… The numbers Griffin piled up in Detroit’s 4-2 start would suggest his focus was indeed where it should be going into Wednesday night’s visit to Brooklyn. Drawing conclusions at such an early stage of the season can be foolhardy, but Griffin wasn’t merely averaging 27.7 points, 10.8 rebounds and 4.3 assists. He was averaging 90.3 touches per game, tops in the N.B.A., ahead of Russell Westbrook (89.5) and James Harden (88.5).
Dwane Casey, the Pistons’ new coach, vowed to let Griffin initiate the offense more than any other player, but the extent to which he has made good on that promise was even more eye-catching than Griffin’s first career 50-point game last week. According to Second Spectrum tracking data, Griffin averages more than five minutes of possession per game.
Devin McCourty is now the fastest-tracked ball carrier in football, but the Patriots defense was joking about another player working his legs on McCourty’s 84-yard pick-6 from Monday night in Buffalo.
It was defensive end Adrian Clayborn, who ran nearly step for step with McCourty for the final 30 yards of the play. He didn’t cover as much ground but he had to have been moving fast to keep up with McCourty, who reached a top speed of 22.05 miles per hour on the return, according to the NFL’s Next Gen Stats.
“AC, we think he must have been at 19.5,” McCourty said Wednesday.
… “You just put your head down, keep working and fight for that podium spot,” she said. “So when I finally did get into that third place, I got another level of excitement and just felt really proud of myself in that moment that I kept fighting, even though there’s some rough patches in there.”
Now Flanagan’s career is again at a crossroads. She could attempt to make the team for her fifth Olympics, in Tokyo in 2020. Or she could give in to the temptation to retire, and coach.
Fans of gymnastics love to speculate that Simone Biles, the reigning Olympic all-around champion and by all accounts the best gymnast in the world, could outdo her competition even if her scores suffered from not just one fall—the sport’s greatest error—but several. On Thursday, attempting to secure another world all-around title at this year’s championships in Doha, Qatar, Biles ended up putting this hypothesis to the test. In the meet’s first round, she fell backward after under-rotating a vault that bears her name because, until qualifications, no other woman had ever completed it in international competition. Later, on the beam, Biles failed to land a Barani somersault and barely saved her notorious front pike. (A similar skill had thwarted her during the beam final in Rio two years ago, when she grabbed the apparatus after a shaky front tuck.) Though Biles succeeded on the uneven bars, historically her least favorite event, she landed out of bounds during her floor routine’s stratospheric first tumbling pass, completing her roughest meet since 2013.
Yet sure enough, in Doha, Biles managed to emerge on top, with a record-breaking margin of victory—1.693 points, larger than the gap between second and twelfth place.
… when I turned 39, I finally started to slow: Each marathon got worse. Last year, at age 42, I did a little better than the year before, but the trend line did not look good.
This year, I set a slightly fuzzy goal of two hours plus my age in minutes, a barrier I had never quite broken. I would turn 43 in the summer, which meant I wanted to run a fall marathon in 2:43. As I was beginning to plan, late in the spring, I got an unexpected note from Nike saying that they often connect non-elite runners to elite coaches. Did I want to run the Chicago Marathon under their tutelage in October? Of course I did. And that’s how I set out on a quest to understand the deeper science of running, aging, and performance.
I got on a conference call with three experts—Brett Kirby, a sports scientist with the calm demeanor and seeming wisdom of Obi-Wan; Stephen Finley, a big-hearted coach who nearly made the Olympic trials in the steeplechase; and Joe Holder, a physical trainer and former University of Pennsylvania wide receiver whose other clients include Naomi Campbell.
With a values-based, holistic approach, Princeton Tiger Performance (PTP) integrates strength and conditioning, athletic medicine, sports nutrition, sports psychology, sports science, leadership development, and supportive campus resources.
A unique feature of PTP, which launched this fall and is based in Jadwin Gymnasium, is the values integration at all levels, led by Ford Family Director of Athletics Mollie Marcoux Samaan and her entire “Team around the Team.”
“We believe that values shape behavior, behavior defines culture, and culture drives performance,” Marcoux Samaan said. “PTP reflects our department’s core beliefs, bringing them to life with innovation and vigor.”
