… Pelicans coach Alvin Gentry again said he understood the frustration of the fans but said they should understand where the team is coming from.
“It’s the way we’ve decided, it’s best for him right now and that’s what we’re going to stick to,” Gentry said. “I know everybody gets real excited, and I hear every night that I’m the dumbest coach in the world about why would I take the guy out in the game of the last 5 minutes or 6 minutes? So I’ll live with that knowing that we’re doing the right thing.”
… Over two decades since that first meeting, the sun is setting on each players’ respective career, at least on an international level. Tokyo 2020 will be the fifth and final Olympic Games for the pair.
“Hell yeah that’s it,” Bird said. “It’s been a long run. It’s definitely the last Olympics for sure.”
“I’m more than sure that it’ll be my fifth and last one,” Taurasi echoed. “It’s been a good run. I’m happy.”
… “I think the most important thing right now for me is not to go play in the All-Star Game,” Ovechkin told Men’s Journal. “It’s fun, it’s a privilege, but I have to make a decision on what’s better for me in this time of the year. I’m not 23 years old anymore. I need to get ready for the playoffs and the second half of the year.”
Chelsea midfielder Mason Mount has hinted that his breakthrough at the club has been years in the making. The youngster has been ever-present for the Blues this season and has managed to establish himself as a first-team regular for the West Londoners.
As a product of the Blues youth development system, Abraham also has a special place in the heart of many of the club’s fans.
“I never saw myself as a prospect, it was always about playing as much football as I can.
… But the biggest adjustment for Andonovski has been at the training grounds. It’s easy to identify deficiencies on club teams and quickly see results by addressing them, but the players on the USWNT don’t have many weaknesses.
USWNT defender Ali Krieger says Andonovski has been a detail-oriented coach so far, being out on the field for every training session and zeroing in on the finer points of drills.
“I’m learning a lot,” Krieger tells Yahoo Sports. “It’s so enjoyable to show up to work every day and learn something new. That’s what I think a lot of our teammates really enjoy about being coached by Vlatko.”
… According to traditional thinking – still espoused by university counselling centres around the world, such as the University of Manchester in the UK and the University of Rochester in the US – I, along with my fellow procrastinators, have a time management problem. By this view, I haven’t fully appreciated how long my assignment is going to take and I’m not paying enough attention to how much time I’m currently wasting on ‘cyberloafing’. With better scheduling and a better grip on time, so the logic goes, I will stop procrastinating and get on with my work.
Increasingly, however, psychologists are realising this is wrong. Experts like Tim Pychyl at Carleton University in Canada and his collaborator Fuschia Sirois at the University of Sheffield in the UK have proposed that procrastination is an issue with managing our emotions, not our time. The task we’re putting off is making us feel bad – perhaps it’s boring, too difficult or we’re worried about failing – and to make ourselves feel better in the moment, we start doing something else, like watching videos.
Immediately after finishing fourth in the February 2016 United States Olympic marathon trials, just one spot short of qualifying for the 2016 Rio Olympics, a tearful Kara Goucher said, “I kept asking myself if I was doing all I could, and I was; [the top three finishers] are just better.”
With hindsight, and the advantage of research conducted in the past few years, it is possible to conclude with some certainty that Goucher missed a spot in the 2016 Rio Olympics not because her competitors were necessarily better runners, but because they had better shoes.
I discussed this with Goucher over the weekend, and she told me that in 2016 at the trials she was completely unaware of the importance of the new shoe technology: “I had talked to people on the inside in late 2016 who said the shoes were a performance enhancer on par with EPO, but I didn’t know that they truly worked until Nike released their data in March of 2017.”
Nike’s high-end racing shoes have become a popular choice for both elite and amateur runners. But the shoes may soon be banned in professional competitions if World Athletics, the world governing body of track and field, decides they offer an unfair advantage. [video, pre-roll + 8:26]
Stanford University, Stanford Medicine, News Center from
… The researchers determined that people generally age along certain biological pathways in the body: metabolic, immune, hepatic (liver) and nephrotic (kidney). People who are metabolic agers, for example, might be at a higher risk for diabetes or show signs of elevated hemoglobin A1c, a measure of blood-sugar levels, as they grow older. People with an immune ageotype, on the other hand, might generate higher levels of inflammatory markers or be more prone to immune-related diseases as they age. But the ageotypes are not mutually exclusive, and a metabolic ager could also be an immune ager, for example.
