“I’ve said this all along that we’re going to be our best in the [Class of 2018-19] recruiting,” Pastner said. “We’re going to have the chance to make deeper
relationships, [and] they’re going to be able to see us play and have data points on us.”
The aim of the current study was to conduct a systematic review determining the effect of sport-specific mental health awareness programs to improve mental health knowledge and help-seeking among sports coaches, athletes and officials. The second aim was to review the study quality and to report on the validity of measures that were used to determine the effectiveness of programs. Methods
Sport-specific mental health awareness programs adopting an experimental or quasi-experimental design were included for synthesis. Six electronic databases were searched: PsycINFO, MEDLINE (OVID interface), Scopus, Cochrane, CINAHL and SPORTDiscus. Each database was searched from its year of inception to October 2016. Risk of bias was assessed using the Cochrane and QATSQ tools. Results
Ten studies were included from the 1216 studies retrieved: four comprising coaches or service providers, one with officials, four with athletes, and one involved a combination of coaches and athletes. A range of outcomes was used to assess indices of mental health awareness and well-being. Mental health referral efficacy was improved in six studies, while three reported an increase in knowledge about mental health disorders. However, seven studies did not report effect sizes for their outcomes, limiting clinically meaningful interpretations. Furthermore, there was substantial heterogeneity and limited validity in the outcome measures of mental health knowledge and referral efficacy. Seven studies demonstrated a high risk of bias. Conclusions
Further, well-designed controlled intervention studies are required. Researchers, practitioners and policy makers should adhere to available methodological guidance and apply the psychological theory of behaviour change when developing and evaluating complex interventions. [full text]
PLOS One; John Elvis Hagan Jnr., Dietmar Pollmann, Thomas Schack from
Background and purpose
Although sport psychology literature focuses on psychological skills use to promote proficiency, it is still puzzling that current research has focused on psychological skills use only during competition. There remains a scarcity of empirical evidence to support the timing, and content of psychological skill application during the time preceding competition. This study examined the extent to which psychological skills usage are dynamic or stable over a 7-day pre-competitive period and whether any natural learning experiences might have accounted for the acquisition of these skills across gender and skill level. Methods and results
Ninety elite and sub-elite table tennis players completed the Test of Performance Strategies (TOPS) at three different periods (7 days, 2 days, 1 hour) before competition. A MANOVA repeated measures with follow-up analyses revealed significant multivariate main effects for only skill level and time-to-competition with no interactions. Specifically, elite (international) athletes reported more usage than sub-elite (national) counterparts for self-talk, imagery and relaxation respectively. Time-to-competition effects showed imagery use decreased steadily across the three time points while reported usage of relaxation were almost at the same level on two time points (7 days and 1 hour) but decreased 2 days before competition. Conclusions
Findings suggest an implementation of formalized and periodized psychological skills training programs over continuous training cycles. This may foster a positive long-term athletes’ psychological state prior to the onset of competition.
… Before the season begins and while you’re looking into a program, you may not know much about who will be coaching your child. At that point, about all you can do is to ask whether the coaches have preseason training or have gone through a certification program. Once the season begins, however, you will have opportunities to observe the coach. This is your right and your responsibility.
What should parents look for in a coach?
Here’s a checklist of qualities that are important in a youth sport coach.
… It must be incredibly challenging for conscientious coaches in those sports to stay true to a holistic coaching ethos to ensure their young athletes develop all the skills necessary to fulfil their athletic dreams. With so much money at stake and no room to hide when things go wrong, there is so much more to good youth coaching than meets the eye.
How do you intentionally slow down a youth athlete’s progress so they can work on a weakness? That one step back may enable the critical two steps forward later on in their development. How do you convince that same athlete’s parents of the importance of their kid playing in more than one position as a teenager, even if it may forsake results of the team as a whole? Such a process-oriented ethos will embed a greater understanding of the trials and tribulations of winning and losing. Not to mention the opportunity to learn game intelligence and spatial awareness; two things we are told are natural gifts — what nonsense.