Despite a week of tumult, the commission that probed the culture of the Maryland football program still thinks the university has an opportunity to become a nationwide leader in the medical care it delivers to athletes.
“I hope that once the dust settles on these personnel controversies, Maryland addresses what we hope will be the legacy of all of this, which is they became the gold standard for student-athlete health,” said Charles Scheeler, the Baltimore attorney who helped lead the commission.
While much of the attention last week focused on high-profile and controversial personnel maneuverings — the firing of football coach DJ Durkin and the planned retirement of Wallace D. Loh, the university president — Maryland also agreed to take action on the commission’s many recommendations, which include an overhaul of its medical model, effectively putting many health decisions in the hands of medical professionals who are not employed by the school’s athletic department.
Steve Kerr, the coach of the Golden State Warriors, decided at the start of last season to emphasize to his players just how much they would need to grind to reach a fourth straight N.B.A. finals. He painted a fairly bleak picture of the road ahead, drawing on his own experiences as a player with the Chicago Bulls to illustrate the challenges.
His intentions were good. He wanted to guard against complacency. He wanted his team to be mentally prepared. But in hindsight, he said, it was probably a big mistake.
“This year, we haven’t talked about that at all,” Kerr said. “We’re just talking more about enjoying the process, enjoying every day, every game.”
… Youth sports organizations are increasingly reporting scenarios in which parents yell, threaten or physically assault coaches, referees, players or other parents. A 2017 study from the National Association of Sports Officials, which represents youth, amateur, college and professional sports, found that 40 percent of officials named parents as the source of unsportsmanlike behavior.
“At our office, there is not a week that goes by that we don’t get video from parents of an 8-year-old playing soccer or football and the parent wants us to look at the call,” said Barry Mano, the president and founder of NASO.
Sports psychologists are now trying to better understand why a growing number of parents are becoming increasingly emotionally overinvested in their children’s athletics. They cite several reasons some parents take their child’s swim meet or soccer match very seriously.
bioRxiv; Akira Wiberg, Gwenaelle Douaud, Michael Ng, Yasser Al Omran, Fidel Alfaro-Almagro, Jonathan Marchini, David L Bennett, Stephen Smith, Dominic Furniss from
Background: The skew in distribution of handedness is a uniquely human trait, and has fascinated researchers for centuries. The heritability of handedness is estimated at 25%, but defining genetic variants contributing to this trait has so far proved elusive. Methods: We performed GWAS of self-reported handedness in UK Biobank, a prospective cohort study of ~500,000 individuals. Furthermore, we investigated correlations between our associated SNPs and brain imaging-derived phenotypes (IDPs) from >9,000 individuals in UK Biobank, as well as between self-reported handedness and IDPs. Results: Our association study of 38,322 left-handers vs 356,567 right-handers (excluding ambidextrous participants) revealed three genome-wide significant loci (rs199512, 17q21.31, p=4.1×10-9; rs45608532, 22q11.22, p=1.4×10-8; rs13017199, 2q34, p=3.3×10-8). In the imaging study, we found strong associations between rs199512 and diffusion MRI measures mainly in white matter tracts connecting language-related brain regions (p<2.0x10-6). Direct investigation between handedness and IDPs revealed numerous associations with functional connectivity between the same language-related areas of the brain. A second GWAS of non- right handers (n=44,631) vs right-handers (n=356,567) revealed an additional locus: rs3094128, 6p21.33, p=2.9x10-8. Three of the four associated loci (2q34, 17q21.31, 6p21.33) contain genes that encode microtubule-related proteins that are highly expressed in the brain: MAP2, MAPT and TUBB. These genes are strongly implicated in the pathogenesis of diseases that are known to affect an excess of left-handed people, including schizophrenia. Conclusions: This is the first GWAS to identify genome-wide significant loci for human handedness in the general population, and the genes at these loci have biological plausibility in contributing to neurodevelopmental lateralization of brain organisation, which appears to predispose both to left-handedness and to certain neurodegenerative and psychiatric diseases.
