Seattle Seahawks’ wide receiver Doug Baldwin is likely to have more surgeries that will affect him playing on the field this season. Baldwin has been plagued by injuries in his last three years, but this surgery may be a sports hernia surgery. After last season, Baldwin underwent knee and shoulder surgeries and head coach Pete Carroll has been optimistic about Baldwin’s return.”He’s making progress, working at it hard. He’s working at the facility regularly,” Carroll said.
When Baldwin is on the field, he is a threat to defenders. He is not a speedy player, but he does enough to get open and catches the ball consistently. While Baldwin is underrated as one of the best wide receivers in the game today, he does a lot for the Seahawks. He is a great blocker and a player that works hard on his craft. Majority of the Seahawks’ success is written in the hands of Baldwin, but last season was stressful for him. “This year has been hell,” Baldwin said. “This year has been absolute hell. I’ve been … oh my goodness. We don’t have enough time for that. It’s been hell. But I’m so grateful to be healthy enough to be on the field with my teammates to celebrate victories and just enjoying playing football again, just like a kid.”
… He’s playing so well that all of a sudden his national team coach Berhalter has an interesting problem: He designed a U.S. tactical plan that had Adams as one of its component parts, playing a specialty hybrid right back/center midfield role that Berhalter unveiled with his first friendlies in charge of the team, though with San Jose Earthquakes’ Nick Lima in the role.
When Berhalter designed the role, just a few months ago, Adams was a bright young talent. But Adams is now showing that he’s one of the very best midfielders in one of the best leagues in the world, age be damned. And this hybrid role, while clever, may risk marginalizing a player the U.S. might need to build a team around.
For Kristaps Porzingis, the most difficult part of sticking to the plan for his comeback comes when he steps into his closet before heading to the arena for Dallas Mavericks games.
“Oh my god, that’s the hardest thing for me to wake up on game days, go through shootaround with the team and then have to pick a suit to wear for the game,” Porzingis told ESPN in his most extensive sit-down interview since the New York Knicks traded him to Dallas in early February. “I’m like, ‘I don’t want to do this anymore.’ It’s the toughest thing for me. I hate my suits. Not that I hate the suits, but I hate picking them for the game day.
“It’s so weird that I’m not able to — I am able to, but I’m not playing yet. It’s the game day, and I feel like it’s the game day, but you just pick a suit and you wear it and you’re there. And I try to be in the moment when I’m there with the team and help as much as I can without being able to be on the floor, but it’s very, very, very tough. Tougher than I expected.”
… Cori (Coco) Gauff played her first W.T.A. tour-level match. Gauff is fifteen years old. She is thought by tennis insiders to be the best next-next-generation prospect in Florida. She is coached by her father, Corey, who grew up in South Florida and played basketball for Georgia State. He and his wife, Candi, who ran track for Florida State, moved the family to Florida from Atlanta when Gauff was in second grade. By the age of eight, she was attracting tennis-world attention, winning the “Little Mo” Internationals, in Palm Beach Gardens. (The competition is named for Maureen (Little Mo) Connolly Brinker, who won nine Grand Slam singles titles, in the early fifties.) Two years ago, Gauff became the youngest player ever to reach the girls’ final at the U.S. Open. Last summer, she became one of the youngest players ever to win the French Open girls’ title. On Thursday, Gauff stepped onto tiny Court 7 at the Miami Open, with Corey and Candi there in the first row of bleachers to cheer her on. Patrick Mouratoglou, who coaches Serena Williams, sat with them. Gauff has trained with him, at his academy in the South of France, and there will come a time, if things unfold as they tend to do for young tennis phenoms, when Gauff’s father will bring on a seasoned coach of top pros to aid in his daughter’s development.
… Several Edgerton natives who interned with Helland are now coaches at the Division I level.
Brendon Ziegler is the assistant athletics director/director of sport performance at Cal State Bakersfield. He was hired in 2011, after spending several years at Oregon State, as the Roadrunners’ first strength and conditioning coach.
Tyler Dobratz is in his second season with the Chattanooga Mocs in Tennessee. Dobratz, who played tight end at University of Dubuque after graduating from Edgerton, is the assistant director of athletic performance and works with Chattanooga’s men’s basketball, women’s golf and men’s tennis teams.
Another Edgerton grad, Kyle Johnson, is an assistant director of speed, strength and conditioning at Coastal Carolina.
England manager Gareth Southgate says he will take inspiration from Sir Alex Ferguson as he attempts to get the best out of teenagers Jadon Sancho and Callum Hudson-Odoi.
The 18-year-olds impressed in Friday’s 5-0 European Championship qualifying win over the Czech Republic.
Ferguson handled young players at Manchester United with care, limiting their game time and public exposure.
“I always think of Sir Alex with Ryan Giggs,” said Southgate.
Sportsnet.ca, Big Reads, Shi Davidi and Ben Nicholson-Smith from
Young baseball players are seeking instructional info from a wide variety of sources, and MLB is being forced to catch up. So, coaches who speak the language of analytics are more in demand than ever.
… It can be easy to have that impression about players because we have a tendency to equate “Major Leagues” with “finished product.” It’s a reasonable enough assumption — after all, how often does one reach the pinnacle of their profession and then get drastically better? The thing about that thought, though, is it assumes that peaks are static. Realistically, “player development doesn’t stop. It’s not a minor league thing,” [Sam] Fuld says.