All too quickly the mistitled gifted kids or talented teams get special treatment with coaches choosing to enhance their strengths and protect them from the discomfort of their weaknesses at this formative stage of their development.
… The real answer to building a culture that can lead to sustained success in a league full of parity is far more complicated. It’s an answer the 49ers are currently seeking under first-time head coach Kyle Shanahan and general manager John Lynch.
Believe it or not, [Will] Ferrell is part of the equation, and so are Jerry Rice and Drake. In San Francisco, it requires striking a balance between pulling from a rich tradition and finding ways to evolve.
For Shanahan, it also means mixing in various things he picked up during his years around his father, Mike, when Mike was the head coach of the Denver Broncos. Those are things Kyle carried through a collegiate playing career at Texas and through 13 seasons as an NFL assistant.
Youth athletes who participate in sports with weight classes or an emphasis on physique may be engaging in unhealthy strategies for weight loss and weight gain, according to a clinical report issued by the AAP Council on Sports Medicine and Fitness.
“Sometimes, children and teens in certain sports believe they need to achieve a particular body type to be successful,” Rebecca L. Carl, MD, MS, FAAP, from the Institute for Sports Medicine at the Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital, said in a press release. “Unless they have a healthy strategy to work toward their goals, however, they can end up defeating themselves and causing health problems.”
Stay tuned for more from PlaySight, especially on the PlayFair front – there are plans to bring video review challenges to many more tournaments and duals this season.
For most runners, finding the optimal fueling strategy during a marathon or ultra involves sifting through random articles on the Internet followed by a process of trial and error typically ending in either GI issues or hitting the wall. A new web-based application, Fuel The Core, eliminates the guesswork from dialing in your optimal race-day and mid-run nutritional needs. Designed by famed sports nutritionist and Ironman athlete Asker Jeukendrup and runner Bill Braun, Fuel The Core provides athletes with evidence-based fueling and hydration recommendations starting just before and during endurance events such as running, cycling and triathlons.
“The problem is that in the world of sports nutrition there are so many opinions. One of the most challenging things when determining nutritional requirements during exercise is distinguishing between opinion and evidence-based,” said Jeukendrup, who helped design Fuel The Core to solve that issue. Jeukendrup developed the idea for the app when working with such athletes as 27-time world record holder, Haile Gebrselassie and four-time Ironman World Champion and world record holder, Chrissie Wellington. He found that since he was always asking for the same data when working one-on-one with endurance athletes it was possible to automate that process and bring personalized evidence-based fueling to the masses and Fuel The Core was born.
For decades, spying on another team has been as much a part of baseball’s gamesmanship as brushback pitches and hard slides. The Boston Red Sox have apparently added a modern — and illicit — twist: They used an Apple Watch to gain an advantage against the Yankees and other teams.
Investigators for Major League Baseball have determined that the Red Sox, who are in first place in the American League East and very likely headed to the playoffs, executed a scheme to illicitly steal hand signals from opponents’ catchers in games against the second-place Yankees and other teams, according to several people briefed on the matter.
The baseball inquiry began about two weeks ago, after the Yankees’ general manager, Brian Cashman, filed a detailed complaint with the commissioner’s office that included video the Yankees shot of the Red Sox dugout during a three-game series between the two teams in Boston last month.
A coach in the dugout using a wireless device will be able to speak directly to his catcher to call pitches in SEC conference baseball games and in the postseason tournament in 2018, a move that is expected to significantly reduce the length of games.
The NCAA Playing Rules Oversight Panel last month approved a request from the Southeastern Conference to allow the technology on an experimental basis. It won’t be used in nonconference games or NCAA postseason games.
Putting on a brave face won’t fool this algorithm. A new system that rates how much pain someone is in just by looking at their face could help doctors decide how to treat patients. By examining tiny facial expressions and calibrating the system to each person, it provides a level of objectivity in an area where that’s normally hard to come by.
“These metrics might be useful in determining real pain from faked pain,” says Jeffrey Cohn at the University of Pittsburgh in the US. The system could make the difference between prescribing potentially addictive painkillers and catching out a faker.
