… Right now — keep gaining attention at Fortuna. Next season — get into the squad at Man City, where Ederson is the starter and Claudio Bravo the primary backup. Long-term — success with the U.S. national team on home soil at the 2026 World Cup.
Steffen will be 31 and hopefully at his peak when that tournament comes around.
Hosting the World Cup with Canada and Mexico will be an “amazing opportunity” to grow soccer in the United States, said Steffen, who grew up watching any men’s or women’s national team games he could.
Roger Federer admits he suffered a “bit of a breakdown” during last month’s tour of Mexico and South America after rioting in Colombian capital Bogota forced him to cancel his exhibition match against Germany’s Alexander Zverev.
The 38-year-old’s five-country tour is covered in broadcaster ESPN’s candid documentary ‘Roger Federer: Everywhere is Home’ which will air on Dec. 17.
It charts the 20-time Grand Slam champion’s journey, including the history-making match in Mexico City bullring when a 42,517 delirious fans watched him take on German Zverev — a record crowd for a tennis match.
One of the NHL’s most polarizing players, Tom Wilson is working to clean up his game without sacrificing its physical edge — and laying out the blueprint for the league’s new breed of power forward in the process
For the first half of Devin Bush’s rookie season with the Pittsburgh Steelers, he played no fewer than 76% of all defensive snaps in a game and he logged every defensive snap on three occasions.
In the five games that followed, the inside linebacker exceeded 76% of the snaps just once as coach Mike Tomlin and his staff monitored Bush’s playing time.
The reduction was done with December in mind. Tomlin wanted Bush, who, like all other young players transitioning from a 12-game college schedule to 16 in the NFL, to be fresh for the Steelers’ playoff push that continued Sunday night against the Buffalo Bills.
… A recent study (Hulin et al., 2019) analysed the relationship between physical performance, TL and injury risk in 45 professional rugby players for two consecutive seasons. They took into account all lower extremity injuries (apart from contact injuries) that resulted in missing a training session or a match. … This is the first study to demonstrate an association between performance in submaximal tests and injury risk in team sports, and showed that a decrease in the ability to perform high-intensity exercise is related to: 1) lower chronic TL; 2) higher acute: chronic TL ratio; and 3) increased risk of injury.
Increasing your training load will not automatically yield greater performance gains, study finds.
Training intensity distribution (TID)—how much time you spend in different training intensity zones is most important for maximizing training gains, according to the research published in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research.
Cyclists in the study responded best to polarized training—spending more time in the harder and easier ends of the training intensity spectrum than the comfortably hard training intensities in between.
Nicky Butt has a unique way of explaining the role of Manchester United’s academy when it comes to turning a young footballer into, hopefully, one of the best in the world.
“I’d describe it as, when you meet the person you’re going to spend the rest of your life with, the first thing you are attracted to is looks,” Butt, who spent 13 years at United (387 appearances) and is now the head of first-team development for the club, tells ESPN. “Then you begin to learn about the person, you fall in love and then you get married. When you see a young player, the first thing you see is talent. But that can’t be all there is, just like in a relationship. You see the talent straight away but the biggest thing then is the character.”
Recovery foods are an essential aspect of getting the most out of your run and making sure you’re ready for the next one. When runners think of “recovery foods” they tend to think of the meal they eat right after training. While that first meal is important, your body is actually in recovery mode all day and especially at night, so every single meal and snack throughout the day is essential to staying healthy and strong. Leaning on packaged foods can leave you depleted of essential vitamins and minerals and cause you to feel constantly “hangry”. When marathon training it’s important to take the time to cook and eat three balanced meals per day and one or two nutrient-dense snacks.
… The league would “absolutely” like to add opioid testing for next season, said Dan Halem, the league’s deputy commissioner. Tony Clark, the executive director of the players’ association, said the union plans to work with the league to assess “all of our drug protocols relating to education, treatment and prevention.”
The parties have discussed whether to loosen baseball’s restrictions on marijuana — not specifically as a trade-off for opioid testing, but as part of the annual review of the sport’s drug policy, according to three people familiar with the talks but not authorized to comment publicly on them.
The discussions reflect in part the national trend toward legalization of marijuana, even as it remains on the federal register of controlled substances. According to the Marijuana Policy Project, 11 states have legalized marijuana for recreational purposes, 33 states have done so for medicinal purposes, and 26 states have decriminalized marijuana.
Plant-based diets have been receiving a lot of buzz lately with the recent release of the documentary The Game Changers, about the benefits of plant-based eating for athletes.
Is this all hype, or is eating plant-based foods the key to athletic success?
… Ultraprocessed foods (UPF) are widespread in Western diets. Their consumption has been associated in recent prospective studies with increased risks of all-cause mortality and chronic diseases such as cancer, cardiovascular diseases, hypertension, and dyslipidemia; however, data regarding diabetes is lacking.
At the NFL league meeting outside of Dallas this week, the Panthers’ owner opens up about his vision for his franchise after moving on from head coach Ron Rivera—and how he doesn’t want to be known as the “analytics guy.”
The NFLPA sent an email to players announcing that an arbitrator has ruled in the union’s favor after it filed a grievance against the Jaguars.
The union argued that the Jaguars were in violation of the Collective Bargaining Agreement when they attempted to make offseason rehab a mandatory activity for injured players. Per the union’s email, via Tom Pelissero of NFL Media, they fined one unnamed player over $700,000 for missing these sessions.
England manager Gareth Southgate and Belgium Head of Analysis and Innovation Luke Benstead have explained how they create their own metrics to give context to data for their teams.
Speaking at the Google Cloud Next 19 Conference in London, England manager Southgate said: “The style of your own team’s play really dictates what you want to measure.
“Some teams might want to play with more players forward, or more quickly, and so that would be a measure of playing in the style they think they should. Every team has a slightly different style of play, and what’s important to them might not be as important to you.
Harvard Business Review, Sandy Cross and Porter Braswell from
Within 25 years, people of color are projected to be a majority in the United States. As this key demographic rapidly expands, businesses of all sizes across America are realizing the need to hire diverse talent in order to develop products, services, and experiences for a changing population. Further, research shows that companies that have more diverse workforces outperform and out-innovate those that don’t. According to a 2018 McKinsey report, companies in the top-quartile for workforce diversity are 33% more likely to financially outperform their less diverse counterparts.
But while companies understand why they need to have a more diverse workforce, many aren’t sure how to make it happen. The PGA of America was one, and it faced challenging public perceptions. Golf is often viewed as a primarily white sport, which makes it difficult to recruit from underrepresented communities. Historically, there have been many barriers to entry for people of color interested in golf, including financial hurdles to enter training and acquiring equipment. While the PGA of America has historically instituted programs geared toward attracting diverse talent (like the PGA WORKS program, which actively recruits people from diverse backgrounds to apply for fellowships and other pathways of entry), there’s still more work to be done.