ESPN WNBA, Katie Lou Samuelson and Mechelle Voepel from
When I look back on when I was dealing with depression and anxiety, it feels like I was putting together a puzzle. Slowly at first, because until recently, I didn’t understand exactly what I was working on.
Growing up in California, my sisters and I loved basketball. Bonnie and Karlie went on to play at Stanford, but I took a different route: to the opposite coast and UConn. Other Californians had succeeded there, such as Diana Taurasi, Charde Houston and Kaleena Mosqueda-Lewis, and had set the bar high. I was up for the challenge.
Sure, we had to adjust to the cold of New England and the heat of high expectations. But it was a great place for me.
Mike Conley is waiting for further instructions. So is the rest of the NBA.
The league is continuing to work through multiple return-to-play scenarios, with two people with knowledge of the situation saying Wednesday that Orlando — which has been talked about for several weeks — along with Las Vegas and Houston remain under consideration. The people spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the league has made no final decisions.
More than half of the league’s teams have now opened facilities for voluntary player workouts, with Minnesota expected to be the next to do so on Thursday. Utah is among the teams that has opened, but Conley is still at his home in Ohio and has yet to return to Salt Lake City for those sessions at the Jazz facility.
Professional soccer players can perform amazing feats, whether lacing a pinpoint pass 60 yards, trapping a ball with a delicate touch or blasting a shot at incredible speed. They are also incredible physical specimens, capable of running for 90 minutes or more, sprinting full field in the dying stages of a match or elevating above opponents to win a header.
This piece is about these second types of achievements.
We called up Major League Soccer’s trainers, heads of performance, strength coaches and more to hear tales of the most impressive physical achievement they’ve seen. From Alphonso Davies literally speeding to a Wayne Rooney game-winning effort, these are the MLS feats of strength.
Head coach Justin Fuente confirmed on Wednesday that Marc Lewis is joining the program on a full-time basis to lead Tech’s sports science analytics efforts for the football program. Lewis, who holds a master’s of science and graduate certificate from Virginia Tech has spent the last year as an applied sports science fellow with Ben Hilgart and Tech’s football strength and conditioning staff. He will also assist Hilgart’s staff in implementing the many aspects of Tech’s in-season and off-season training regimens.
Lewis is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in Human Nutrition, Foods and Exercise at Tech. In the past year, he assisted Hilgart’s team in the development and implementation of a comprehensive strength and conditioning program aimed at reducing the likelihood and severity of sport-related injury, while enhancing on-field performance. He will manage Tech’s comprehensive athlete monitoring program using GPS tracking and heart rate monitor systems utilized by student-athletes during training and practice to collect and analyze data as he monitors training load and assesses performance indicators, working in conjunction with Mike Goforth and Tech’s medical and athletic training staffs.
Federal immigration officials wrongly denied a petition by the Buffalo Sabres to secure a green card for their British-born strength and conditioning coach, the team argued in a lawsuit.
According to the lawsuit filed in U.S. District Court in Buffalo on Tuesday, U.S Citizenship and Immigration Services misstated facts and arbitrarily failed to follow its own rules in denying permanent residency status to Ed Gannon, an action that potentially subjects the team “to substantial financial harm and disruption in developing (its) athletes.”
Gannon was hired by the Sabres in 2015 while the team was beefing up its player development staff. He previously spent 10 years as the lead strength and conditioning coach of a professional rugby club, the Leicester Tigers.
Adding to all the newness of the New York Giants offseason is the fact that they notably have scores of new players and a new coaching staff, as well as a new strength and conditioning staff.
Aaron Wellman left as the Giants’ strength and conditioning coach after four seasons in March and a new staff was brought in — Craig Fitzgerald, Thomas Stallworth and Sam Coad, an Australian native, who like Wellman received his PhD from Bond University in Queensland, Australia.