The sentiment becomes easier to appreciate when remembering how more data seems to flow into baseball decision-making every day. But it’s important to distinguish the role that data has. Just existing doesn’t mean it’s going to jumpstart progress. Talking about it doesn’t mean it’s going to be applied correctly. Buying into it doesn’t mean you know exactly what’s going to happen, because “for every action, there is often some sort of unintended consequence,” tells Fuld. He continued:
“[I]f we’re trying to get someone to throw his dominant slider more often, maybe throwing it more will make him lose feel for one of his other pitches. Or if we tell a hitter that he should look for fastballs in the lower half of the zone because that’s where he does most of his damage, this might make him more susceptible to breaking balls down out of the zone because that’s where his sights have changed to.
… Michel Anteby, associate professor of organizational behavior and sociology at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business, relates a rather chilling tale of employee monitoring. In a study he started in 2011 and reported in 2018, he tracked the experiences and resistance strategies of security screening personnel subject to CCTV surveillance at a large urban airport. Ironically, the U.S. Transportation Security Administration (TSA) that employed the personnel and set up the surveillance to strengthen managerial control of employee theft and reassure the vast majority of employees that they were not responsible for theft, ended up with a disillusioned workforce that felt a sense of visibility of behavior, but a lack of management notice as individuals. This led the staff to engage in invisibility practices in an attempt to go unseen and remain unnoticed.
Emerging technology has created a new doping technique for athletic performance that is, as of now, perfectly legal.
Coined “neuro-doping,” this method sends electric current through one’s brain to facilitate quicker learning, enhanced muscular strength, and improved coordination. Use of this electronic stimulus has taken off in the sports world as a replacement for other doping methods banned by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA). Because it’s relatively new, WADA has yet to establish rules around neuro-doping. Plus, it’s virtually undetectable. Naturally, a lot of athletes are taking advantage of it.
… Last month, two new studies were published that found significant improvements in athletic performance—one running, one cycling—using Halo’s brain-stimulation headphones. Both studies are small, and both leave some questions unanswered. But as brain stimulation drifts toward mainstream, it’s worth taking a look at the new findings.
When you run a weak electric current—typically about 2 milliamps, hundreds of times smaller than what’s used in electroconvulsive therapy—through your brain, it alters the excitability of the affected neurons, making them a little more likely to fire during the hour or so after brain stimulation.
… “He’s still just as competitive as ever,” longtime Epstein lieutenant and Cubs general manager Jed Hoyer said. “He’s still a baseball rat at his core. He still relates to all sorts of people exceptionally well and has an IQ and EQ [emotional quotient] that’s off the charts.”
Hoyer and other colleagues paint a picture of the Cubs being the beneficiary of Epstein’s decade run in Boston. Back then, he was simply the “smartest guy in the room,” but by the time he came to the Chicago, he could add a world of experience to his résumé. It has taken him to another level in terms of leadership.
“It’s been fun for me to see the difference in him from then until now, because in Boston, he was figuring it out,” Hoyer said. “Most people can’t figure it out on the job, in a big media market, and now in Chicago, he knows himself better. He knows how to be a leader, and he knows what he’s looking for in people around him.”
… “Personally, I’m pretty skeptical about how it could work,” one NBA front office and analytics staffer told Forbes. “Because of the different camera angles you get in college arenas, it makes it really difficult to teach a computer how to consistently recognize things. But if it works, that’s super valuable.”
Analytics personnel around the NBA believe AutoSTATS could be useful if past games are back-logged, which they believe will be the case. Eventually, subscribers will be able to utilize a library of data similar to what SportVu provides the NBA, but for current and former college players.
But that’s not where AutoSTATS’ reach ends.
What’s more groundbreaking is the possibility of using the artificial intelligence for player evaluation. According to a release from Business Wire, AutoSTATS will utilize a product called OpenPose which “unlocks new layers of body-pose information, providing a deeper quality of player tracking data like body position, shot form, torque, and other aspects of the game.”
The infrared dot zips across the oversized screen in the Alabama quarterbacks meeting room with impressive quickness and precision.
It makes stops at several points, landing on the backs of Alabama defenders’ Crimson jerseys, just before the snap of several plays against Oklahoma in the national semifinal. The man in control of the beam is a man that is always on the beam. He’s in one of his comfort zones.
Bill Belichick, clad in a brand-spanking-new Alabama sweat shirt, is sitting in the front row of this mini amphitheater, ticking off the names and classes of all the players as they move through their motions.
… On the absolutely highest level of any sport or business, there are periods of time where you will need to work almost around the clock for your team or company to reach its objectives. Benjamin Franklin said it well, “Failing to prepare is preparing for failure” and that is not an option if you want to win tomorrow.
I remember from last summers WFA Pro course that one of the delegates shared to us his conversation with a coach who was currently at a World Cup team. This coach said that this scenario describes exactly what it’s like, working 20 hour days for multiple days in a row.
He went on to say that without having been a part of such a demanding education system as the World Football Academy in the past he would not have been able to perform at the level he did at the World Cup. In other words this coach put our metaphorical context into a very real context from the absolute top level in sports.