Kirkland, Wash.-based startup Cardiac Insight has raised an additional $4.5 million to bolster production and distribution of its lightweight disposable electrocardiogram (ECG) test that monitors patients’ heartbeats.
The company calls its product, which received approval from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration earlier this year, a game-changer for cardiologists because it allows doctors to give patients instant diagnosis after they wear the device for a week and doesn’t require any supervision from medical professionals.
“The patient comes in, they have some sort of malady that they are unsure of … and they don’t know what to do, and nothing can be reproduced in the doctor’s office,” said Cardiac Insight CEO Brad Harlow. “They wear this device for seven days, then come back to their physician and they can immediately have the physician tell them what sort of cardiac anomaly, if anything, they have and reassure the patient or move them on for further treatment.”
Researchers from the University of Tokyo have turned the human body into a controller for virtual, augmented, and mixed reality. Dubbed e-skin, the connected shirt enables camera-free motion capture and tracking.
“Our vision was to revolutionize the apparel industry by creating printed circuit fabric,” James Eakin, chief marketing officer for Xenoma, the company behind e-skin, told Digital Trends. “E-skin apparel demonstrates the ability to create an array of sensors and electronics integrated into traditional textile materials which have broad implications for gaming, fitness, wellness, and industrial applications.”
The wireless shirt, which is on display at IFA 2017 in Berlin, allows wearers to move freely, stretch, and perform tasks like running and swinging. The shirt’s 14 strategically placed sensors — in areas like the shoulder, thorax, elbows, and wrist — allow it to pick up signals from these movements and translate them into actions in a connected program.
A new medical-diagnostic device made out of paper detects biomarkers and identifies diseases by performing electrochemical analyses – powered only by the user’s touch – and reads out the color-coded test results, making it easy for non-experts to understand.
“You could consider this a portable laboratory that is just completely made out of paper, is inexpensive and can be disposed of through incineration,” said Ramses V. Martinez, an assistant professor of industrial and biomedical engineering at Purdue University. “We hope these devices will serve untrained people located in remote villages or military bases to test for a variety of diseases without requiring any source of electricity, clean water, or additional equipment.”
The self-powered, paper-based electrochemical devices, or SPEDs, are designed for sensitive diagnostics at the “point-of-care,” or when care is delivered to patients, in regions where the public has limited access to resources or sophisticated medical equipment.
“This is coming in 2025 if all goes well,” Dr. William Korinek, the CEO of Astrocyte Pharmaceuticals, said of a drug that turbocharges the brain’s ability to heal its own damage.
Dr. Kun Ping Lu, who’s working on a medication that destroys the compounds that cause brain damage, isn’t quite that optimistic but said, “I hope it should be here in 10 years.”
… “We’re not nearly as far in hockey [research] as we are in football because we just don’t have the same numbers,” McKee said in a phone interview with ESPN.com.
Released in late July, McKee’s study showed 177 of 202 deceased football players’ brains had chronic traumatic encephalopathy — commonly referred to as CTE. This included 110 of 111 brains of NFL players.
According to a Boston University CTE Center research assistant, neuropathology has been completed on just 16 hockey players’ brains, nine of which were found to have CTE.
… A concussion is a type of a brain injury that occurs following a trauma to the head or body. Symptoms can come on immediately or may take hours to gradually evolve. The most common symptom following concussion is a headache. However, a number of other symptoms such as dizziness, nausea, fatigue, difficulty with concentration, neck pain and other complaints may also occur. Lying motionless, clutching the head, being slow to get up, wobbling and appearing dazed are some of the observable signs.
In the event that a concussion may have occurred, it is important that the player is removed from the activity and has follow-up medical evaluation as soon as possible. A tool called the Concussion Recognition Tool 5 (CRT5) has been developed by the Concussion in Sport Group and is meant to help coaches, officials, parents and players recognize the signs of concussion.
