… “It’s been an interesting season,” Carleton told Pro Soccer USA. “I had a couple of slip-ups – if you want to call them that. It’s something that you learn from. As a young player, you try to get the most out of those things and learn from it. I’m just trying to work hard and get back to a place where I’m fighting for minutes with the first team.”
Carleton seems to be back in that spot now. On Tuesday, he made the 18-man roster for Atlanta United’s U.S. Open Cup semifinal against rival Orlando City SC. And in the 49th minute, manager Frank de Boer called his number, subbing in the kid fans nicknamed “the Frosted Orange” for Ezequiel Barco.
… So we got straight to it. Did the Warriors mishandle the injury?
Durant slowly straightened up with a perplexed expression on his face.
“Hell, no. How can you blame [the Warriors]? Hell, no,” Durant told Yahoo Sports. “I heard the Warriors pressured me into getting back. Nobody never said a word to me during rehab as I was coming back. It was only me and [director of sports medicine and performance] Rick [Celebrini] working out every day. Right when the series started, I targeted Game 5. Hell, nah. It just happened. It’s basketball. S— happens. Nobody was responsible for it. It was just the game. We just need to move on from that s— because I’m going to be back playing.”
… “When I took the job … it was the beginning of a cycle, and now I feel like this is the end of a cycle,” Ellis said. “I know the Olympics is very close, but that begins another cycle, if that makes sense. I think the timing is now. … I mean, 5 1/2 years is kind of a long time in this job, which has been great and such a privilege. But I didn’t give much consideration to coaching next year.”
Ellis likely could have stayed on through Tokyo, but decided to give a head start to her successor. She had a few words of advice for whoever steps into her large shoes.
“It’s a roller coaster. Put your seatbelt on,” Ellis said with a grin. “Enjoy the ride, because you’re going to expect highs and lows. It’s the wave analogy. It’s the trough and the crest. You can’t have a beautiful ocean without both of those. You can’t have this journey without all the highs and lows.”
TwinCities.com, St. Paul Pioneer-Press, Andy Greeder from
Matias Almeyda had reasons to say no.
The San Jose Earthquakes coach had just lost 3-1 to Minnesota United in a big Western Conference match in early July when Loons coach Adrian Heath invited him to have a drink in the coaches’ lounge within Allianz Field.
Almeyda, an Argentine with a coaching career for clubs in Buenos Aires and Mexico, was caught off guard by the Englishman’s gesture. But he was willing to meet.
An hour later, Almeyda told Heath through a Spanish translation that he planned to reciprocate the meeting when United travels to California next season. But with one caveat: Almeyda wants to provide a famous Malbec from Argentina’s wine region of Mendoza.
PLOS One; Thomas A. Haugen, Felix Breitschädel, Stephen Seiler from
Purpose
The main aim of this investigation was to quantify differences in sprint mechanical variables across sports and within each sport. Secondary aims were to quantify sex differences and relationships among the variables. Methods
In this cross-sectional study of elite athletes, 235 women (23 ± 5 y and 65 ± 7 kg) and 431 men (23 ± 4 y and 80 ± 12 kg) from 23 different sports (including 128 medalists from World Championships and/or Olympic Games) were tested in a 40-m sprint at the Norwegian Olympic Training Center between 1995 and 2018. These were pre-existing data from quarterly or semi-annual testing that the athletes performed for training purposes. Anthropometric and speed-time sprint data were used to calculate the theoretical maximal velocity, horizontal force, horizontal power, slope of the force-velocity relationship, maximal ratio of force, and index of force application technique. Results
Substantial differences in mechanical profiles were observed across sports. Athletes in sports in which sprinting ability is an important predictor of success (e.g., athletics sprinting, jumping and bobsleigh) produced the highest values for most variables, whereas athletes in sports in which sprinting ability is not as important tended to produce substantially lower values. The sex differences ranged from small to large, depending on variable of interest. Although most of the variables were strongly associated with 10- and 40-m sprint time, considerable individual differences in sprint mechanical variables were observed among equally performing athletes. Conclusions
Our data from a large sample of elite athletes tested under identical conditions provides a holistic picture of the force-velocity-power profile continuum in athletes. The data indicate that sprint mechanical variables are more individual than sport specific. The values presented in this study could be used by coaches to develop interventions that optimize the training stimulus to the individual athlete. [full text]
On Tuesday, Monumental Basketball named Mark Simpson as their Vice President of Player Performance. Simpson comes to D.C. from the Los Angeles Clippers, where he was the Director of Performance. In that role, he managed players’ load management and workout plans.
Simpson, like Monumental Basketball’s Chief of Athlete Care & Performance Daniel Medina, is a European national. Simpson hails from the United Kingdom where he also worked on player conditioning for the British cycling team, according to a news release by Monumental Sports & Entertainment.
Like most coaches in Division I collegiate baseball, those at Oregon State University are keenly interested in game-related data. Statistics have long been essential to the sport, key to understanding each player’s potential impact on any given day.
Yet over the course of the past year or so, as the OSU Beavers — the 2018 national champs — have continued to play and train, this interest has grown into a near obsession. Data is central to coaches’ preparation — and, they believe, key to the team’s success.