Coad came to the States in 2014 as a performance manager at the University of Michigan working with Wellman. When Wellman headed to he Giants a year later, Coad headed south to the University of Oklahoma and a new job as performance manager in the football program.
Penn psychology professor Angela Duckworth—best known for her work on Grit—was pleasantly surprised when PhD student Lauren Eskreis-Winkler came to her with a creative new idea: What if the best way to help someone develop grit was to have them advise other people on this very question?
It was a totally counter-intuitive concept. Usually when we want to help someone accomplish a goal, we give them all kinds of advice. Surely, we think, they must be missing some essential knowledge, and this ignorance is standing in their way. But Eskreis-Winkler had a different idea about why people don’t do what’s in their best interest—and it’s not always that they don’t know how. Duckworth was hooked and collaborated on research proving that by teaching, we learn.
Wharton professor Katy Milkman interviewed Duckworth in a recent episode of her podcast, Choiceology, which explores how behavioral economics can help people make smarter decisions in their everyday lives. The following is an excerpt from their interview about this fascinating new research.
One of the main topics at the fourth annual Junior NBA Leadership Conference was the importance of having young athletes play a wide variety of sports, instead of specializing too early.
Several basketball luminaries with Duke connections weighed in on the topic, often referring to their own experiences with youth sports.
“I recommend playing multiple sports when you’re younger,” Jay Bilas said. “First and foremost, the reason is sports are supposed to be fun. The more you participate and play different things, the more varied your experience and the more fun its is.
The importance of concurrent exercise order for improving endurance and resistance adaptations remains unclear, particularly when sessions are performed a few hours apart. We investigated the effects of concurrent training (in alternate orders, separated by ~3 hours) on endurance and resistance training adaptations, compared to resistance-only training. Materials and methods
Twenty-nine healthy, moderately-active men (mean ± SD; age 24.5 ± 4.7 y; body mass 74.9 ± 10.8 kg; height 179.7 ± 6.5 cm) performed either resistance-only training (RT, n = 9), or same-day concurrent training whereby high-intensity interval training was performed either 3 hours before (HIIT+RT, n = 10) or after resistance training (RT+HIIT, n = 10), for 3 d.wk-1 over 9 weeks. Training-induced changes in leg press 1-repetition maximal (1-RM) strength, countermovement jump (CMJ) performance, body composition, peak oxygen uptake (), aerobic power (), and lactate threshold () were assessed before, and after both 5 and 9 weeks of training. Results
After 9 weeks, all training groups increased leg press 1-RM (~24–28%) and total lean mass (~3-4%), with no clear differences between groups. Both concurrent groups elicited similar small-to-moderate improvements in all markers of aerobic fitness ( ~8–9%; ~16-20%; ~14-15%). RT improved CMJ displacement (mean ± SD, 5.3 ± 6.3%), velocity (2.2 ± 2.7%), force (absolute: 10.1 ± 10.1%), and power (absolute: 9.8 ± 7.6%; relative: 6.0 ± 6.6%). HIIT+RT elicited comparable improvements in CMJ velocity only (2.2 ± 2.7%). Compared to RT, RT+HIIT attenuated CMJ displacement (mean difference ± 90%CI, -5.1 ± 4.3%), force (absolute: -8.2 ± 7.1%) and power (absolute: -6.0 ± 4.7%). Only RT+HIIT reduced absolute fat mass (mean ± SD, -11.0 ± 11.7%). Conclusions
In moderately-active males, concurrent training, regardless of the exercise order, presents a viable strategy to improve lower-body maximal strength and total lean mass comparably to resistance-only training, whilst also improving indices of aerobic fitness. However, improvements in CMJ displacement, force, and power were attenuated when RT was performed before HIIT, and as such, exercise order may be an important consideration when designing training programs in which the goal is to improve lower-body power.