Scientific American Blog Network, Observations, Brian Levine and Carrie Esopenko from
… At Baycrest’s Rotman Research Institute in Toronto, we have been fortunate to interview, test, and scan the brains of more than 50 National Hockey League (NHL) alumni in our research on the remote effects of concussion. We found no evidence of cognitive impairment, yet there was an elevated rate of psychological problems, such as depression, anxiety and substance abuse.
While CTE cannot be ruled out, these conditions, which are commonly observed in the absence of concussion history, are treatable. Given media accounts of CTE, many alumni are frightened and wonder if they are on a path towards inexorable decline. Ex-NHLer Todd Ewan, for example, (not a participant in our study), took his life after struggling with depression. His family was convinced that he had CTE, but there was no evidence of this upon neuropathological examination.
Research on brain changes including CTE in retired professional athletes may lead to important new discoveries about brain trauma, aging and neurodegenerative disease. Although we regard CTE as a legitimate concern for professional athletes with major concussion exposure, is there similar concern warranted for recreational contact sports? Out of the millions exposed to concussions through recreational sports, the count of confirmed cases of CTE in the research literature is in the tens.
New helmet technology is reducing the severity of impacts to football players’ heads, but medical experts caution there is nothing ‘concussion-proof’ about it.
From 2003 to 2009, the NFL’s now- defunct Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee concluded that “no NFL player” had experienced chronic brain damage from repeat concussions, and that “professional football players do not sustain frequent repetitive blows to the brain on a regular basis.” The league tried to discredit Dr. Bennet Omalu, whose 2005 article in the journal Neurosurgery detailed his discovery of chronic traumatic encephalopathy in the brain of former Pittsburgh Steelers center Mike Webster.
Since then the truth has come out, and the NFL committed millions to brain research in 2016. Part of that research has been going to helmet safety and testing, which included the new VICIS Zero 1 helmet, pictured below. Several big-name players have also invested in Seattle-based VICIS, but the company’s website clearly states that there is no data that a “concussion-proof” helmet exists.
… One of the biggest problems the sport still faces, despite recent progress, is a dearth in understanding the many ways the brain works when it is injured. As leagues from the youth level to the NFL scramble to implement more stringent concussion protocol for players who have suffered potential brain injury, it remains something of guesswork as to when exactly a player has recovered to the point where they can return to activity.
“We do not have a great set of tools in our toolbox right now to help definitively diagnose when someone has suffered a concussion and when it’s safe to return to play,” said Dr. Shane Caswell, co-director of the Sports Medicine Assessment Research and Testing Laboratory at George Mason, who has been studying brain injury in youth sports for 15 years.
A year after the NFL pledged $100 million in support of independent medical research and engineering advancements, a huge chunk of that soon will be awarded to such research, primarily dedicated to neuroscience.
A Scientific Advisory Board assembled by the NFL is set to launch its program to solicit and evaluate research proposals for funding. The board, comprised of independent experts, doctors, scientists and clinicians, and chaired by retired U.S. Army General Peter Chiarelli, will provide direction for the $40 million allocated under the league’s initiative.
“Prevention should always be a focus,” Chiarelli says. “Nevertheless, the development of biologically based diagnostics is critical for return-to-play decisions for the NFL, and return to combat/training for the armed forces. Imagine if you had a handheld analyzer that with a single drop could determine whether a player or a soldier had a concussion — and determine the severity of that injury.”
University of Washington, Allen School of Computer Science & Engineering from
… “Right now the best screening protocols we have are still subjective,” professor Shwetak Patel, who holds a joint appointment in the Allen School and UW Department of Electrical Engineering, told UW News. “A player who really wants to get back on the field can find ways to game the system.”
PupilScreen would eliminate this element of uncertainty by providing an objective way to assess an individual for brain injury. It uses the smartphone camera flash to stimulate the pupillary response, then records a brief video of the pupil changing diameter. The video is processed using convolutional neural networks to measure changes in the pupil’s diameter and identify clinically relevant deviations from the normal pupillary response. In a small pilot study involving a combination of people with and without traumatic brain injury, clinicians successfully diagnosed cases of injury with near-perfect accuracy using PupilScreen. Although they relied on a 3-D printed box to control the amount of light to which subjects’ eyes were exposed during the study, the researchers are working on an app that can be used without accessories.
