… Hart, who was drafted by the Flyers in the second round (48th overall) of the 2016 draft, has been viewed by both fans and management as the answer ever since. The Flyers are the Eastern Conference’s No. 1 seed for the first time since 2000, and Hart’s playoff debut has had a few rough patches, but he has always found a way to rebound. After being pulled in Game 2 against the Canadiens after allowing four goals, he posted back-to-back shutouts, making him the second-youngest goalie in NHL playoff history to accomplish that feat (following Detroit’s Harry Lumley in 1945).
In Game 5, coach Alain Vigneault was ready to pull Hart yet again after he allowed four goals. But the Flyers challenged the goal for offsides and won; the goal was overturned. Vigneault summoned Hart to the bench. “I got the chance to look into Carter’s eyes,” Vigneault said. “And he was fine. He’s played extremely well for us.”
Hart stayed in. His teammates had the utmost confidence in him then, and they do for a bounce-back performance in Game 6 and beyond.
“It’s a good thing he’s a little too oblivious to some things,” teammate Jakub Voracek said this week. “[Like] being a goalie in Philadelphia.”
For much of his remarkable 19-year career, Cameron Smith has been mocked about his physique but the 423-game veteran has the strongest core of any player Kangaroos elite performance manager Troy Thomson has come across.
Nicknamed “The Accountant” by Melbourne Storm team-mates, Smith has been an inspiration for the growing army of players whose careers now extend well beyond 30 due to a combination of advances in diet, recovery, preparation, training methods, technology and genetics.
The hotels might be posh, their amenities and service first rate, and yet life inside the NHL’s two playoff bubbles isn’t exactly glamorous.
Having spent nearly a month cooped up at the tunnel-connected hotel-arena complex in Edmonton, Alberta, Rick Bowness acknowledged there’s times he’s had to coax himself to step outside to bask in the sun and breathe in some fresh, nonfiltered air.
“If people think living in a bubble is great, it’s tough. It’s mentally tough. And everyone’s making the best of it,” the Stars interim coach said after Dallas advanced to the second round with Game 6 victory over Calgary last week.
Many Wolverines are adapting to a unique challenge. They are practicing fall season sports without a schedule of games dangling in front of them as motivation for their hard work.
When the Big Ten Conference announced Aug. 11 that fall sports were postponed because of the coronavirus pandemic — with possible rescheduling later in the school year — it brought about the need for adjustments.
University of Michigan volleyball head coach Mark Rosen moved scrimmages from legendary Cliff Keen Arena to the large “rubbery” pad off the grass in the middle of the nearby outdoor track lanes.
Gov. Gretchen Whitmer has limited groups to gathering inside with 10 or fewer people, and after the coaching staff is subtracted, that would leave room for only six players — enough for one team but six short of what would be required for a second team to play in an intrasquad setup.
“We didn’t feel it would be productive in the fall unless we could get the whole team together at once,” said Rosen. “Some of that is also tied into the team dynamic of wanting them all in one place and with each other, talking about the things we need to do for our team to play well.
… As Alabama opened up camp this week, the positive reviews continued to roll in as Tide players expressed their thought on the new workout regime.
“They’re very open about their philosophy, involving science and things like that,” quarterback Mac Jones said last week, “But everything they do in the weight room translates to the field. Every single lift we do, there’s a reason we’re doing it. And they make it very clear to why we’re doing that lift. And I feel like that just boosts morale, and we don’t feel like we’re just going through the motions.
“We’re getting better every day. There’s science to prove it. They’ve done a great job leading us. We love those guys already. So I think everybody on the team would say, they feel much better about how the strength and conditioning has evolved.”
The aim of coaching is to enhance the performance of our clients. To achieve this they must change the way they behave in a way that makes a positive difference. However, many coaches share the underlying assumption that they need to dictate exactly what their clients need to do to improve. If they comply, then success should be assured. If they don’t, then they only have themselves to blame. But it’s not that simple.
In this article, I’ll introduce you to behavior change science, a systematic way of understanding why humans behave the way they do and effective ways to change behavior. By doing so, I hope that I encourage you to think a little bit differently about how you coach, help you gain more insightful feedback and hopefully improve your client retention rates too.
Anxiety increased from 5.12% in 2008 to 6.68% in 2018 (p<.0001) among adult Americans. Stratification by age revealed the most notable increase from 7.97% to 14.66% among respondents 18-25 years old (p<.001), which was a more rapid increase than among 26-34 and 35-49 year olds (differential time trend p<.001). Anxiety did not significantly increase among those ages 50 and older. Anxiety increased more rapidly among those never married and with some college education, relative to their respective counterparts. Apart from age, marital status and education, anxiety increased consistently among sociodemographic groups.
That is from a new paper by Renee D. Goodwin, Andrea H. Weinberger, June H. Kim, Melody Wu, and Sandro Galea.