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In this Saturday, May 9, 2020 photo, St. Louis Bears youth baseball players Mac Floyd, left, 14, gets a elbow bump from this brother and assistant coach Robby Floyd as Mac rounds the bases after smacking a homer during the Mother’s Day Classic baseball tournament organized by GameTime Tournaments in Cottleville, Mo. (David Carson/St. Louis Post-Dispatch via AP)
Konrad Ott and some of the parents with his Northern California girls volleyball club skipped a popular Florida tournament that is now postponed. They could soon face a similar decision about a national event in Dallas.
A boys baseball tournament organizer in the St. Louis area generated debate by staging an event less than a week after the Missouri governor cleared such gatherings.
These scenarios playing out across the nation illustrate how a return to youth sports amid the coronavirus pandemic is fraught with questions, from the health of everyone who attends to the ethics of potentially putting children in harm’s way in the name of getting back to business.
… Pop Warner players ages 5-10, including all offensive and defensive linemen, are prohibited from putting their hand on the ground — a three-point stance — before the snap. “It’s just kind of intuitively obvious,” executive director Jon Butler said, that pre-snap positioning in a two-point stance would prevent many instances of the sub-concussive head impact believed to cause chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) and other forms of brain damage.
Less than a year later, a pilot study has emerged that helps confirm those instincts. In a paper published this spring, Stanford University professor emeritus Paul Auerbach joined Purdue University engineers Thomas Talavage and Eric Nauman to show that offensive linemen in The Spring League — a professional-level developmental program — absorbed 40% fewer head acceleration events (HAE) when starting from a two-point stance compared to those who started from a three-point stance. (They did not study defensive linemen.) Their findings prompted a longer study due to be submitted in the next year, but Auerbach said the initial data showed what appeared to be a beneficial effect.
Due to their size and energy demands, as well as the need to maintain muscle mass and body weight, both offensive and defensive linemen need to consume a lot more food and calories than a normal individual. Some athletes have an easier time at maintaining their weight than others which is why my focus is individualized depending if they need to gain, maintain, lose weight or just change their body composition to lose body fat and increase muscle mass. The caloric needs can range from 3500 – 6000 calories per day based on individual needs and goals. The focus is always on lean protein sources, complex or simple carbohydrates, and healthy fats. It takes some fine tuning and there is an art to creating a plan based on needs but also personal food preferences, food allergies, and motivation. Nutrition quality matters with what we serve our players, so locally sourced and organic foods are a priority. Carbohydrates are the most important macronutrient for a football athlete due the explosive nature of the sport. However, protein and fat are important macronutrients for muscle repair and overall health and recovery.
… “Data is key, right? It’s fundamental,” said Monchi. “We always had data, before it was small data and today is big data. In the year 2000, when I started, there was only one form of data. It was a Word document where the scout used to put ‘It’s a good player, etc’, and that was the data. Nowadays, thanks to platforms like Wyscout, we have platforms where we can manage our data.”
Monchi has now introduced an R&D department to Sevilla, with mathematicians, physicists, specialized engineers and analysts employed at the Andalusian club. “This was unthinkable until five years ago, inconceivable,” said Monchi. “But this is the future. That is, the data analysis and the implementation of this analysis in the decision-making process is key.”
… “We looked at the top foreign players,” recalled the manager at the time. “I brought Lotta in who was very young at the time. Players like Shirley Cruz and Lara Dickenmann. We recruited the best French players over a number of years. Nécib, Renard, Eugénie Le Sommer, Henry, Camille Abily, Thomis, and Bouhaddi.
“Our second principle was to give them the best conditions in Europe. We worked with the federation to create professional contracts so the players could be 100 percent professional. We decided then to help them with their studies, working with them for a plan after their career.”
The third and fourth parts of the plan also largely came off the field, ensuring the players had the best environment possible to succeed.
“Slowly but surely we offered them a very good structure,” added Benstiti. “We improved the pitches, the locker rooms, the medical side, how we traveled, we made sure they came to football with the best conditions.