… Benintendi didn’t roll out of bed on May 12 and suddenly decide to make this change. In fact, his stance started opening up on April 26 in a game against the Blue Jays. He went 2-for-4 with a double in that game, but it still took him another two weeks to really turn on the jets. In that time, his stance opened up some more and his hands dropped a bit farther before both landed where they are today.
Tyler Adams looks and sounds like a man ready for the next challenge.
The 19-year-old has already made 52 league, playoff and cup appearances for the New York Red Bulls. Lately he’s been making inroads at the international level and is slated to earn his fifth cap with the U.S. when it takes on France this Saturday. Combined with his exploits at last year’s FIFA U-20 World Cup, it’s clear that Adams is a man in demand. A long-rumored move to Bundesliga side RB Leipzig looks to be in the offing.
“The Red Bulls have been everything for me since I was a kid, so they know where I stand with having big ambitions to go overseas and ultimately reach big goals, playing in Champions League,” Adams said at the U.S. team’s hotel. “Hopefully one day I’ll play at a stage where Christian [Pulisic] is playing and Weston [McKennie] and guys like that.
“For me, it means a lot that I’ve had talks with my club [and manager Jesse Marsch], and they know where I stand with that, and they want to help me with the best step going forward. But all I can focus on right now is playing well with Red Bulls so that doors continue to open up.”
… There are questions about his still-developing frame (he has added 30 pounds in the past three years), an up-and-down season at Texas and his motor, plus competition in the sheer star power at the top of this draft. But history shows that the player picked No. 1 isn’t guaranteed to be the best prospect in the class.
Bamba has done everything in his power since his season wrapped in March to make his case for why teams might regret passing on him, with a regimented routine including strength training, physical therapy, boxing, beach workouts, yoga, film study and two skill workouts a day with renowned player development specialist Drew Hanlen in Los Angeles.
Hanlen has become well known in basketball circles because of his work with Jayson Tatum, Joel Embiid and Bradley Beal, among others, causing numerous NBA players to flock to his gym. What separates him from other trainers, beyond the relentless ribbing his clients endure in every workout, is the fact that he’s not afraid to completely reconstruct a player’s jump shot.
… Her first official return to competition came with the U.S. WNT on April 6, 2017, when she played a solid 10 minutes against Russia in Frisco, Texas. Twelve days later, she stepped on the field with her club FC Kansas City for its opening day match on April 18, 2017.
It was a dream start, if only for a few minutes, as Rodriguez scored in the 48th minute to put FCKC up 2-0. There was joy and jubilation. The long-awaited return had come and been punctuated with a goal. But sometimes the universe can be cruel, and just six minutes later as Rodriguez was receiving a pass, an opposing player knocked into her right side, forcing her to jam her left foot awkwardly into the ground. The pressure appeared to cause her left leg to buckle, at which point she fell to the field, curled onto her left side and pounded her fist repeatedly on the turf.
It was tough to watch. Fans in the stands sat in complete silence. Everyone in the women’s soccer community was left speechless. She has battled so hard to return, and now this? It was unfair, and it probably would have been the end to a career for many.
Soccer found Robert Russ when he was in the seventh grade – not that he was looking for it. Like most African American kids at his Washington middle school, he had no interest in the game. Soccer, everyone had told him, was either for white children in the suburbs or Latino immigrants, not kids like him.
Then one afternoon someone waved him on to the playing field. By the end of the day, he was in love with a new sport.
Soon came the taunts from his friends, telling him that he wasn’t playing a real sport. That what he was doing wasn’t really black. That he was wasting his time.
“If you’re African American and you play soccer, you get picked on a lot,” Russ says. “People are going to say you’re trying to be Hispanic,” he says.
He never cared about the teasing; he enjoyed the game too much. But now that he’s 20 and working with young inner city players, Russ notices how few look like him. He’s sure peer pressure has a lot to do with that.
The day after the U.S. failed to make the World Cup for the first time in more than 30 years, Minnesota United coach Adrian Heath narrowed U.S. Soccer’s problem down to one main area: development. Specifically, how the college game is out of touch with the rest of the world’s standards.
“I honestly believe the college system for basketball and American football and maybe baseball is as probably as good a setup as you can have anywhere in the world to prepare people to play professionally,” the England native said. “It’s probably the worst for soccer.
“We can’t have kids going to college at 18, staying for two, three years playing three months of competitive football a year. Everywhere else in the world, it’s getting more [games]. Here, it’s getting less at a really important time.”
… Neville says the changes to the top tier of women’s football next season are “massively important” in regards to a fully professional league and when discussing the plight of Sunderland added clubs have to be at a “certain level.”
“It’s sad for Sunderland, for Mel [Copeland] and the players,” he said. “The league has had to make tough decisions and I don’t get involved in that. I think the league is getting stronger and it’s up to the clubs. It’s okay to say we’re sad but to get into that league, you’ve got to be a certain level and we’re hoping those teams stepping up will improve the quality.
Memories resonate in the mind even when it’s not aware of processing them. New research from Rice University and Michigan Medicine takes a step toward understanding why these ripples hint at the bigger picture of how brains sort and store information.
Researchers led by Caleb Kemere of Riceand Kamran Diba of Michigan Medicine have developed a tool to form quantitative models of memory. Their strategy analyzes waves of firing neurons that race in an instant across the hippocampus and beyond in animals while they’re active and, significantly, while they rest.
