Like veterans across the league, the Eagles receiver has invested significant time and money into keeping his body in top shape during the punishing NFL season. And that included a visit to an unlikely spot two nights before the Super Bowl
… Having groomed a 19-year-old Parker at the point guard spot, Popovich expects ups and downs from Murray.
“Learning how to run the show takes a little bit of time for a young person,” Popovich said. “That point guard position is the toughest one on the court, and has an infinite amount of responsibility. You just start at the beginning, and roll. Each player that’s young like that has different strengths, both mentally and physically that you work on. But most of it is situational. So, they have to be out there in all sorts of situations and learn how to react and what to do.
“We’ve done it at this point because there’s a lot of the season left, and it’s going to give him a great opportunity to grow. I’m fortunate that Tony Parker has the character he has — to accept it the way he has, and to be a leader and be a mentor for Dejounte. It’s worked out well.”
… “We have one of the most educated teams, I think, in these Olympics,” Elana Meyers Taylor said at a press conference in Pyeongchang in the opening days of the 2018 Winter Games. “Between the four of us sitting here I think we’ve got five master’s degrees, so we’re highly educated women.”
This year’s heavily favored bobsled team won a silver medal Wednesday through Meyers Taylor and Lauren Gibbs. Jamie Greubel Poser and Aja Evans finished fifth in a field of 20, just .13 seconds off the podium.
At the press conference, Meyers Taylor proudly shouted out their postgraduate education and the level of financial security it gives them after they finish competing in the Olympics, so NBC reached out to their schools ahead of the competition to learn more about them. Here’s what they — and the athletes — had to say.
The national championship might seem like it was last week, but somehow, spring football is already on the horizon. With most teams starting their practices in mid-March, this might seem like a premature oh hooray it’s football message—but it’s not. In fact, by the time you read this, multiple teams will have already started spring (er, late winter, freezing-cold, seasonally-confused) ball, before the end of the third week of February.
Appalachian State began practices on Feb. 5. Liberty, an independent moving up to FBS this season, kicked off on Feb. 10. Western Michigan, East Carolina, Colorado and Air Force all started between Feb. 20 and Feb. 23. That means it’s time to start tracking the newest quarterback arrivals, or worrying about minor injuries, or just salivating at the prospect of fall being just around the corner (kind of … not really). It’s also time to wonder: Can’t this wait until March? Why, exactly, do some teams start practices so early, while others wait almost an additional month to get football underway?
… “I feel very fortunate to have a hobby that I really love and a job that I really love,” she says. “I use the techniques that any busy, multitasking person uses.” That means creating detailed schedules, plotting her training into her calendar and sometimes cramming in work in the car on long drives. So far though, it has paid off.
It was Molly’s husband, Rob, a professor of political science at Berkeley and a former bike racer, who suggested she go for the hour record. It suited her strengths and was something she could train for in between her other commitments.
She thought he was crazy. But then he bought her a new track bike and started aerodynamic testing bikes, tires, helmets and clothes. Molly, 44, does not have a professional cycling contract, team doctors or high-end sponsors, but she does have Rob, who loves playing around with various mechanical details.
… “I think that my biggest message was that throughout the whole course of the season, remember the vibe and the feeling you have now,” Stevens said.
The feeling of not having any at-bats under their belts. The feeling of having fresh arms and legs. The feeling of not yet experiencing a losing streak. The exciting, unknowing feeling of what lies ahead in the coming months and the endless possibilities that await them.
Experiencing that feeling with the Red Sox is exactly the reason why Stevens went down to Fort Myers in the first place.
Draymond Green never stepped on a piece of cardio equipment until he was in college.
Not all those years growing up in Saginaw, Mich., where his gritty game grew in spite of the fact that his waistline would often do the same. Not in that summer of 2007, when he sprained his ankle before his senior season at Saginaw High School not long before he would head for Michigan State en route to Golden State Warriors fame.
There was, as he remembers, a total dearth of health facilities in his home region.
“I remember not having a gym to work out at – we didn’t have a single piece of cardio equipment,” Green tells USA TODAY Sports about that summer. “All I did was sit on the couch and eat. That’s when I first gained a ton of weight.”
We have witnessed some exceptional performances during the Pyeongchang Winter Olympics. For any athlete to deliver a gold medal performance, mental toughness is an essential ingredient. But what exactly is mental toughness — and how does an athlete develop it?
Research published in the Journal of Sports Sciences has found successful Olympians have a high degree of self-confidence, are able to block out distractions and manage their arousal level, are goal-oriented, and demonstrate a healthy form of perfectionism.
On a personal note, as an Olympian and a registered member with the Canadian Sport Psychology Association, I have used both strategies to enhance my own mental toughness, and I now assist athletes as a consultant to develop those skills.
Behavioral Scientist, Dan Ariely and Jeff Kreisler from
… The story of Aunt Susan and JCPenney shows some of the many effects of relativity, one of the most powerful forces that make us assess value in ways that have little to do with actual value. At JCPenney, Aunt Susan assessed value based upon relative value, but relative to what? Relative to the original posted price. JCPenney helped her make the comparison by posting the discount as a percentage and adding notes like “sale” and “special” to help focus her attention on the amazing relative price they offered.
Which would you buy? A dress shirt priced at $60 or the very same dress shirt, priced at $100, but “On Sale! 40% off! Only $60!”?
