… “Christian was one of the guys near the top of our list who we thought could eventually develop into an elite type of player,” says Stearns, standing in the visiting dugout at Coors Field. It’s the day before Game 3 of the National League Division Series with the Colorado Rockies, a contest that the Brewers would win. Just like they won the first two games of the series. Just like they won their tiebreaker against the Chicago Cubs before that. Just like they won their final seven contests of the regular season before that.
To say that Yelich is the sole reason for the Brew Crew’s improbable 11-game winning streak would be an injustice to the rest of the roster. To say that he and he alone is responsible for Milwaukee reaching the league championship series for just the second time since 1982 wouldn’t be fair to Lorenzo Cain, the Milwaukee center fielder who signed as a free agent on the very same day that Yelich was traded and who spent the majority of the season at or near the top of everyone’s MVP rankings. It wouldn’t be fair to Josh Hader or Jeremy Jeffress. It wouldn’t be fair to Travis Shaw or Ryan Braun or Craig Counsell or Bernie Brewer or the good citizens of southeastern Wisconsin, among others.
That said, if there’s one person who’s at the heart of Milwaukee’s playoff push, one player who has been the driving force behind a 96-win season that’s tied for the best in franchise history, it’s Yelich. “He’s a special player,” says hitting coach Darnell Coles. “The numbers speak for themselves.”
During the football season, Julian Edelman knows all about the 1 p.m. ET kickoff, as well as 4:25 p.m. and 8:20 p.m. He lives for game day.
But being away from the team during the time in which he served a four-game NFL suspension to open the 2018 season, Edelman grew accustomed to the 11 a.m. ET kickoff.
That’s when the team of people helping him, a group that notably included former teammate Rob Ninkovich, would arrive at various fields around Boston and its suburbs. This was the daily schedule — whether it was at Harvard University in Cambridge; Ahern Middle School in Foxborough; Union Sports Complex in Weymouth; Milton Academy; Nobles and Greenough School in Dedham; Boston College in Chestnut Hill; and The Rivers School in Weston, which is also the alma mater of Patriots safeties coach Steve Belichick.
… Specialization is causing most athletes in other sports to get bigger or faster, but the NBA can’t decide whether it prefers speed or size, so it’s asking big men to do both. The game’s evolution is pushing the most athletic bodies to their logical extremes.
“When you’re big, a lot of times it’s hard to control where each joint is in space,” says Eric Leidersdorf, Director of Biomechanics at Peak Performance Project, or P3. “These guys have such long levers — their femurs, their thighs, their shins. It’s harder for them to control what’s going on at the end of that lever, which is where your knee is, where your ankle is. Those forces are so much bigger simply by being longer.”
Being at PSG has rubbed off on 18-year-old Tim Weah, who is still fine-tuning his game, expects a winter loan and provided the highlight of the night in the USA’s 4-2 loss.
Darcy Norman, the former Head of Performance for AS Roma, believes mindset and communication will be the biggest areas of growth for the industry in the coming months and years.
The American worked for the Italian giants for three years before exiting in June, and is now Director of Performance Science for Kitman Labs. Prior to Roma, he held senior positions with both Bayern Munich and the German national team.
“We have enough tech, that is not our limiting factor,” Norman told TGG, “our limiting factor can be the ability to communicate between the different parts of the performance system, which is down to mentality and communication.
… After he put the Penguins through their fifth practice of the week Friday (four, plus a morning skate Thursday), Sullivan had only partial praise for his team.
“It’s hard to assess in a short-term span,” he said when asked if players are complying with his demand for a tighter defensive game.
“What we’re trying to do is become a team that’s more difficult to play against. Did we accomplish that (Thursday) night? In some areas, yes, in other areas, no. I know our team is capable of a much better game.”
Anyone who has worked with sports coaches understands they have competing demands. Not only are they required to devise an overall strategy for the team to execute, but they need to liaise with administrators (e.g. the chairman and the board), sponsors, and media, manage rosters, assistant coaches, and individual athletes (and their unique personalities), and play a key role in the day-to-day planning of technical, tactical (and sometimes) strength and conditioning sessions. There is no doubt that the principles of load management are important for coaches to understand, but coaches are time poor! With all of the athlete monitoring and workload management resources that are available, it is not surprising when coaches exclaim “Just tell me what I need to know!” This article provides a user-friendly guide for practitioners when describing the general purpose of load management to coaches.
The last time you had your blood pressure checked, it was probably at a doctor’s office with a bulky cuff wrapped around your arm. One day soon, perhaps, you will just need a simple stick-on patch on your neck, no bigger than a postage stamp.
