… When your best players are showing up early, watching film non-stop and constantly going above and beyond, everyone else is going to follow suit. Bron and AD are willing to do whatever it takes to win and that attitude is contagious.
We have other great leaders too. During every film session, I sit next to Rajon Rondo just to pick his brain. His attention to detail is incredible as well. Jared Dudley doesn’t get enough credit for being an amazing teammate and leader. Danny Green is a great glue guy. Honestly, everyone sacrifices for the greater good of the team. It really feels like an AAU team with how close we are as a team and how together we are. It’s a very unique group of guys.
Victor Hedman put the Tampa Bay Lightning on his back and carried them to the Stanley Cup Final in 2015.
Five years later, the 6-foot-6 monster of a man can shoulder even more of a load.
Hedman is perhaps the best defenseman in the world and headlines an NHL playoffs showcasing the present and future stars at hockey’s most complicated position.
If the big Swede represents the pinnacle of blue line play, teammate Mikhail Sergachev, Miro Heiskanen and John Klingberg of the Dallas Stars and Shea Theodore of the Vegas Golden Knights show ascent to the summit, and others such as Colorado’s Cale Makar and Vancouver’s Quinn Hughes display the potential to make that climb.
When Liverpool hoisted the Premier League trophy into the firework-lit night sky back in late June, one of their staff was watching on from Denmark. Thomas Grønnemark, their throw-in coach, was drinking from his Liverpool mug — a souvenir he collects from the different clubs he’s worked with — and felt immense personal pride.
Jurgen Klopp was derided when he brought in Grønnemark back in 2018. The doubters said a throw-in is a basic part of football — look for the man, throw it to them. Why invest in a coach? But Klopp knew different, and Grønnemark had, before Klopp called, spent the previous 14 years convinced football was getting it wrong on their lax attitude to this aspect of the game.
Grønnemark has silenced the doubters — his results speak for themselves. Liverpool scored 14 of their 85 Premier League goals from throw-in situations in their title-winning 2019-20 campaign. His services are so in demand, he can now afford to turn down some approaches if his philosophy doesn’t fit with the club’s needs. But he wants to take his message to the world. “My biggest dream is to change football,” Grønnemark tells ESPN. “So instead of throw-ins being a thing that has to be done, it’s developed instead into something totally fantastic and entertaining for fans.”
A week before IMG Academy’s first game of the season, Bobby Acosta slowly walked around the football field, thinking about how far he and his team had come the past few months.
Alone with his thoughts, Acosta, IMG’s new head football coach, was moved to tears as he prodded across the turf, thinking how far his team had come to be able to take the field on Friday and actually play football.
Acosta knew there would be challenges when he accepted the coaching position on Jan. 30. The Bradenton, Florida, boarding school brings in some of the top football recruits from across the country to form its national team, traveling nationwide in a highly competitive schedule. But he never could have imagined what would lie ahead once the coronavirus pandemic hit.
“I took the job, we started off really embracing our new vision, our new philosophy,” Acosta said. “The kids bought in quickly, and then we went off for spring break on March 13, and that was the last time we saw the kids for months.”
Normally, schools would have started their fall semester in mid-August, with sports ramping up at the same time. This year has forced everyone to shift gears and come up with new strategies. In the athletics world, athletes have adapted by finding new ways to train, some mainstream athletes have been competing in esports, and even athletic trainers (ATs) found innovative ways of working at the beginning of the pandemic to help their athletes.
While ATs can work in unconventional settings, we’ll be focusing on their more conventional and well-known role of supporting school sports teams.
Here’s how ATs have prepared for athletes to return to school.
… Assistant and head coaches travel to scout prospects when time permits throughout the course of a season. The recruiting process ramps up to full speed following the conclusion of the season.
“The head coach[es] are the CEO, they are the last person to give the sign-off [on offers],” said Corey Evans, a national basketball analyst for Rivals. “And confidence and comfortability and relatability have not been easy to come by this spring and summer.”
While coaches can’t go to AAU events this summer, some tournaments have been live-streamed through online streaming services. Though Evans said coaches are able to evaluate prospects better by seeing them play in person.
As a result, Evans said he’s seen a dramatic decline in offers this summer, particularly at high major programs. A head coach’s fate relies on the makeup of its roster, and most programs aren’t willing to take a chance on a player they’ve never seen play in person, especially if no other schools of their caliber have.
Scandanavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports from
The present study investigated if athletes can be classified as responders or non‐responders based on their individual change in total hemoglobin mass (tHb‐mass) following altitude training while also identifying the potential factors that may affect responsiveness to altitude exposure. Measurements were completed with 59 elite endurance athletes who participated in national team altitude training camps. Fifteen athletes participated the altitude training camp at least twice. Total Hb‐mass using a CO rebreathing method and other blood markers were measured before and after a total of 82 altitude training camps (1350‐2500 m) in 59 athletes. In 46 (56 %) altitude training camps tHb‐mass increased. The amount of positive responses increased to 65 % when only camps above 2000 m were considered. From the fifteen athletes who participated in altitude training camps at least twice, 27 % always had positive tHb‐mass responses, 13 % only negative responses and 60 % both positive and negative responses. Logistic regression analysis showed that altitude was the most significant factor explaining positive tHb‐mass response. Furthermore, male athletes had greater tHb‐mass response than female athletes. In endurance athletes, tHb‐mass is likely to increase after altitude training given that hypoxic stimulus is appropriate. However, great inter‐ and intraindividual variability in tHb‐mass response does not support classification of an athlete permanently as a responder or non‐responder. This variability warrants efforts to control numerous factors affecting an athlete’s response to each altitude training camp.