It shouldn’t matter, right? A $60 shirt is a $60 shirt, no matter what language and graphics are on the price tag. Yes, but since relativity works on us at a very deep way, we don’t see these two in the same way, and if we were a regular like Aunt Susan, we would buy the on-sale shirt every time—and be outraged by the mere presence of the straight-up $60 one.
… How has your own participation in sports influenced your thinking on leadership and management?
Although I am not an Olympic athlete, early positive experiences in soccer, basketball, and lacrosse cemented an identity for me as an athlete. In more recent years, I have spent some wonderful time on the tennis court. Some of the enduring lessons are a learning mindset; a focus on winning (and being able to manage losing); moving through the field/life with a calm center; and creating powerful team dynamics.
After about 10 years of teaching at Yale SOM, I looked around at a team of amazing people who coach and facilitate the student learning experience in my courses and recognized that a high percentage of the coaches and facilitators are serious athletes or artists. I am fascinated by the mindset similarity between athletic or artistic pursuits that require continued practice and the lifelong pursuit of leadership effectiveness. Great athletes are great learners. They have to be in order to master high-level techniques and be able to produce under demanding and dynamic conditions. The same goes for great leadership.
… “Where I see this going is that at a young age you’ll basically get a report card,” says Khera. “And it will say for these 10 diseases, here’s your score. You are in the 90th percentile for heart disease, 50th for breast cancer, and the lowest 10 percent for diabetes.”
Such comprehensive report cards aren’t being given out yet, but the science to create them is here. Delving into giant databases like the UK Biobank, which collects the DNA and holds the medical records of some 500,000 Britons, geneticists are peering into the lives of more people and extracting correlations between their genomes and their diseases, personalities, even habits. The latest gene hunt, for the causes of insomnia, involved a record 1,310,010 people.
The sheer quantity of material is what allows scientists like Khera to see how complex patterns of genetic variants are tied to many diseases and traits. Such patterns were hidden in earlier, more limited studies, but now the search for ever smaller signals in ever bigger data is paying off. Give Khera the simplest readout of your genome—the kind created with a $100 DNA-reading chip the size of a theater ticket—and he can add up your vulnerabilities and strengths just as one would a tally in a ledger.
International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism from
Some dietary supplements are recommended to athletes based on data that supports improved exercise performance. Other dietary supplements are not ergogenic per se, but may improve health, adaptation to exercise, or recovery from injury, and so could help athletes to train and/or compete more effectively. In this review, we describe several dietary supplements that may improve health, exercise adaptation, or recovery. Creatine monohydrate may improve recovery from and adaptation to intense training, recovery from periods of injury with extreme inactivity, cognitive processing, and reduce severity of or enhance recovery from mild traumatic brain injury (mTBI). Omega 3-fatty acid supplementation may also reduce severity of or enhance recovery from mTBI. Replenishment of vitamin D insufficiency or deficiency will likely improve some aspects of immune, bone, and muscle health. Probiotic supplementation can reduce the incidence, duration, and severity of upper respiratory tract infection, which may indirectly improve training or competitive performance. Preliminary data show that gelatin and/or collagen may improve connective tissue health. Some anti-inflammatory supplements, such as curcumin or tart cherry juice, may reduce inflammation and possibly delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS). Beta-hydroxy beta-methylbutyrate (HMB) does not consistently increase strength and/or lean mass or reduce markers of muscle damage, but more research on recovery from injury that includes periods of extreme inactivity is needed. Several dietary supplements, including creatine monohydrate, omega 3-fatty acids, vitamin D, probiotics, gelatin, and curcumin/tart cherry juice could help athletes train and/or compete more effectively.
Those are the numbers of players invited to the NFL Scouting Combine, since 2015, that were high school multi-sport athletes according to a recent study conducted by Tracking Football. More importantly, the average Player Athletic Index score of invited players over the past four years was significantly higher than that of DI-FBS recruit averages. This indicates that players attending the Combine were generally bigger, faster, and more explosive than most DI recruits at the same position BEFORE college. On top of that the vast majority competed for and represented their high schools in a variety of sports other than football. Apparently competing in other sports along the way did not derail dreams of making the NFL.
… This season, Johnson has rolled out ten different starting lineups and has routinely tinkered with his rotations.
“It sometimes shows up if a guy plays 36 minutes instead of 28 minutes,” Johnson said. “Maybe he is a little bit more effective in 28 minutes and obviously we look at lineups and matchups and who plays well together and who doesn’t. We look at scoring droughts and who is on the floor and who is not on the floor.”
The man responsible for spotting these trends is a Harvard grad. His name is Colton Houston, Alabama’s director of basketball operations. According to his bio on the team website, one of Houston’s many tasks is “spearheading the program’s analytics efforts.”
How much of MLB teams’ success is due to skill, and how much due to luck? We have a pretty good idea of the answer to that. But what about success in life, in general? If a person is particularly successful in their chosen field, how much of that success is due to luck?
That’s the question Robert Frank asks in his 2016 book, Success and Luck. He believes that luck is a substantial contributor to success, as evidenced by his subtitle: “Good Fortune and the Myth of Meritocracy.”
On the basic question, I agree with him that luck is a huge factor in how someone’s life turns out. There is a near-infinite number of alternative paths our lives could have taken. If a butterfly had flapped its wings differently in China decades ago, I might not even exist now, never mind be sitting here typing this blog post.