… Several top high school players have opted to skip college and play professionally overseas since the N.B.A. implemented its so-called one-and-done rule in 2006, which requires prospects to be 19 years old and a year removed from high school to enter the draft. However, Bazley will be the first since Latavious Williams in 2009 to head straight to the development league, which announced last week that it would raise salaries to $35,000 next season, from $26,000. Bazley had foreshadowed his plan before the all-star game, saying that since coaches had told him he’d be ready for the N.B.A. after one year of college, he felt tempted to skip another year of school altogether.
“My ultimate goal is to play professional basketball, so going that route, that would be great for me,” he said.
… There was something in that. In good times and bad Messi looks for Iniesta, and in bad times above all. It is in those moments when he seeks security, assurance, that he most wants the Spaniard at his side. “I know how difficult it is to do what he does,” Messi says in Iniesta’s book, The Artist.
“On the pitch I like him to be near me, especially when the game takes a turn for the worse, when things are difficult. That’s when I say to him: ‘Come closer.’ He takes control and responsibility.”
It is a simple solution, successful for well over a decade and expressed on Saturday night, like a portrait of their era, Barcelona producing a performance that may have been as good as any since Wembley 2011. And yet time waits for no man, not even the man who sometimes seemed able to control it. You can slow the clock, but not stop it and when Messi looks for Iniesta next season, he will no longer be there … he’ll be 5,000 miles away; 22 years after arriving, 18 after meeting Messi, 16 since his debut, Iniesta is leaving Barcelona for China. An announcement is expected this week.
Kyle Korver was explaining one of the Cleveland Cavaliers’ core philosophies this season: The job of everyone on the team not named LeBron James is to put LeBron James in position to do the things LeBron James does as the best basketball player in the planet.
“We all know the narrative around us: It’s ’Bron, and we’re all trying to make it work for him,” Korver, a shooting guard, said on Tuesday. “But I don’t want to make too much of it, because we don’t need to overthink it. We need to go out there and play basketball.”
… Effective work (i.e., training that works and keeps working) follows a plan, has clear goals, builds on the skills that came before it and is guided by regular feedback.
After asking Sam a few key questions and assessing her training diary, it’s clear that she’s doing this too.
But despite Sam’s best intentions, getting out of bed each morning is a drag. She’s tired and grumpy a lot and seldom feels at her best in training.
At school, concentrating on her work for more than a few minutes is a challenge.
… In principle, this could be a good idea. But, there are massive problems with the idea of using this data to estimate a child’s maturation. To get at the heart of the manner, you don’t actually know how developed a child really is by doing these calculations. You are merely making an estimate. I don’t mean to question the mathematical modeling that they use here. Apparently, they use some well-regarded theorem, but algorithms like this are meant to be used on very large sample sizes. We are talking hundreds or thousands of data points. When you have data that large, you can really start to be able to make accurate, generalized statements. However, soccer doesn’t use large sample sizes. The sample size we are talking about for kids is the size of the club choosing to use bio banding. In the context of soccer, we aren’t making predictions for hundreds or thousands of players. We are making predictions for individuals. And on an individual level, these things can vary pretty wildly.
Let’s use myself as an example. They said that they use the parent’s height as a comparison, so let’s compare me with my dad. I’m around 5’ 8”, somewhere between 4 and 5 inches taller than my father. That makes for a 6% difference between the two of us. So, if bio banding predicted that I would be around my father’s height, I would have been assigned a score that was 6% off. That’s the difference of an entire interval! If my true maturation score is at the 85th percentile, I ought be in the 80-85% group. But the score I am given is 6% higher, I’d leapfrog past the 85-90%, to the 90-95% group. With that kind of range difference, an error like that could completely misplace me! That’s the thing with small intervals. If the statistical variation is predicted to be just +/- 2.5% (i.e. 5%), then half the kids in an interval will be misplaced.
Nick Saban knows what he’s doing isn’t normal. The University of Alabama football coach is well aware that it’s anything but typical for one school to thoroughly dominate a major sport the way his Crimson Tide has ruled college football over the past decade. More to the point, he knows that it’s well outside the bounds of ordinary to expect 18- to 22-year-olds to win national championships—and then work even harder to get better. “To me it takes a completely different mindset to stay successful as opposed to what you have to do to build something to be successful,” says Saban. “All of us are sort of geared toward, if we have success, we’re supposed to be rewarded for it, not necessarily that we have to continue to do things even better than we did before.”
It’s the Friday before his team’s first scrimmage of spring practice, and Saban, 66, is sitting, legs crossed, in a plush chair in his wood-paneled office in Tuscaloosa, Ala., a collection of championship rings spread out on the coffee table in front of him. Clad in a black pullover sweater, gray slacks, and black loafers, the coach is in a reflective mood. But his trademark intensity begins to show as he warms to the subject: Being a champion means, well, being different.
… “It’s got everything lined up to be a golden era again,” Moos said. “The facilities, infrastructure, the support, the most amazing and passionate fan bases in college athletics. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Moos retold the story of how he was hired at Nebraska. About how as the athletic director at Washington State he felt like he had one more stop in him. How he got the phone call that he’d been selected to be NU’s next athletic director at a breakfast with Washington State donors and fans.
“I dropped my fork right in my eggs,” he said.
How his first call was to Tom Osborne and how he instructed Nebraska color analyst Matt Davison to get in touch with Scott Frost soon after he was hired.