To investigate lower-limb muscle function during sidestep cutting, prior studies have analysed electromyography (EMG) data together with three dimensional motion analysis. Such an approach does not directly quantify the biomechanical role of individual lower-limb muscles during a sidestep cut. This study recorded three dimensional motion analysis, ground reaction force (GRF) and EMG data for eight healthy males executing an unanticipated sidestep cut. Using a musculoskeletal modelling approach, muscle function was determined by computing the muscle contributions to the GRFs and lower-limb joint moments. We found that bodyweight support (vertical GRF) was primarily provided by the vasti, gluteus maximus, soleus and gastrocnemius. These same muscles, along with the hamstrings, were also primarily responsible for modulating braking and propulsion (anteroposterior GRF). The vasti, gluteus maximus and gluteus medius were the key muscles for accelerating the centre-of-mass towards the desired cutting direction by generating a medially-directed GRF. Our findings have implications for designing retraining programs to improve sidestep cutting technique.
Research in football for a long time has focused on the physical nature of fatigue as opposed to its mental aspects. However, since 2016, six original articles have investigated the effects of induced mental fatigue in football on isolated physical, skill and decision-making performance tests, along with physical, technical and tactical performance outcomes in small-sided games. Whilst these studies have overall shown a negative impact of mental fatigue on task performance, this current opinion aims to critically examine the methodological approach to this problem, most notably the lack of ecological validity when inducing mental fatigue and the present approach to measuring mental fatigue using visual analogue scales (VAS). It is suggested that future research on mental fatigue in football may benefit from the use of surveys/interviews to understand the true cognitive demands of elite football players. Additionally, future research should aim to reduce the reliance on using VAS to measure mental fatigue as results from this tool may be confounded by several response biases. In conclusion, this article highlights the need for mentally fatiguing tasks that adequately represent football-associated mental fatigue and assessments of mental fatigue that minimise the confounding effect of response bias.
… Ankle injuries are among the top five most common in the sport and according to an NCAA study, football players are nearly 7 times more likely to be injured during a game than in practice.
So [Mike] Bean started brainstorming and came up with the TayCo brace.
“There was always a lot of braces you could wear that would go inside the shoe. They served a purpose and they worked but generally they weren’t very comfortable,” Bean said. “You had to go to a bigger size shoe, or you had to modify the shoe you were wearing.”
The TayCo brace fits on the outside of the shoe, so the athlete can wear his normal cleat.
Sports science and medicine need specialists to solve the challenges that arise with injury data. In the sports injury field, it is important to be able to optimise injury data to quantify injury occurrences, understand their aetiology and most importantly, prevent them. One of these specialty professions is that of Sports Biostatistician. The aim of this paper is to describe the emergent field of Sports Biostatistics and its relevance to injury prevention. A number of important issues regarding this profession and the science of sports injury prevention are highlighted. There is a clear need for more multidisciplinary teams that incorporate biostatistics, epidemiology and public health in the sports injury area.
The aim was to objectively identify key performance indicators in professional soccer that influence outfield players’ league status using an artificial neural network. Mean technical performance data were collected from 966 outfield players’ (mean SD; age: 25 ± 4 yr, 1.81 ±) 90-minute performances in the English Football League. ProZone’s MatchViewer system and online databases were used to collect data on 347 indicators assessing the total number, accuracy and consistency of passes, tackles, possessions regained, clearances and shots. Players were assigned to one of three categories based on where they went on to complete most of their match time in the following season: group 0 (n = 209 players) went on to play in a lower soccer league, group 1 (n = 637 players) remained in the Football League Championship, and group 2 (n = 120 players) consisted of players who moved up to the English Premier League. The models created correctly predicted between 61.5% and 78.8% of the players’ league status. The model with the highest average test performance was for group 0 v 2 (U21 international caps, international caps, median tackles, percentage of first time passes unsuccessful upper quartile, maximum dribbles and possessions gained minimum) which correctly predicted 78.8% of the players’ league status with a test error of 8.3%. To date, there has not been a published example of an objective method of predicting career trajectory in soccer. This is a significant development as it highlights the potential for machine learning to be used in the scouting and recruitment process in a professional soccer environment. [full text]