Tab Ramos and Memo Rodriguez hit it off from the very beginning. It was last October when Ramos had just been hired as the Houston Dynamo’s manager, and with the team’s season having just concluded, Rodriguez was in the process of getting in a set of postseason workouts. Rodriguez swung by his new boss’ office and they got to talking about where the El Campo, Texas, native best fit into Ramos’ system.
Rodriguez had grown up as a central midfielder, but he’d spent the bulk of his professional career on the wing. Ramos, a fan of Rodriguez’s technical ability, physicality and endurance, thought a return to a more central role as a two-way midfielder suited the 24-year-old best. The player agreed.
“I was glad that [Ramos] brought that up to me,” Rodriguez told ESPN during the MLS is Back Tournament. “I was ready, I was excited, and I told him that’s where I feel more comfortable. That’s where I feel at home. That’s where I want to play. And I think that’s where I can thrive throughout my career and have success.”
Ronald Darby sunk back in coverage, slowly releasing from the receiver to lure the quarterback into throwing the ball his way. Dwayne Haskins took the bait. The Washington Football Team’s second-year quarterback — who is still adjusting to a new scheme, new coaching staff and the general ins and outs of being a starter — knew the defense was in cover-two but thought there was no way Darby could get to the ball in time. He soon learned otherwise.
Haskins’s pass was underthrown and Darby jumped the route, picked off the pass and sprinted the length of the field for a touchdown. As he stood on the sideline after the play, Haskins talked through his mistake.
“What we talked about was the situation,” Coach Ron Rivera said. “He still had a timeout left; he had the whole field open to him. I told him at that point: ‘There’s nothing wrong with putting something in the middle, because if we catch it there we can call timeout, [and] there’s nothing wrong with throwing the ball away. The two things we can’t do are turn the ball over and take a sack.’
… “We’re going to try to make it as competitive as possible,” Kerr said Monday on 95.7 The Game’s “Damon, Ratto & Kolsky” show. “Knowing that next season isn’t gonna start on time and could even be pushed back further, we want to get the most that we possibly can out of this camp.
“We’re asking guys to come in in great shape so that we can get a lot of scrimmaging in. We’ll probably have a couple of dress rehearsal-type scrimmages on the main floor at Chase.
“We want to get as much work in as possible to make up for the fact that we have hardly played any basketball for six months, and probably won’t be for another few months after that.”
What this study clearly shows, is if we want sport to have a positive impact on young people’s pro-social behaviours and development, then we can’t blindly assume that participation will do that. There needs to be intentional design organised around a sound pedagogical approach.
During the last 30 years we have witnessed significant progress in the field of football injury prevention. Large-scale randomised controlled trials (RCTs) have shown that exercise-based prevention programmes can substantially reduce the incidence of football injuries. But while it is commonly assumed that the positive results of these RCTs will automatically lead to real-world injury rate reductions, long-term analyses indicate that the rate of some football injuries, including hamstring and anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries, are actually on the rise1,2. One of the reasons for this paradox is that many teams don’t perform evidence-based injury prevention programmes as prescribed, decide not to use them or have no knowledge of the programmes. Bridging this gap between RCT evidence and everyday injury prevention practices in clubs represents one of the biggest future opportunities for football medicine. This article focuses on implementing injury prevention (that is, putting programmes into practice), including the research progress made so far and the challenging road ahead.
University of Colorado, Anschutz Medical Campus from
A little understood region of the cerebellum plays a critical role in making split-second `go-no go’ decisions, according to a new study from researchers at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus.
“We wanted to know how this kind of decision making takes place,” said the study’s senior author Diego Restrepo, PhD, professor of cell and developmental biology at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. “How, for example, do you decide to swing or not swing at a fast ball in baseball?”
The study was published online today in Nature Communications.
A new Los Angeles startup is betting that enough consumers are interested in paying between $69 and $149 per year to receive lessons in life and sports from celebrity athletes like Maria Sharapova and Shaun White to make a billion-dollar business.
That’s the gamble that Maveron, Global Founders Capital and 8VC are taking on The Skills, which launches today.
Founded by E. Omer Atesmen, a former renewable energy entrepreneur whose last company, Clean Energy Experts, was acquired by SunRun for an undisclosed amount. The Skills aims to bring coaching lessons from life and sports to subscribers in a MasterClass-style format.
With a roster that includes Sharapova, White, volleyball star Kerri Walsh Jennings, All-Pro football player Larry Fitzgerald and Michael Phelps, the former competitive swimmer who won 28 medals in his Olympic Games competitions, The Skills has managed to ink athletes that were among or at the top of the competitive field in their respective sports.
Emergency medical technicians (EMTs), military medics, and emergency room physicians could one day be better able to treat victims of vehicular accidents, gunshot wounds, and battlefield injuries thanks to a new device under development that may more accurately assess the effects of blood loss due to hemorrhage.
A research team has now shown that it can accurately assess blood loss by measuring seismic vibrations in the chest cavity and by detecting changes in the timing of heartbeats. The knowledge, developed in the laboratory, could potentially lead to development of a smart wearable device that could be carried by ambulance crews and medics and made available in emergency rooms and surgical facilities.
“We envision a wearable device that could be placed on a person’s chest to measure the signs that we found are indicative of worsening cardiovascular system performance in response to bleeding,” said Omer Inan, associate professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “Based on information from the device, different interventions such as fluid resuscitation could be performed to help a victim of trauma.”