“It’s not that the data wasn’t there in the past,” says Tim De Quilettes, IT director for Oregon State University Athletics. “But now we have tools that let them see it more holistically and really dig deep into the analytics.”
De Quilettes, hired by OSU to join its Data and Media Infrastructure Team, has since 2017 divided his attention between “normal IT support work” and what he describes as a departmentwide effort to “revolutionize how technology is used in intercollegiate athletics.”
As part of that initiative, his staff elected to rely on two solutions from Microsoft: Power BI, a cloud-based business analytics service, and SharePoint, an online collaboration platform.
This morning AI-enabled handheld ultrasound startup Exo landed $35 million in Series B funding. The new infusion of cash was led by Intel Capital with participation from Applied Ventures, Bold Capital, Creative Ventures, Longevity Vision Fund, Magnetar Capital, Nautilus Venture Partners, OSF Healthcare, Rising Tide Fund, Sony Innovation Fund and Wanxiang Healthcare Investments.
WHAT THEY DO
The Redwood City, California-based startup is developing a portable ultrasound that is able to create a 3D image. The company is combining nano-materials, sensor technology and advanced signal processing and computation to create the technology.
Collegiate student-athletes often engage in health-risk behaviors such as alcohol misuse and hazing, but the literature in this domain lacks evidence pertaining to how peers shape attitudes towards such behaviors. We investigated how peer acceptance and social cohesion relate to attitudes towards alcohol use, marijuana use, drinking and driving, playing through a concussion, performance enhancing substance use, and hazing. DESIGN:
Cross-sectional survey. METHODS:
Participants were 387 NCAA athletes from 23 intact teams. Multilevel modeling was used to examine the extent that health-risk attitudes clustered within teams and enabled us to disentangle individual-level and group-level effects of peer acceptance and social cohesion. RESULTS:
Intraclass correlation coefficients revealed that health-risk attitudes clustered within teams. At the individual-level, student-athletes who perceived higher levels of peer acceptance, relative to teammates, held riskier attitudes towards alcohol use, playing through a concussion, and hazing. Meanwhile, those who perceived higher levels of social cohesion relative to teammates held less risky attitudes towards playing through a concussion. At the group-level, teams with greater peer acceptance held less risky attitudes towards playing through a concussion, whereas teams with greater social cohesion held riskier attitudes toward playing through a concussion. CONCLUSIONS:
These data indicated that health-risk behaviors may cluster within teams, and that peer acceptance and cohesiveness are differentially associated with attitudes toward risky behavior. Given that peer influence is a multilevel phenomenon, it is prudent that prevention efforts leverage social processes within teams, while reducing pressures to engage in risky behaviors.
Kaiser Health News, The Washington Post, Liz Szabo from
Baseball superstar Max Scherzer — whose back injury has prevented him from pitching for the Washington Nationals since he last played on July 25 — is the latest in a long list of professional athletes to embrace unproven stem cell injections in an attempt to accelerate their recovery.
But many doctors and ethicists worry that pro athletes — who have played a key role in popularizing stem cells — are misleading the public into thinking that the costly, controversial shots are an accepted, approved treatment.
“It sends a signal to all the fans out there that stem cells have more value than they really do,” said Dr. James Rickert, president of the Society for Patient Centered Orthopedics, which advocates for high-quality care. “It’s extremely good PR for the people selling this kind of thing. But there’s no question that this is an unproven treatment.”
… Nutrition has become a critical component in the ongoing arms race that has always existed within major college football. Frankly, Navy had fallen behind the competition in that department.
Athletic director Chet Gladchuk addressed that void this summer by creating a new position as part of Navy’s training staff. Scott Maher was hired in June as assistant athletic director for Dietetics and Sports Performance. [Austin] Talbert-Loving was among many football players who were thrilled to have him come aboard.
Maher provided Talbert-Loving with a special phone application that enabled him to count calories on a daily basis. After two weeks, they got together to review the results.
The California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) announced Thursday that 91,305 high school students played football in 2018, a drop of 3.1 percent from 2017.
That’s down further from the 103,725 kids that played in 2014.
Several weeks ago, we looked at the accuracy of Statcast launch speed (a/k/a “exit velocity”) measurements, and some of the stadium effects that might be confounding those measurements. Today we’ll move on to launch angle.
arXiv, Statistics > Applications; Tom Decroos, Lotte Bransen, Jan Van Haaren, Jesse Davis from
Assessing the impact of the individual actions performed by soccer players during games is a crucial aspect of the player recruitment process. Unfortunately, most traditional metrics fall short in addressing this task as they either focus on rare actions like shots and goals alone or fail to account for the context in which the actions occurred. This paper introduces (1) a new language for describing individual player actions on the pitch and (2) a framework for valuing any type of player action based on its impact on the game outcome while accounting for the context in which the action happened. By aggregating soccer players’ action values, their total offensive and defensive contributions to their team can be quantified. We show how our approach considers relevant contextual information that traditional player evaluation metrics ignore and present a number of use cases related to scouting and playing style characterization in the 2016/2017 and 2017/2018 seasons in Europe’s top competitions. [full text]