… Dr. Bert Mandelbaum: If you step back and look at what is sports medicine and the tripod of sports medicine — which is prevention, optimize performance and rehabilitation and injury care — [you can see] the business model that we have in this country does not support sports medicine.
It doesn’t focus on prevention, [but rather] on how we optimize performance. A lot of times [with sports medicine] and with the injuries we treat, the payer says, “You have 24 visits, but none of the visits involved return to play progression or prevention.”
… The uncertainty with CTE doesn’t mean CTE doesn’t exist. Rather, it means it’s difficult determining the true prevalence of CTE. Researchers are using advanced neuroimaging such as diffusion tensor imaging to diagnose and predict CTE. But imaging is only as good as the gold standard for the diagnosis of CTE. And if the gold standard for CTE is wobbly, or uncertain, so will be the diagnostic and predictive tools for CTE.
The true prevalence of CTE is the crucial question. If the prevalence of CTE truly is 99 percent — that is, 99 percent of NFL players will develop clinically significant CTE (meaning they develop symptoms of impairment during their lifetime), the implications are profound. But we must remember that clinically significant CTE is not the same as autopsy-confirmed CTE.
… Based on numbers compiled by actuaries on behalf of the NFL, former players between ages 50 and 59 had rates of Alzheimer’s disease and dementia up to 23 times higher than the general population of similar ages. For players between 60 and 64, the rate was up to 35 times higher.
Which brings us back to the Spectator’s landmark CFL concussion project, done in collaboration with researchers from McMaster University and St. Joseph’s Healthcare.
The study of 22 retired CFL players showed disturbing differences in brain anatomy, wiring and electrical activity between the players and control subjects — men in a similar age range with no history of concussions or repeated hits to the head.
… I never even thought about taking performance enhancing drugs—my ambitions just aren’t that grand, and I’m frankly too lazy to go to the trouble. But as the publisher of an independent tennis magazine, I am asked about Sharapova’s ban all the time. Was it fair? Did the drugs actually help her performance? When a friend who had been traveling in Riga jokingly brought me back a box of Mildronats, a Latvian brand of the generic drug meldonium, it seemed like a good way to find out.
For the record, meldonium is not illegal (or “scheduled”) in America, nor is it banned specifically by the USTA. But it is a heart drug I don’t need that came with instructions written solely in Latvian. The English-language recommendations for use—helpfully sent to me by someone who follows my tennis podcast—indicated that I should take two 250mg capsules on days of high-intensity training, and double that in competition. So that’s what I did. And guess what? This drug rules.
More elite athletes than previously thought are cheating by evading traditional biological drug testing, according to a University of Northern Colorado professor who contributed to groundbreaking research on the topic.
The study co-authored by UNC statistician Jay Schaffer and eight other scientists worldwide relied upon a scientific lie-detector test of sorts they developed and used with 2,167 athletes at two international track and field competitions to determine the probability that an athlete was doping.
While traditional drug testing through blood and urine analysis typically reveals doping in 1-2 percent of athletes, the tests can fail to detect “cutting-edge doping techniques,” according to the study.
… Already, Joey has a neon-ready nickname–Joey Baseball–and more than 24,000 followers on Instagram. Jewelry and apparel companies have asked him to hawk their stuff. On a rare family vacation in Florida, a boy approached Joey in a restaurant and asked for his autograph. But Joey Baseball has yet to learn cursive. He is, after all, only 10 years old. They snapped a picture instead.
Joey Erace is an extreme example of what has become a new reality for America’s aspiring young athletes and their families. Across the nation, kids of all skill levels, in virtually every team sport, are getting swept up by a youth-sports economy that increasingly resembles the pros at increasingly early ages. Neighborhood Little Leagues, town soccer associations and church basketball squads that bonded kids in a community–and didn’t cost as much as a rent check–have largely lost their luster. Little League participation, for example, is down 20% from its turn-of-the-century peak. These local leagues have been nudged aside by private club teams, a loosely governed constellation that includes everything from development academies affiliated with professional sports franchises to regional squads run by moonlighting coaches with little experience. The most competitive teams vie for talent and travel to national tournaments. Others are elite in name only, siphoning expensive participation fees from parents of kids with little hope of making the high school varsity, let alone the pros.