Recommended for You
China stands accused of hacking servers used by Apple, Amazon, and others
The first “social network” of brains lets three people transmit thoughts to each other’s heads
Tencent’s AI programs defeat Starcraft’s own AI
New autonomous farm wants to produce food without human workers
Wide-scale US wind power could cause significant warming
That’s the goal of Sheng Xu and his team at the University of California, San Diego, who are working on a patch that can continuously measure someone’s central blood pressure—the pressure of blood coursing beyond your aorta, the artery in your heart that delivers blood to all the different parts of the body. It could make it a lot easier to monitor heart conditions and keep an eye on other vital organs like the liver, lungs, and brain.
The silicon elastomer patch works by sending out ultrasonic waves that penetrate the skin and reflect off the wearer’s tissues and blood. Those reflections are sent back to the sensor, and then to a laptop that processes the blood pressure data (for now, at least, the patch must be wired to a laptop and a power source, too). It is the first known wearable device that can sense deep below the surface of the skin.
… The Eindhoven Marathon is a testing ground for researchers for several years now, Edgar de Veer, director of Golazo, organizer of the Eindhoven Marathon, says. Steven Vos, a professor at the TU/e and lecturer at Fontys Sporthogescholen, mapped out the different types of runners: why does someone run, what are their goals, motives and which needs do runners have? The research is an integral part of the marathon. An app was also developed with which spectators could follow the runners live and in 2008 the very first version of Arion, the smart running sole, was tested, among others by the then mayor. It is De Veers ambition to become the most innovative marathon in the world.
“In the past, anyone who had an innovation was welcomed with open arms. But that’s the last thing you should do, then it becomes so ad hoc and incoherent.” Albers thinks that as a marathon you have to decide what you bring in and what you don’t bring in. “You want to deliver quality with your marathon and with those who bring the innovation into the marathon; they use the runners.” Together with De Veer, Albers developed a long-term vision. The basis for this comes from his first experience as medical coordinator of the marathon. During that edition, he never saw so many runners go flat out because they didn’t drink enough. “I was on the front page of the newspaper that Monday, I had an infusion in my hand. It was that edition very warm and a lot of runners became unwell. There were some runners with a spastic paralysis, a weak paralysis, I saw a lot of things from the side. It was terrible.”
Kids these days: they have so many options when it comes to sports. There are organized travel teams, it seems, for every game: soccer, lacrosse, hoops, the works. While a child’s decision about which sport to play might not be as formative as, say, picking a college, it can sure feel that way. And potentially cost as much: fees and travel expenses for some club teams skyrocket to $10,000 per year and beyond.
In trying to navigate today’s youth sports scene, any guidance helps. That’s why a new tool released Thursday by the Aspen Institute’s Sports & Society Program, called the Healthy Sport Index, couldn’t be more timely. The handy website allows families to weigh three factors in deciding what sport makes the most sense: safety, physical activity, and the sport’s psychosocial benefits. The index then provides a customized ranking of ten sports, based on where a child lands on a sliding scale of “low emphasis” to “high emphasis” for each of the three factors.
Stem cells can now be produced in the lab, but how are they being used? Do they really have the potential to transform medicine? In this Dose of Science, find out what’s happening in stem cell research today!
… As club football hits pause for the international break, we’ve dug through the academy graduate lists of Europe’s teams and plotted out what their best XIs might resemble if they could only use their own.
In an effort to ensure we feature largely recognisable names, our criteria is fairly loose: To qualify, a player must only have spent two years at the club in question before the age of 21.
England coach Gareth Southgate said the Premier League’s early start was a factor in some of his players lacking sharpness or suffering from injury and questioned why the season began less than a month after the World Cup final.
Data is pored over by coaches and staff of the Orlando Magic on a regular basis. They’ll dissect how far a player runs during practice, how quickly that player accelerates and decelerates, how his performance changes as the workout goes along, biometric measurements like his heartbeat or when his workload is particularly heavy.
The charts and graphs are detailed and precise.
But how it’ll help the Magic win, that’s still an unknown.
The web of coaching connections in the NFL is nearly endless. “When you’re an assistant and you’ve been on a few staffs, you’re on all kinds of trees,” former 49ers and Lions head coach Steve Mariucci said. “It’s a forest.” But through the branches, every coach can point to one head coach who’s most responsible for helping him land one of the league’s 32 coveted positions. Here’s a look at the connections of the NFL’s current head coaches, as well as the main branches from which they came.