… “You’ve got to show you can do it over a full season,” he said. “You don’t really want to have those slumps. I think you kind of implement that in your training over the summer and be ready for this year.”
Guentzel doesn’t have to look very far if he wants some pointers on the adjustment. The Penguins have plenty of guys who have recently made the transition from mid-season call-up to NHL regular. Just a year ago, players such as Bryan Rust and Conor Sheary were the ones in Guentzel’s shoes.
“I think the challenge is that consistency throughout the entire regular season,” Rust said. “There’s going to be nights where your body’s not feeling the greatest and you’ve got to find a way to grind through it.”
Baseball history is awash with stories of pitchers adding new pitches to their repertoire by the same rote method: a teammate or coach suggests a grip, the pitcher fiddles with the ball until he gets a good feel and then he debuts his new offering in a game. This is addition by anecdote, a happenstance way of expanding one’s arsenal while more analytically minded pitchers are relying on technology to make concerted plans to engineer complementary pitches.
“Pitch design is such an untapped resource,” Cleveland Indians starter Trevor Bauer said.
Bauer has trained for several offseasons at Driveline Baseball, a data-driven pitching incubator in suburban Seattle, whose facility is loaded with all the latest technology: Edgertronic high-speed video, TrackMan radars to Pitch F/X optical tracking cameras to Rapsodo, a radar-triggered camera system. Driveline pairs the gadgets and gurus powering that technology with its weighted baseballs to form the core of its research-based ballistic training.
Daniel Norris plans to catch some rays and waves in Santa Barbara, Calif. in the off-season. He’s also planning to do a lot of work over a three-week span there at P3, the Peak Performance Project.
Norris said going to Santa Barbara is a change from his past off-seasons, when he’s worked alone in Tennessee.
Last Thursday, the Carolina Panthers restricted how much Cam Newton threw during practice. They would have preferred Newton took the entire day off, a routine Coach Ron Rivera affords other Carolina veterans three days before games. Newton had little choice but to accept the breather for his arm, as he continues his recovery from shoulder surgery. But coaches knew he wouldn’t sit out completely.
“He’s not going to take a rest day,” Coach Ron Rivera said Thursday. “He just won’t. So this is the compromise — the new normal.”
Newton’s season, in many ways, is about discovering how to operate in a new normal. It is a season of adjustment for Newton, and sometimes adjustments take time. The first two weeks of the season, despite two victories, have reinforced that the process may not be smooth.
Barcelona coach Ernesto Valverde believes Ousmane Dembele’s inexperience was partly to blame for the hamstring injury which will keep him out for around four months.
The 20-year-old France winger backheeled the ball while running at speed in the 25th minute of Barca’s 2-1 win at Getafe in La Liga on Saturday and immediately pulled up injured.
Andy Murray practised against both boys and girls in his early years, and went on to play with some of the world’s top female tennis players in mixed doubles. He hit the headlines recently for his comments on gender in sport, including once when he corrected a journalist’s casual sexism. Here, he writes about his hopes for women in tennis.
It is mid-September but the clock is already ticking on the countdown to the inevitable rainy season that routinely plays havoc with the grassroots youth football calendar around the country. So it was timely for the FA to announce on Monday that it is trying to dismantle the barriers blocking access to school halls to allow young footballers to seek refuge from the cold and try the game that formed a legion of footballing superstars: futsal.
Grants from the Football Foundation totalling £300,000 will be made available for schools, colleges and youth football leagues. The aim is to create 200 futsal hubs, exposing at least 12,000 more children to the fast-paced five-a-side game that Neymar, Lionel Messi, Cristiano Ronaldo and the Spanish rondo brigade credit with honing their impeccable skills as youngsters.
“Futsal in schools needs to happen,” says Michael Skubala, the FA’s futsal elite performance manager and head coach of the England team. “Until we start doing futsal properly, we probably aren’t going to win a football World Cup like Spain and Brazil. These nations are all doing it on a massive scale, all their kids are doing it. And the constraints of the game are showing us that it gives us huge football returns later down the line.”
When it comes to the concept of fairness, teenagers’ ability to consider the intentions of others appears to be linked to structural changes underway in the brain, according to a study. The study is the first to provide evidence linking structural changes with behavioral changes within this context. Understanding the intentions of others is fundamental to human cooperation and how we exist as social beings.