… Setting aside the “Leicester miracle” for a moment, studies show that the best predictor of a club’s success is the size of its wage bill. So with revenues in the game rising we should see more records being set and clubs splashing the cash just to stand still. Expect further transfer inflation in coming years as dominant club brands try to further their global standing while ambitious clubs (and new owners) try and break in and gain wider recognition.
For Premier League teams trying to plan their future, it all depends how success is defined. For some it is survival in the top division, for others it might be mid-table mediocrity and the sniff of a spot in European competition. Everyone will have to spend more, either way. But one thing this latest transfer window has made very clear – if you want to punch your weight with the very best and compete for the biggest prizes, then that is where transfer hyperinflation is at its most startling and the investment risks of failure at their most dramatic.
Lindsay Davenport, a Hall of Famer who now works as a tennis coach and commentator, does not mince words about where she sees continuing deficiencies in women’s tennis, the sport in which she was ranked No. 1 in singles and doubles.
“It is appalling to me, so often, to go watch these ladies serve,” Davenport said. “They spend very little time on it. They don’t take pride in it, and it’s the one shot you have complete control of.”
The serve, often seen as a vulnerability in the women’s game, is a strength of most top men on the ATP Tour, which leads to striking statistical discrepancies.
In 2016, only one woman, Serena Williams, won more than 80 percent of her service games.
… “There’s an enormous amount of effort and investment and focus on data analytics right now,” says Tom O’Toole, a senior fellow and clinical professor of marketing at the Kellogg School, who was formerly CMO at United Airlines and CMO and CIO at Hyatt Hotels Corporation. “But the reality is that companies are still having difficulty figuring out how, in practice, to connect analytics to business outcomes.”
One fundamental problem is that companies typically approach the rollout of analytics as a technical challenge: hire data scientists, adopt the right software, then reap business gains. But achieving real business value from analytics, says O’Toole, requires deeper enterprise change.
The key is for companies to create an environment in which employees think in terms of asking business questions that can be answered with data, and they are free and able to ask such questions.
Sports analytics is best known as the field of research that focuses on discovering slight but significant improvements within competitions; however, broader sets of athlete- and team-level data from outside of competitions (e.g., strength and conditioning metrics) have been typically left out from such analyses. Given that strength and conditioning programs are perhaps the most common avenue through which people expect extra-competition progress to translate into within-competition performance, it is clear that strength and conditioning metrics warrant closer analytic attention. To illustrate this approach, we present a study of NCAA Division 1 Men’s Ice Hockey players that integrates both (1) strength and conditioning metrics as well as (2) in-game performance measurements. Bivariate analyses show a significant positive correlation between bench press performance and points scored (r = .15) though multivariate analyses point to positive relationships between strength and conditioning measures and playing time as the more important finding. While within-competition data is increasingly accessible for analytics research, the basic approach that we develop highlights the importance of considering extra-competition variables such as strength and conditioning metrics for understanding both coaching decisions regarding playing time as well as within-competition performance. We also discuss ways in which the integrated approach that we present offers potential applications for strength and conditioning professionals as well as players, coaches, and team managers.
… In 2017, the absence of 3 of the 5 highest ranked men’s players put Rafael Nadal in the No. 1 position with an Elo or 2257, little more than marginally better than where he was as the 4th seed in 2016. After the reshuffling to adjust for Murray’s withdrawal, Marin Cilic took the top spot in the weakest quarter and entered the draw with an Elo rating of 2093. That is only 50 Elo points ahead of where Cilic was in the 2016 US Open, when he was the 7th seed.
So, yes, a lot has changed in a year.
But the contrast in the form of the top seeds is only part of what has driven the chatter about the 2017 US Open field. The imbalance in the draw has also been a source of disappointment and even ire. With the bottom half of the draw having just one player with a Major title to his name, some tennis writers have commented that any ambulatory competitor has a fighting chance of reaching a semifinal. Not the kind of situation to inspire casual tennis fans to tune in.
