… Late last month, Francis Jacobs signed a professional contract with USL Championship side Orange County SC, and it raises the usual questions. What’s the rush? And what efforts are being made to make sure that Jacobs stays on track and doesn’t end up going down the route of Adu and other talented teenagers before him?
The Simone Biles that captivated national primetime TV on Sunday might not have existed if she didn’t change her mind back in 2016. The double-double. The triple-double. The voice for accountability and change in her troubled sport. All gone.
Aimee Boorman, Biles’ coach from age 7 through the 2016 Olympics, decided before the Rio Games that, post-Olympics, she would move from the Biles family gym in Texas to an executive director position at Evo Athletics in Florida. Biles would not be following her.
At one point, “I didn’t think she was going to come back,” after Rio, Boorman recalled Sunday by phone from Florida, “because she was saying she didn’t want to come back.”
Team USA, USA Triathlon Magazine, A.C. Shilton from
… this story begins back in 2008, when ITU and USA Triathlon Hall-of-Famer Barb Lindquist hatched the idea of a Collegiate Recruitment Program.
“Every year [at USA Triathlon], we’d have to write our goals. So, in 2008 one of my goals was to figure out how, if someone wanted to methodically recruit runners and swimmers, they’d go about doing that,” she says. Her boss loved the idea. “He asked me, do you want to make this your job?”
Phase one of the plan was simple: Reach out to collegiate track coaches and ask if they had stars who also happened to know how to swim. Word got around to Chris Fox, the Syracuse University cross country coach. He reported back that he had just one such athlete. Her name was Katie Hursey, and she was currently ruling on the track in steeplechase.
“If I could have every runner we recruit be a steeplechase athlete, I would. They’re a little bit mongrel. Their hips are stronger; they’re not afraid of getting their shoes wet; they can be more resilient,” says Lindquist.
Researchers from Flinders University and the University of Helsinki collaborated with Finnish company, Polar, to compare the sleeping habits of 17,335 people wearing fitness trackers to measure their 14 day sleep patterns.
As published in Sleep Medicine, they looked at sleep duration, sleep midpoint and weekend catch up for participants aged 16 to 30.
Flinders professor Michael Gradisar, PhD, says the study indicates differences in sleep durations shift dramatically throughout adolescence and stabilize near 30 years of age around the world.
Single-sport athletes who specialize in baseball at a young age may have a greater predisposition to overuse injury, burnout, and decreased career longevity when compared with multiple-sport athletes. The effect of sport specialization has not been studied in professional baseball players. Hypothesis:
Major League Baseball (MLB) players who played multiple sports in high school would experience fewer injuries, spend less time on the disabled list, play more games, and have a longer career than athletes who played only baseball in high school. Study Design:
Descriptive epidemiology study. Methods:
First- and second-round MLB draft picks from 2008 to 2016 who played in at least 1 professional game were included in this study. Athletes who participated in 1 or more sports in addition to baseball during high school were considered multisport athletes, and athletes who participated in only baseball were considered single-sport athletes. For each athlete, participation in high school sports, injuries sustained in MLB and Minor League Baseball, number of days on the disabled list for each injury, number of games played in both leagues, and whether the athlete was still active were collected from publicly available records. Results:
A total of 746 athletes were included in this study: 240 (32%) multisport and 506 (68%) single sport. Multisport athletes played in significantly more mean total games (362.8 vs 300.8; P < .01) as well as more mean MLB games (95.9 vs 71.6; P = .04) than single-sport athletes. There was no difference in the mean number of seasons played in the major leagues (1.8 vs 1.6; P = .15) or minor league (5.25 vs 5.20; P = .23) between multisport and single-sport athletes. Single-sport athletes had a significantly higher prevalence of upper extremity injuries compared with multisport athletes (136 [63%] vs 55 [50%]; P = .009). Single-sport pitchers also had a higher prevalence of shoulder and elbow injuries (86 vs 27; P = .008) and were more likely to have recurrent elbow injuries (33% vs 17% recurrence; P = .002) compared with multisport pitchers.
Conclusion:
Professional baseball players who participated in multiple sports in high school played in more major league games and experienced lower rates of upper and lower extremity injuries than players who played only baseball in high school.