Offensive Line Performance, Le Charles Bentley from
Coaching offensive line is about so much more than relaying information. It runs deeper than a coach’s football acumen. Offensive line is a position built upon trust. The coach has to trust the players to give their best effort, the players must trust one another, and in turn the players have to trust the coach’s guidance. The offensive line room is an ecosystem that transcends the X’s & O’s of the game. This is why it’s paramount for the coach to develop not just the player, but also his/her interpersonal relationships with their players. Unfortunately, there are offensive line coaches that far too often violate the coaching code of conduct for the sake of being “hard nosed” and “tough.”
The term “bad coaching” isn’t a reference to a coach’s “know how.” It’s a reference to coaching style. It’s so disheartening speaking with players to hear the negative commentary many have to endure. I had a player tell me his coach said to him, “I wish we had another option at (position X), because I would bench your a**.” Well, maybe the player isn’t the problem. Could it be the poor coaching he’s received? Another player had a coach tell him, “You’re the best player on the team, the best at f*ucking up.” I’m sure this doesn’t qualify as a confidence booster. The things I hear and see extend beyond the verbal jabs, and into the realm of mental abuse.
There won’t be anyone for players to argue calls with at this tennis tournament: They’re getting rid of the line judges entirely.
The men’s tour announced Monday that the Next Gen ATP Finals, a season-ending event for top 21-and-under players, will feature electronic line-calling for all shots. It’s the first time this is being tried at an ATP tournament.
NEJM Catalyst; Glenn Fox, PhD, Shaun Garland, PhD, Andrew Keibel, MD & Leslie A. Saxon, MD from
Wearable technology can benefit health only if it leads to enduring behavior change. There are more than 1,000 commercially available wearable devices that can be paired to a software application (app) to measure and improve health behavior, and one in five Americans has purchased one. Despite their ubiquity, there has been little systematic measurement and understanding of how people use and stop using them. The research that does exist, emerging mostly from market research white papers, tells a story of rapid abandonment. Most users report increased physical activity after purchasing a sensor, but the longer they own it, the less they use it: nearly one third of all users cease tracking activity six months after purchase.
In order to derive sustained health benefits from activity sensors, it is important to understand why users often abandon their devices. Qualitative analyses of the reasons include forgetting to wear the device, discomfort during exercise, lack of aesthetic appeal, and loss of interest. In some cases, users report they have met their fitness goals and no longer rely on the device. Previous studies of device usage by small numbers of patients provide evidence that leveraging peer support to encourage activity and other healthful habits achieves more favorable health outcomes than self-motivation.
EurekAlert! Science News, Binghamton University from
A new paper-based sensor patch developed by researchers at Binghamton University, State University of New York could allow diabetics to effectively measure glucose levels during exercise.
Today’s most widespread methods for glucose self-testing involve monitoring glucose levels in blood. Conventional measurements, however, are not suitable for preventing hypoglycemia during exercise, said Binghamton University Electrical and Computer Science Assistant Professor Seokheun Choi.
Earnie Stewart promised big changes, but he was smart not to box himself inside too specific a timeline.
The long-time U.S. national team midfielder took over as the sporting director of the Philadelphia Union on Jan. 1, 2016 and was aided in his cause by two dynamics.
First of all, Philly was a bit of a mess, having reached the postseason and finished in the top 10 in the MLS standings just once in its first six seasons.
Second, though he was just 46 years old when he took the job, Stewart had already developed a resume that would stack up favorably against almost any other executive in the league.
… Many voices have said MLS has to increase investment in order to be more competitive globally. Count this column among them. Both Atlanta and Toronto are proving you can deliver a top-level team within the constraints of this league.
Atlanta spent money on transfer fees that would freeze out teams all across Europe. Toronto proved that you can pay for quality players in their primes and convince them MLS is a worthy home. Both have found worthwhile talent within MLS, and both hope to develop their own young stars.
… When Harris and Blitzer finally completed the deal to acquire Palace in December 2015, the South London club became the eighth English team under American control. The Glazer family had been the first on the scene, buying Manchester United in 2003. In the years to come, Liverpool (twice), Arsenal, Aston Villa, Sunderland, Fulham, Millwall and Derby County would follow.
After Harris and Blitzer, Swansea City and Portsmouth, too, moved into American hands; Bournemouth is partly owned by Matthew Hulsizer, a Chicago financier. Barnsley, targeted by a consortium including the Oakland A’s executive Billy Beane, may be next.
Few, if any, would count as unqualified successes. The Glazers faced protests almost from the start; even now, the Manchester United Supporters’ Trust believes no owner has “ever taken so much money from a single club.” Kroenke is blamed for Arsenal’s inertia. Henry is hardly universally popular in Liverpool.