… Perhaps it reflects poorly on English football that De Boer, who led Ajax to four consecutive Eredivisie titles in his first managerial job, has encountered early resistance at Palace (highest Premier League finish: 10th in 2015). After all, everyone was on board when he outlined his vision in the summer and demonstrated an awareness that refining Palace’s style would not be easy, promising “evolution, not revolution”. Three matches in, however, Palace fans are still waiting to celebrate a goal, let alone their first point. More worrying than the results are the insipid, cure-for-insomnia performances, the dogmatism that makes Van Gaal’s Manchester United look even more freewheeling than Brazil’s 1970 team.
But why did the Palace hierarchy not see this coming? Before De Boer, the home dugout at Selhurst Park was the domain of the Proper Football Man. Since winning promotion under Ian Holloway in 2013, Palace have employed Tony Pulis, Neil Warnock, Alan Pardew and Sam Allardyce, and the result is a gritty, direct team with few frills and little creativity or flair. One has got to go back 19 years to find the only other time they had a foreign manager, Atillio Lombardo, who could not save them from relegation during a brief spell as caretaker player-manager. Hiring De Boer was a departure from the norm for Palace and maybe it was to be expected they would experience teething problems. They will be accused of impatience if they decide to cut their losses; in reality, however, their biggest crime would be failing to lay the proper foundations for such a big change to their identity.
It would hint at the kind of structural shortcomings stemming from a lack of a philosophy within the club. Allardyce one minute, De Boer the next: it was too extreme. Palace had just survived a relegation scrap and there was no sense they had been gearing up to become the English Ajax. It is no wonder the squad has struggled to adapt to De Boer, who said his players lacked courage on the ball after the home defeat by Swansea City.
… Kentucky, Duke, Kansas and other bluebloods and second-tier powerhouses will always be the destination of choice for most top-10 prospects, but should they be? Has it made a significant difference for players who decided to carve their own path?
We looked back at every class since the ESPN recruiting database started in 2007 to see how players who went an unconventional college route fared at the college level, and whether it impacted their NBA draft stock.
Chicago Tribune, Charlotte Observer, Langston Wertz Jr. from
… Real Sports follows several families who travel with their kid. One parent said she and her husband spend 30 weekends a year on the road playing baseball. The reason? So their children can play against other elite athletes around the country — better than they could find locally. And so they can make sure he gets a college scholarship.
“It’s so competitive,” one Virginia-based parent said, “and if you don’t keep up with what someone else is doing, you’re going to fall behind.”
There are travel leagues popping up in all sports, where travel teams will visit different cities to play in leagues at “travel league stops” throughout the country — or in “national championships” that are held by the same organization in different cities at different times throughout the year.
The purpose of this study was to analyze and compare the value of players drafted in early rounds of the NFL Draft since the new collective bargaining agreement (CBA) began in 2011. The NFL’s player statistics database and database of player contract details were searched for players drafted in the first three rounds of the 2011 to 2013 NFL Drafts. Performance outcomes specific to each position were divided by each player’s salary to calculate a value statistic. Various demographics, NFL Combine results, and total number of games missed due to injury were also recorded for each player. These statistics were compared within each position between players selected in the 1st round of the NFL Draft (Group A) versus those drafted in the 2nd or 3rd round (Group B). A total of 147 players were included (Group A 35, Group B 112). Overall, players in Group A were significantly taller (p < 0.01) and heavier (p = 0.037) than players in Group B. Group B demonstrated significantly greater value statistics than Group A for quarterbacks (p = 0.028), wide receivers (p < 0.001), defensive tackles (p = 0.019), and cornerbacks (p < 0.001). No significant differences were found between groups with regard to number of games missed due to injury. Players drafted in the 2nd or 3rd rounds of the NFL Draft often carry more value than those drafted in the 1st round. NFL teams may wish to more frequently trade down in the Draft rather than trading up.