… We’ve heard of this happening in spots around the country, such as soccer clubs in Orange County, California that can’t play or scrimmage locally, so they drive to San Diego County and ignore state orders restricting youth sports. Some in California are even traveling to Utah for tournaments – even though public health experts have advised against travel sports tournaments.
UCLA law professor Steven Bank, who’s a soccer dad himself, said some city, county or state orders explicitly prohibit residents from traveling outside the jurisdiction. “It’s also possible your club is acting in violation of its sanctioning authority’s protocols, which could get it in trouble with that organization and could cause the club to be in violation of its insurance policy requirements,” Bank said. “However, none of this is likely to cause the club to change what it plans to do, and certainly not in time to resolve your issue.”
Aim We aimed to systematically analyse the videos of acute injuries in professional men’s football and describe typical injury patterns.
Methods Injuries were registered with the German statutory accident insurance for professional athletes as part of occupational accident reporting. Following each season (2014–2017), video footage of the two highest divisions in German male football was searched for moderate and severe acute match injuries. Two raters then independently assessed the injuries for: game situation, player and opponent behaviour, referee decision, and injury mechanisms.
Results The total data set included 7493 acute injuries. Of these, 857 (11%) were moderate or severe match injuries. The video search yielded 345 (40%) clearly identifiable injuries and of those 170 (49%) were contact injuries. We describe nine typical injury patterns: one each for head and shoulder injuries, two for thigh and ankle, and three for knee injuries. The nine patterns are called: (1) Head-to-head injury. (2) Collision-and-fall shoulder injury. (3) Sprinter’s thigh injury. (4) Perturbation-and-strain thigh injury. (5) Tackle knee injury. (6) Tackle-and-twist knee injury. (7) Non-contact knee injury. (8) Attacked ankle injury. (9) Collision-and-twist ankle injury. Thigh injuries occurred primarily in non-contact situations (44/81), mostly while the player was sprinting (23/44). Knee injuries were often caused by direct external impact (49/84)—mainly suffered by the tackler during a tackle (17/49).
Conclusion The nine common injury patterns in football differed substantially in their mechanisms and causes.
University of Alabama at Birmingham, UAB News from
Sara Gould is in the bubble. A sports medicine physician in the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine and with Children’s of Alabama, Gould has been working with the National Basketball Association in the Orlando bubble since July 12.
“I’ve been involved with the NBA since 2013, doing some consulting and event medicine for the league at various locations in the United States and around the world,” said Gould, M.D., an associate professor in the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery. “Early in my career I did a fellowship in sports medicine in New York which led to connections with the NBA.”
Gould points out that her affiliation is with the NBA, not the individual teams. Her role is to help manage overall medical response in the bubble, whether that means coordinating transportation of an injured player or arranging for imaging such as MRI’s or X-rays. One of the most important roles that she and her colleagues play is to help the league manage response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
… Progress has clearly been made in Clifford’s two seasons. Nikola Vucevic is an All-Star and Orlando has him locked up for the immediate future. Terrence Ross is a pure scorer, Aaron Gordon still has levels that he can get to and the Magic did what not everyone thought was possible by resurrecting Markelle Fultz’s career this season.
Just as clear, however, is this: The Magic need a bit more. And all the uncertainty surrounding next season only adds to that challenge. There will be a draft, maybe in October, maybe later. There will be free agency, again, maybe in October, maybe later.
Magic President Jeff Weltman said the silver lining to the uncertainty is it gives the team a chance to decompress after nearly two months in the bubble and a season that essentially lasted for 11 months.
“The timing and the way things are going to work, even to the point of what are summer workouts going to look like for our players in our facility, you know these things are all very much TBD,” Weltman said. “We’ll just have to kind of roll with the punches.”
… having the eight of the nine NWSL teams playing in bubble might have made [Vlatko] Andonovski feel like a kid locked in that proverbial candy store.
He could watch and scout any player he needed at the venues in Herriman and Sandy, Utah.
And Andonovski did just that as he makes plans for the present and future of the USWNT.
He said he watched about 25 games and about 50-60 training sessions during his 35-day in the bubble.
“It was a very valuable experience,” he said during a press conference as he was honored as Park University’s Distinguished Alumnus Award Aug. 27. “To watch all the games live, that was one thing, but another thing that was very valuable for us, me personally, and the whole coaching staff that was there with me. We were able to attend lots of practices. Just to put a parallel between the trainings and games to see how the players are implementing the ideas of coaches, how coachable they are, how they’re taking and processing some of those ideas was very valuable for us in the evaluating process.”
If football and men’s basketball players at Power 5 colleges were paid under collective bargaining agreements like their professional peers in the NFL and NBA, they would earn annual salaries of $360,000 and $500,000, respectively.
Driving the news: That’s according to a new study released by the National Bureau of Economic Research, which also estimates that high-profile athletes like quarterbacks ($2.4 million per year on average) and every starting player on a basketball team (between $800,000 and $1.2 million per year) would earn significantly more.
Why it matters: The study finds that college athletics’ amateurism rules create a system that transfers money away from poorer, largely Black students to wealthier, mostly white students, coaches and administrators.
The restarted NHL season is just over a month old. The bubbles in Toronto and Edmonton have held, with zero positive tests for the coronavirus. The action on the ice has been exciting, if missing that extra zest of a live playoff audience. After facing so many challenges in returning to play — including owners and the players agreeing to a new collective bargaining agreement — it appears the Stanley Cup will be awarded and a 10-month-long 2019-20 season will be concluded.
Then comes the hard part: Figuring out what on earth the 2020-21 season is going to look like.