… Bryant was an early adopter of using massage guns, as ESPN tells us. In 2007, he met with high school teacher Anthony Katz, who presented the Lakers star with a rough design for leg wraps that would help players ice their knees more efficiently.
They would continue to work together developing items that would help players heal their bodies when needed. One product that emerged from the unlikely partnership was a massage gun, which helps players to treat their muscles while they’re resting on the bench during a game. Katz developed it after consulting with players and trainers regarding how they could improve their recovery after workouts and games.
Katz gave Bryant one of the early designs, and he became hooked on it.
Gatorade for decades has reigned supreme in sports drinks, serving as the mid-workout thirst-quencher and the post-victory coach-soaker.
Now the PepsiCo (PEP) megabrand is going big in tech.
Gatorade has been studying how hundreds of athletes sleep, think, and perspire to develop non-drink products such as nighttime protein powders, smart squeeze bottles that track fluid intake, and tech-enabled patches that create tailored hydration and nutrition plans based on how someone sweats.
These might seem like unexpected moves for a brand known for its brightly colored, electrolyte-rich drinks.
“We view ourselves less as a sports drink company and more as leaders of athletic intelligence,” Brett O’Brien, Gatorade’s general manager, told CNN Business.
The BMJ, Opinion; Harry Rutter, Miranda Wolpert, Trisha Greenhalgh from
As each country’s covid-19 experience shifts from an acute national disaster to a chronic policy crisis, we all—clinicians, scientists, policy makers, and citizens—need to move on from imagining that the uncertainties can be resolved. They may never be.
This is because covid-19 is a complex problem in a complex system. Complex systems are, by definition, made up of multiple interacting components. Such systems are open (their boundaries are fluid and hard to define), dynamically evolving (elements in the system affect, positively or negatively, other elements), unpredictable (a fixed input to the system doesn’t have a fixed output) and self-organising (the system responds adaptively to interventions). Complex systems can be properly understood only in their entirety; isolating a part of the system to “solve” that does not produce a solution that works across the system for all time. Uncertainty, tension, and paradox are inherent and must be accommodated rather than resolved.
In circumstances like this, uncontested facts—things that are ascertainable, reproducible, transferable, and predictable—tend to be elusive. Most decisions must be based on information that is flawed (imperfectly measured, with missing data), uncertain (contested, perhaps with low sensitivity or specificity), proximate (relating to something one stage removed from the real phenomenon of interest), or sparse (available only for some aspects of the problem).4
Data that are trustworthy, certain, definitive, and plentiful can be presented as facts, and evidence based decisions can follow from them. These are the data we hope for and search for, the science that will inform the ultimate exit strategy from this pandemic.5 But the stage of the current pandemic requires us to work with the kinds of imperfect data described above, so different approaches are needed. [full text]
Journal of Science and Medicine in Sport, Opinion from
The past 30 years of athlete health protection – namely, injury and illness prevention and management – has largely been successful in answering the research questions that our field has, up until now, sought to investigate. Interventions have proven efficacious in a wide range of areas and populations, and the field has moved to optimise effectiveness in recent years. Despite this success, it is widely acknowledged that athlete health protection still has several challenges to address.
These challenges include bridging the gap between research and practice in a number of key ways, including for example: the inclusion of the athlete voice, and the implementation of health protection strategies. In response to these challenges, recognition of the complexity of athlete health protection has recently emerged and qualitative research methods have been advocated as one important approach that can provide new understandings and lead to better practical outcomes.1, 2, 3 This is because qualitative research provides insight into athlete and other stakeholder perspectives, can improve clinical and implementation understanding and outcomes, and may help us to consider the athlete experience in our health protection work. There is, in this way, a real need for research that complements existing approaches and connects researchers from different disciplines, and which also distinctly holds space for the unique insights that qualitative approaches can add to current knowledge. In this way, qualitative research can explore and incorporate dimensions that are not currently represented in the literature, for better and more influential outcomes.
In September 2019, we founded the Qualitative Research in Sports Medicine (QRSMed) special interest group. Our aim is to identify and champion strategies required to facilitate, support, and incentivise qualitative research in athlete health protection. The purpose of this editorial is, as a first step, to highlight why qualitative research matters to athlete health protection.
… [Martin] Schwellnus himself warned that muscle cramps are a complex phenomenon with many different contributing factors, so we shouldn’t expect a simple solution.
What we’re left with is a search for factors we can control that might influence cramp risk. That’s the goal of a new study in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research from a research team at the University of Valencia and Jaume I University in Spain. It recruited 98 runners preparing for the Valencia Marathon, ran them through a series of tests before and after the race, and looked for differences between crampers and non-crampers. Some of the results were predictable, while others were surprising.
The good news, from the study’s perspective, is that 20 of the runners suffered muscle cramps during or immediately after the race. A total of 84 runners (72 men and 12 women) completed all the pre- and post-race testing, which means that 24 percent of them cramped, with similar rates in men and women. That’s roughly consistent with the stats from other races. Once again, urine and blood tests found no differences in dehydration or electrolyte levels before, during, or after the race.
I thought @903124S wrote a nice article about how teams with good passing games tend to have good running games. Then @cameronsoran made a pretty reasonable hypothesis about why that is.
… Environmental factors have also sent the Dutch soaring, added Barrett, citing the Netherlands’ world-leading healthcare system, low levels of income inequality and excellent social welfare system as another explanation for them overtaking the Americans. “[In the Netherlands] everything is geared towards producing high-quality babies that then don’t suffer any of the kinds of things that reduce height,” she said. “Every time you mount an immune response it costs you energy that otherwise you would have put into growth.”
Then there’s the Dutch diet: people in the Netherlands have a voracious appetite for dairy, and studies suggest this has contributed to their increased height. “Calcium builds bone and growth is dependent on having a good supply of that,” Barrett explained.