… what happens when superstition enters the picture? Will black cats, evil eyes, and broken mirrors change how people react to gambles, gain, and loss?
The answer, according to the researchers, is an unambiguous “yes.” The simple act of crossing one’s fingers or clutching a rabbit’s foot keychain flips loss aversion on its head. People become more risk-seeking in gains but more risk-averse when facing losses.
Labroo and Dong believe the turnaround is the result of increased fatalism: when engaging in superstitious acts, people stop making rational deliberations about probability. Instead, they believe outcomes are predetermined.
“We can think about all kinds of good things happening and all kinds of bad things happening, but thinking about the probability and trying to compute expected value is less natural. It takes a little more effort,” Labroo explains. And many of us give up on those complex computations while engaging in superstitious actions, she adds.
… For some companies, it may help to join an accelerator that only focuses on their specific area. That’s especially true for those in more specialized spaces, which will have their own unique challenges and regulations.
Here are some of the accelerators that are focused specifically on mentoring companies in the sports tech space.
Sports is said to be the social glue of society. It allows people to interact irrespective of their social status or age. With the rise of the mass media, a significant quantity of resources has been channeled into sports in order to improve understanding, performance and presentation. Manual creation of data describing details in sports events is tiresome and in many cases simply unrealistic. Technology is therefore becoming more and more crucial as the demand for improved understanding, performance and presentation increases. Moreover, since the nature of most sports means that monitoring by the use of sensors or other devices fixed to players or equipment is generally not possible, a rich set of opportunities exist for the application of camera-based computer vision techniques to help the competitors, trainers and audience.
This talk will first present a brief overview over where computer vision is currently being used in sports as well as possible future applications of computer vision in sports. Hereafter a more in depth presentation of different computer vision researches in sports will be presented. These will focus on using thermal cameras (in order to ensure privacy) to automatically provide answers to questions like: How many people are currently using a particular sports facility? What are they playing? The level of oxygen consumption?
Analytical and Bioanalytical Chemistry journal from
Despite predictions of their widespread application in healthcare and environmental monitoring, electrochemical sensors are yet to be distributed at scale, instead remaining largely confined to R&D labs. This contrasts sharply with the situation for physical sensors, which are now ubiquitous and seamlessly embedded in the mature ecosystem provided by electronics and connectivity protocols. Although chemical sensors could be integrated into the same ecosystem, there are fundamental issues with these sensors in the three key areas of analytical performance, usability, and affordability. Nevertheless, advances are being made in each of these fields, leading to hope that the deployment of automated and user-friendly low-cost electrochemical sensors is on the horizon. Here, we present a brief survey of key challenges and advances in the development of distributed electrochemical sensors for liquid samples, geared towards applications in healthcare and wellbeing, environmental monitoring, and homeland security. As will be seen, in many cases the analytical performance of the sensor is acceptable; it is usability that is the major barrier to commercial viability at this moment. Were this to be overcome, the issue of affordability could be addressed.
Julian Edelman’s four-game suspension for violating the NFL’s policy on PEDs creates an uncomfortable situation for the Patriots. Not only are they losing an important player for the first quarter of the season (pending appeal), but there’s also the matter of Edelman’s well-established relationship with Tom Brady’s controversial trainer and business partner, Alex Guerrero.
Guerrero’s influence over Brady and some Patriots teammates has been a reported point of friction between Brady and Bill Belichick. The divide could grow deeper considering the biggest question raised by Edelman’s suspension: Did Guerrero’s alternative training methods have anything to do with Edelman’s failed test?
Edelman has been a vocal fan of Guerrero’s, even after a December report from the Boston Globe that Belichick had revoked Guerrero’s special privileges, like flying on the team plane, sideline access and treating players besides Brady at Guerrero’s Gillette Stadium office. In April, Edelman called Guerrero “Mr. Miyagi” in a video on an Instagram story showing Guerrero massaging Edelman’s leg. In November, while promoting his book, Edelman told WEEI that he’d been rehabbing his ACL tear at Brady and Guerrero’s TB12 training facility near Gillette Stadium. “I am a huge advocate of it,” Edelman told WEEI.
Team A looks basically the same compared to league average, while Team B looks complete and utterly different with the incorporation of pressure data. Now, instead of a traditional deep block, Team B looks absolutely miserable to play against. You simply do not get time on the ball against Team B almost anywhere on the pitch.
Team A = West Brom
Team B = Burnley
These are two teams you could easily describe as Deep Block in style, but boy do they vary in execution when you play against them, and from a data perspective, you only see that when you layer in pressing information.
Executive search firms have established themselves within the world of college basketball in recent years. These firms, which are tasked with helping find new head coaches, can have a lasting impact on the health of a Division-I basketball program.
Over the past nine NCAA Division I men’s basketball off-seasons, 36.7 percent of head coaching vacancies have been assisted by search firms. Among those hires include: Ohio State’s Chris Holtmann, Oregon’s Dana Altman, Texas Tech’s Chris Beard, NC State’s Kevin Keatts, and Oklahoma’s Lon Kruger, among others.
Programs in the “Power-Six” basketball conferences (Atlantic Coast Conference, Big XII Conference, Big East Conference, Big Ten Conference, Pac-12 Conference, and Southeastern Conference) are nearly twice as likely to use search firms during head coaching hires than non-Power-Six programs. The graph below shows the difference in search firm usage between Power-Six and non-Power-Six programs since 2010.