In an unlikely turn of events, New Orleans moved up from the seventh spot to the top of this year’s NBA draft lottery Tuesday night, earning the right to select Zion Williamson, the consensus No. 1 pick, in next month’s NBA draft. Now the intrigue begins around whether Williamson’s presence can convince star center Anthony Davis with the team.
Williamson is tailor made for the NBA, a league that prioritizes layups and trips to the free throw line, two of the most-efficient shots a player can attempt. He uses his 6-foot-7, 285-pound frame to muscle his way to the rim, where he uses either a floater at different angles and heights to get around defenders or simply bull rushes his way to highlight-reel worthy dunks that few can stop. And those unfortunate enough to take a charge from Williamson are hit with a force similar to that of a “head-on collision with a Jeep traveling 10 miles per hour,” University of Lynchburg physicist Eric Goff told the Wall Street Journal.
… They’re very proud of McNeil at Burnley, because he’s a standard bearer for the most upwardly mobile Academy in English football; a player who shows prospective players and parents what can be achieved.
Technical Director Mike Rigg told TGG: “Youth development is about getting players through to your first team, and Dwight has shown the way our club should be doing that. With Dwight having been such an amazing success this year and how he has been developed, that shows what makes this Academy so important.”
At this point it’s important to re-iterate the fact that McNeil trained with Manchester United until he was 14 but, still, Burnley recognised his talent, developed him and gave him a sustained opportunity in their first team.
The sobs were audible. Chubby tear-stained cheeks visible via Skype. On her first of many lonely nights at 10 Rue de Poissy, in an apartment 10 miles west of Paris, long before she became a reticent U.S. national team star, an 18-year-old girl from Colorado called her mom and cried.
It was September of 2012 when Lindsey Horan first wondered what the hell she had done. Months earlier, she had barged into her mother’s bedroom at a similarly nocturnal hour, flicked on the lights, and revealed the biggest decision of her life. She had turned down the most prestigious college scholarship in women’s soccer. Turned down a well-worn path to USWNT stardom, and instead chosen an untrodden one, all because of a dream. So in late August, to fulfill it, Horan flew an ocean and half a continent away from home, to a sprawling European metropolis, its culture and intricacies capable of swallowing up even the most mature foreign teenager. She was there to do something no American woman had ever done: Play soccer, professionally, straight out of high school. For PSG. On a six-figure contract.
But before she could, not two weeks into her trailblazing adventure, the club moved her out of a host family’s house, into the apartment on Rue de Poissy. And with her first evening alone winding down, she came to a problematic realization.
… “When players are not willing to work as hard in training, or to look after their bodies, or to give everything in a game, that’s going to affect fitness and results. When Paul Lambert suggested some players weren’t fit enough he was bang on. It wasn’t anything that hadn’t been discussed a season before though.”
At the same time as a new profile of player was coming in, there also started to be a ‘safety first’ approach to training, Roden says, with players being protected too much by the medical team, rather than pushed by the sports scientists.
“Sometimes it can be a battle between the sports science and medical teams at a club, with the manager in the middle,” he says. “That’s why it’s good to have an overarching Head of Performance who oversees both, which is what we are starting to see.
Gareth Southgate fears that only 15% of players in the Premier League will be eligible for England in a decade’s time unless clubs give more opportunities to home-grown players.
Southgate also urged English football not to become complacent amid the dominance of its clubs in Europe and, in a light-hearted quip, warned that the national side could be overtaken by the “bloody Germans” if people rested on their laurels.
The England manager spoke out after seeing data showing that only 30% of Premier League starting spots were filled by players eligible for England last season, compared with 33.2% in 2017-18.
Vinny Del Negro sat at the head of the table inside a conference room Friday at Quest Multisport. All eyes landed on him.
Hours before action began at the second and final day of the NBA draft combine, Del Negro gathered the 16 coaches — former NBA players in the coaches development program, G League coaches, former WNBA star Sheryl Swoopes — and reviewed the day’s plan. There were drills to lead, games to coach.
“We’re trying to help these young kids become better players,” Del Negro said of the close to 70 combine attendees.
Kiki VanDeWeghe, the NBA’s vice president of basketball operations, asked Del Negro to serve as the combine director this year. The job involves overseeing coaches, helping assemble teams and formulating strategies.
Juergen Klopp says he will fill the three-week gap before the Champions League final against Tottenham Hotspur by putting his Liverpool players through a two-week “pre-season”.
… Velocity-based training, Moffitt said, was studied by sports researchers as early as the 1960s in the Soviet Union.
Back then, power was measured in workouts by using strings and surveys. In the decades that followed, modernized equipment helped bring velocity-based training into the mainstream, but even that technology seems archaic in comparison to what is hanging on the LSU weight rack.
Hardly a foot long and a few inches wide, the camera is connected to a cable box-sized plastic container that has a white logo of an owl on it.
The LSU weight room only has one of these devices, called a “Perch,” while the strength program works through a trial phase with the device’s creators. But the goal is to have 22 fully operational devices by July.
For most people, the term “stiffness” has negative connotations. When you wake up in the morning complaining of a “stiff back,” the remedy might include taking a hot shower, doing some yoga, swallowing aspirin, or visiting a physical therapist to loosen up. Stiffness is typically viewed as unpleasant and can limit one’s physical activities.
Surprisingly, though, for elite athletes like professional basketball players, muscle stiffness is not only something that is necessary, you could say it’s their superpower. As a physical therapist and researcher who works with National Basketball Association players, I’m interested in understanding the key factors that help to minimize injury risk and maximize performance in elite athletes – and understanding stiffness is an important part of that.
Mark Guzdial, Computing Education Research Blog from
I asked a group of social studies educators what programming language(s) they might want to use in their classes. One of the interesting themes in the responses was “the same as what’s in math and science classes.” One teacher said that she didn’t want a “weird hierarchy” where there’s one programming language in STEM and another in “history and English” for fear they’d be seen as “dumbed down.” Another said that maybe teaching JavaScript in history class “would make history cool.”
There’s a belief in this theme that I think is wrong. Learning to program in science class probably won’t transfer without a bunch of work to programming in mathematics class, and programming STEM classes will probably be a very different thing than programming in the humanities classes. Even expert programmers learn to program in a domain, and have a hard time transferring that knowledge of programming between domains. Expertise is expertise in a domain.
Firstbeat Sports, the provider of the most comprehensive internal training load analyses in team sports monitoring, is today launching Firstbeat Sports Sensor and Live app.
The next generation solution brings focus and mobility to coaching by introducing a Sensor utilizing Suunto Movesense technology, and a Live app (for iPad). The Sensor’s in-built memory frees coaches and performance staff from a receiver or laptop during sessions, and an embedded processor ensures load calculations from multiple locations are readily available for post-session analysis.
The Live app introduces the most advanced, and efficient, real-time monitoring experience yet. Coaching staff can now access key load and intensity data – including real-time TRIMP/min for the first time – on the move and upload data with ease.
Two groups of study participants were offered nutritionally identical diets. Those eating ultra-processed foods consumed more calories and gained weight.
Olympique Lyonnais will play for its fourth Women’s Champions League title on Saturday. There may not be a team on earth that can match its talent advantage, or its dominance of its sport.
On January 2, the St. Louis Blues had the worst record in the NHL and there were calls to blow the team up. Now they’ve got a shot at their first Stanley Cup Final in five decades. This is the story of one of the greatest turnarounds in hockey history.