… Portland advanced through group stages and knockout rounds unbeaten, likely in part due to its comfort over the course of a 40-day stay at Disney World’s version of ‘Hotel California.’ The Timbers did what they could to make players feel at home. Part of that involved keeping the team schedule on west coast time as much as possible, with daily training around 7 p.m. ET followed by a late dinner.
Another aspect of their daily routine was a phone alert around 10 a.m. each morning reminding players and staff members to fill out a COVID-19 symptom questionnaire that everyone on the team had seen plenty of times before.
Portland was one of several MLS Clubs using Kitman Labs’ performance intelligence platform before MLS adopted the technology as a league-wide tracking hub for COVID-19 symptom monitoring and testing result notifications according to multiple team sources. BioReference Laboratories, meanwhile, has been responsible for the physical testing process. Kitman Labs declined to comment on its deal with MLS. The league did not return a request for comment.
The idea of building COVID-19 monitoring into his app was actually a client’s idea first, Kitman Labs founder Stephen Smith told Sportico. “The longer this global pandemic has gone on, the more we realized the financial impact and burden this global sports shutdown is having,” he said. “If there is a way our technology can help people to keep their jobs and to help the athletes and staff that work around sports to remain healthy, that’s a huge positive for us.”
University of Massachusetts Amherst, News & Media Relations from
From the team that invented physiology-sensing pajamas at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, now comes a new, lightweight eye mask that can unobtrusively capture pulse, eye movement and sleep signals, for example, when worn in an everyday environment.
Senior authors writing this week in the journal Matter are materials chemist and Wearable Electronics Lab director Trisha L. Andrew, with computer scientist Deepak Ganesan and others. They point out that “being able to track pulse and eye movement in a single wearable device will enable a host of sleep and psycho-social studies, in addition to improving the accuracy and usability of gaming and virtual reality headsets.” First author S. Zohreh Homayounfar, will present the findings this week at the online Fall Meeting of the American Chemical Society.
Hours after the Mid-American Conference announced it had postponed fall sports, one of the first text messages Lance Leipold said he received was from Brian Bratta, the University at Buffalo’s associate athletic director for sports medicine and wellness services.
Bratta’s primary concern was the mental state of UB’s football program, as many players learned of the MAC’s Aug. 8 decision not through coaches, campus administrators or conference leaders, but through the swift nature of social media.
“We’re alerting our counseling services on campus,” said Leipold, UB’s football coach. “Finding out something on Twitter is not the way you want to find out what’s happening, hours in. Where our players are, we spend a lot of time on the mental part of it, that’s probably where our next days will be. We’ll probably focus on that.”
The NFL worked Sunday to assess a series of positive COVID-19 results that have all been traced to the same laboratory in New Jersey, raising concerns about the efficacy of the testing program established to minimize the spread of the disease.
“Saturday’s daily COVID testing returned several positive tests from each of the clubs serviced by the same laboratory in New Jersey,” the NFL said in a statement Sunday morning. “We are working with our testing partner, BioReference, to investigate these results, while the clubs work to confirm or rule out the positive tests.”
All told, the NFL is investigating 77 test results from a total of 11 teams, a source told ESPN.
… Ross said he won’t meddle in the plans of each hitter, trusting their individual plans with the team goal of getting runners on base and driving them in.
“There’s a rhythm to the game that doesn’t feel like (it’s established) quite yet in just the short amount (of time),” Ross said. “I feel some of these guys are still getting into the rhythm of how they’re being pitched, what other teams are trying to do.”
Ross acknowledged that some left-handers have been especially effective against the Cubs, but he vowed to maintain faith in his hitters’ approach.
… Around 1,000 players amassed over 1,500 minutes in Europe’s top five leagues last season, with Thiago ranking outside the top 500 for Expected Assists per 90. That seems quite illogical considering that he’s widely perceived as one of the most technical and inventive midfielders around, but it’s simply because his deeper role means he doesn’t tend to directly generate shots for others.
For the 29 year-old to be appreciated in a numerical sense, more has to be considered than who shot, and who provided the shot. What about everything else?
The Bayern pivot is strongly linked with a move to Anfield ahead of the new campaign, with Thiago’s underappreciated pass epitomising why Liverpool’s application and interpretation of numbers in relation to player quality is the best in the business at the moment.
… We wanted to finally answer this question of which league is the most physically demanding, by analysing physical performance according to three categories commonly used in sports science – intensity, sprinting and volume.
For this analysis, we utilised SkillCorner broadcast tracking data on all outfield player performances (over 75 mins in duration) in the ‘Big 5’ European leagues throughout the 2019/20 season up to the COVID-19 shutdown in early March 2020.
As this unique version of the Stanley Cup playoffs enters the second round, it’s sobering to realize when it is concluded, we might not see the NHL for a long time.
That means we won’t see the Penguins play again for an extended period. Will Sidney Crosby lose a year (or more) of his remaining career because of the pandemic? It’s very possible.