… It’s an important moment in “fitness tech.” Apple pivoted its watch toward health applications with huge success. FitBit—I’m a well-documented FitBit fanatic: Ask me about my sleep and resting heart rate next time your see me—is struggling. (FitBit was the steady hero of my 2015 feature on Jawbone, but four-plus years is an eternity in the hardware business.) And Garmin, the pride and joy of Olathe, Kansas’s technology industry, is killing it.
With the NFL season just around the corner, hundreds of athletes are getting prepared. Players range from humongous linemen who sacrifice speed for strength; to defensive backs with incredible speed — but stereotypically bad hands — to wide receivers who are quick, agile, and can pluck a ball out of the air with the greatest of ease. One important measure of a player’s speed is the 40-yard dash, with a 4.4 second time considered excellent, and a few who can even run faster. In celebration of the upcoming season, software/hardware collective “Flopperam” decided to make their own DIY run timer.
Imagine if a coach could know which moments of competition a certain player might peak, or if a truck driver had objective data telling him his body and mind were too tired to continue driving.
Traditionally, measuring alertness or mental fatigue requires interrupting a natural moment to intervene in an artificial setting. But Penn neuroscientist Michael Platt and postdoc Arjun Ramakrishnan have created a tool to use outside the lab, a wearable technology that monitors brain activity and sends back data without benching a player or asking a trucker to pull over.
For the work they wanted to do, Ramakrishnan (above) and Platt sought a high-quality, portable EEG that, once in place, didn’t disturb the user. When they weren’t satisfied with what was available commercially, they built one themselves.
The platform is akin to a Fitbit for the brain, with a set of silicon and silver nanowire sensors embedded into a head covering like a headband, helmet, or cap. The device, a portable electroencephalogram (EEG), is intentionally unobtrusive to allow for extended wear, and, on the backend, powerful algorithms decode the brain signals the sensors collect.
The Houston Texans are doing whatever they can to stay cool during training camp. Their new Cooling Tank keeps things a chilly 35 degrees, and players get up to 3 minutes to cool off before getting back on the field.
However, is it safe to do so?
The Texans call it the CRZ or Cooling Recovery Zone. Players love it, saying it stops them from overheating and they can regroup in the middle of practice.
… In an exclusive interview with The Sun-Herald, [Bennet] Omalu predicted contact sports such as NFL and rugby league will soon cease to exist altogether due to the human costs associated with concussions.
“We are dealing with human life here,” Omalu said from his home in California. “In the next generation or two, mankind won’t be playing sports like rugby or football or ice hockey or mixed martial arts.
“It just doesn’t make sense to be damaging the brain of a human being. In a game like rugby, in every play there is a blow or impact to the head. The human species evolves, it’s part of who we are to change. Society evolves, we move forward.”
It’s been four years since nanotechnology expert Eric Tulsky quit his day job developing electric vehicle batteries in California and moved his family to North Carolina to launch an entirely different career.
Then-Carolina Hurricanes general manager Ron Francis, now with Seattle’s NHL franchise, had employed Tulsky part-time for a season as a long-distance hockey analytics consultant but wanted to make him a full-time data analyst heading up a department devoted to statistics-crunching. For Tulsky, who’d grown up a Flyers fan in Philadelphia before launching the Outnumbered hockey analytics website, it was a risky move into a field the NHL had only started embracing.
“We anguished about it for a bit because it’s not an easy thing to leave a career and a bunch of training you’ve put into it,’’ said Tulsky, 44, who holds a Bachelor of Arts in chemistry and physics from Harvard and a doctorate in chemistry from UC-Berkeley. “But it seemed like a good opportunity, so we moved out there. And that was four years ago.’’
Alyssa Naeher represented the United States at both the 2015 Women’s World Cup and 2016 Olympics, but watched both tournaments from the bench. Before taking over as the U.S. Women’s National Team’s starting goalkeeper in the fall of 2016, Naeher had made just seven career appearances for the U.S.
But even though she wasn’t seeing the field with the national team, Naeher was still growing and developing as a goalkeeper by playing competitive games on a weekly basis in the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL). And that was instrumental in helping her prepare to step into the spotlight at the 2019 Women’s World Cup this summer.