Over the past few decades, thanks in part to books like Betty Edwards’ popular Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, the idea of creativity being correlated solely with “right brain” thinking (and turning the “left brain,” especially verbal and analytic processing, off) has become part of American folk neuroscience (See “When the Myth is the Message: Neuromyths and Education”). Yet scientists are learning that creativity—whether it be expressed in art, music, or science—is a whole brain activity involving shared neural networks. New research from Harvard University suggests creativity may be borne from a specific pattern of connectivity involving three unique brain networks that do not typically work together.
The British Psychological Society, Research Digest, Christian Jarrett from
In a post-truth world of alternative facts, there is understandable interest in the psychology behind why people are generally so wedded to their opinions and why it is so difficult to change minds.
We already know a lot about the deliberate mental processes that people engage in to protect their world view, from seeking out confirmatory evidence (the “confirmation bias“) to questioning the methods used to marshal contradictory evidence (the scientific impotence excuse).
Now a team led by Anat Maril at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem report in Social Psychological and Personality Science that they have found evidence of rapid and involuntarily mental processes that kick-in whenever we encounter opinions we agree with, similar to the processes previously described for how we respond to basic facts.
The researchers write that “their demonstration of such a knee-jerk acceptance of opinions may help explain people’s remarkable ability to remain entrenched in their convictions”.
A Toronto sports technology company, partly owned by the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers, aims to help revolutionize the way sports coaches around the world both train and evaluate top-end athletes.
Its innovation? A small device that straps onto the wrist or waist, or any training-room weight bar. With an accompanying digital app.
In the NFL, for instance, embracing such technology could one day result in completely reassessing the way draft prospects at this time of year are gauged and analyzed.
Researchers from the University of California San Diego have developed a low-cost, single-use tattoo-like wearable that measures the user’s glucose levels. According to a release from the institution, this noninvasive technology will be at the center of a newly announced pilot clinical trial designed to test the accuracy and acceptability of the tattoos.
“Drawing blood is uncomfortable. No one likes doing it. The beauty of the technology we are developing is that it is a truly noninvasive means to measure glucose,” Patrick Mercier, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at UCSD and codirector of its Center for Wearable Sensors, said in a statement. “The main purpose of our research is to develop new technologies that can monitor glucose without drawing blood and ideally measure it over the course of the day. By giving this real-time information to patients, they can manage their consumption of sugars and injections of insulin much better than with periodic spot measurements.”
Hamstring muscle injury prediction by isokinetic strength ratios is low but could result from the method-depending either on the use of the limbs or of the sportsmen as references. We aimed to establish a predictive model including unilateral and bilateral ratios calculated from the dominant, nondominant, right, and left limb in injured and uninjured professional soccer players. DESIGN:
Cohort study. SETTING:
Soccer team of the French Professional Premier League. PATIENTS:
Ninety-one professional soccer players. INTERVENTIONS:
Isokinetic muscle strength was prospectively measured at the beginning of 5 consecutive seasons (2009-2014). MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES:
Several bilateral, conventional, and functional ratios were calculated from isokinetic measurements at different angular speeds (60 and 240 degrees/s in concentric mode and 30 degrees/s in eccentric mode). Thirty-one soccer players had a hamstring injury during the seasons and were compared with 60 uninjured players. Four models were tested to predict the occurrence of hamstring injury from isokinetic ratios calculated in accordance with the dominant, nondominant, right, and left limb. RESULTS:
No predictive model was found when ratios were calculated from the dominant or the right limb. Two models of prediction were found when ratios were calculated from the nondominant or the left limb. In these 2 models, only the bilateral concentric hamstring-to-hamstring ratio at 60 degrees/s was predictive. The best prediction was found with the left limb. CONCLUSIONS:
We identified 2 low predictive models for hamstring muscle injuries depending on the limbs studied. Because of a low prediction, the consensual method used to predict hamstring muscle injury must be defined in future studies.
Numerous studies over the last 35 years report an increase in upper respiratory infection (URI) symptoms in athletes during periods of heavy training and competition. Challenges athletes face such as heavy exercise and life stress influence immune function via activation of the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis and the sympathetic nervous system and the resulting immunoregulatory hormones. Both innate and acquired immunity are often reported to decrease transiently in the hours after heavy exertion, typically 15–70%: prolonged heavy training sessions in particular have been shown to decrease immune function; potentially providing an ‘open window’ for opportunistic infections. Whether the observed changes in immunity with acute strenuous exercise or periods of heavy training account for the increased susceptibility to URI symptoms remains contentious. Nevertheless, there is little doubt that URI symptoms hinder athletic training and competition; underpinning the need to identify the prominent risk factors and appropriate countermeasures. Recent studies have identified prominent risk factors, including: intensified training in the winter; long-haul travel; low energy availability; high levels of psychological stress and anxiety; and depression. Given the shared pathways and effector limbs for the body’s response to physical and psychological challenges, it is logical that psychological strain influences immunity and illness incidence in athletes under heavy training; indeed, stress and anxiety have recently been shown to modify the immune response to exercise. This mini-review provides new insights and evidence-based recommendations for coping with the various challenges that athletes encounter on immune health, including: heavy exercise; life stress; sleep disruption; environmental extremes and nutritional deficits. [full text]
With the draft two days away, and at least five quarterbacks expected to come off the board during Thursday night’s first round, decision-makers around the league are still grappling with the most basic of questions when it comes to Allen, Darnold, Jackson, Mayfield and Rosen