If we’re going to help treat and reduce the risk of injuries incurred by soccer players, then it is important that we first know what types of injuries soccer players typically get. Markus Waldén, Martin Hӓgglund, and Jan Ekstrand began the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) Champions League Study in 2001 by prospectively tracking eleven top clubs from Europe (over 250 players)1. They recorded time-lost injuries and individual player exposure times for all club and national team training sessions and games.
The UEFA Injury Study has given us some valuable information regarding the injury rates and patterns in male professional footballers. Within a team of 25 players, we can expect each player to sustain 2 injuries per season, with 8 injuries per team being severe (>28 days time loss).2 Reinjuries accounted for 12% of all injuries and caused longer absences from training and matches than the index injuries. The injury rate was significantly greater in matches (27.5 per 1000 hours) than in training (4.1 per 1000 hours), and the injury incidence increased over the time course of a game in both the 1st and 2nd halves.
Surgical repair of rotator cuff (RC) tears is an effective treatment option. However, the prevalence of recurrent ruptures is high. Hypothesis:
Recurrent tears are a frequent complication of surgical repair of RC tears. Their incidence might be influenced by factors such as the patient’s age and size of the initial tear. Study Design:
Case series; Level of evidence, 4. Methods:
Data from 90 adult patients who underwent arthroscopic RC repair between 2014 and 2017 and underwent an ultrasound examination 6 to 12 months after surgery were analyzed retrospectively. Massive tears were repaired using a double-row technique, and nonmassive tears were repaired with a single-row technique. Clinical records were reviewed for demographic information. Results:
All patients (57.8% women; 42.2% men) were older than 18 years (mean, 58.9 years). Of these patients, 30.0% (27/90) had massive tears, which were primarily found in patients ≥60 years (74.1%; 20/27). Complete healing was seen in 74.5% of all repairs during follow-up. A total of 23 patients (25.5%) had retears (13 complete; 10 partial), which were diagnosed by ultrasound imaging 6 to 12 months after the initial surgery. The occurrence of retears was more prevalent in patients with massive tears than in patients with nonmassive tears (40.7% vs 19.0%, respectively); the difference was statistically significant (P = .03). Reruptures occurred in 50.0% of patients older than 60 years with massive tears. Although patients older than 60 years had more recurrent tears (32.6%) compared with younger patients (18.2%), the difference was not statistically significant (P = .12). Conclusion:
One-quarter of the patients who had undergone surgical repair of an RC tear had recurrent ruptures. There was a statistically significant association between the initial massive tear and a retear. Patients older than 60 years showed a higher recurrence rate, but this difference lacked statistical significance. Reruptures occurred in 50.0% of patients older than 60 years with massive tears.
… There are 83 schools in the Los Angeles Unified School District with basketball programs and only eight have full-time athletic trainers. The road game was originally scheduled as a day game, and Kelly said she would not have attended if it had not been changed to a night game because of a scheduling conflict at Crenshaw.
”It is the position of Sports Dietitians Australia that exertional heat stress can significantly affect an athlete’s nutritional status, but careful planning and implementation of nutrition strategies can assist him or her to optimize health and performance outcomes in such conditions. The following position statement summarizes these issues and the nutrition and hydration strategies with which they can be addressed.” The authors discuss the physiological effects of exertional heat stress, effects of exertional heat stress on performance and health; heat acclimation and acclimatization; fluid and electrolyte balance during exertional heat stress and acclimation; hydration and electrolyte status assessment; strategies for fluid and electrolyte intake before, during, and after exercise; nutritional pre- and per-cooling strategies during exercise; other nutritional strategies to enhance thermal comfort; practical implementation of nutrition plans for the heat.
… A feature of Liverpool’s performances has been the prodigious energy levels of the team. One of the challenges facing coach Jurgen Klopp is maintaining the energy levels while giving some of his key players a needed rest.
Andy Robertson is one that stands out. He seems to be running on empty over the last few games and he looks like he needs a rest. Then there is the front three of Salah, Firmino, and Mane. The trio have contributed 40 goals so far and although there are options available to Klopp, it is doubtful that any would be as effective over the long-haul.
However, the longer that Liverpool’s unbeaten Premier League run continues, the more tempting it becomes to ask for more from the first-choice eleven. How Klopp deals with this temptation might go a long way to deciding how history will remember the Liverpool 2019/20 edition.