… There is no exact science to how the past and present USMNT players in Germany ended up there. The German top flight has been a place where Americans have found a home in the past: Eric Wynalda, Claudio Reyna, Landon Donovan, Jovan Kirovski and Brian McBride all played in Germany at the start of their careers. Steve Cherundolo, who won 87 caps for the USMNT, played for Hannover 96 his entire career and is nicknamed “Mayor of Hannover.”
When Jurgen Klinsmann took over the U.S. side in 2011, he encouraged young players to look abroad, while also targeting dual-nationality players (“Deutschamerikaners”) in the Bundesliga like John Brooks, Jermaine Jones, Fabian Johnson and Timothy Chandler (all of whom had fathers in the military and stationed in Germany).
But the flashpoint, or “eureka” moment, came in the form of Pulisic.
BBC Sport; Jane Dougall, Katie Falkingham & Kate McKenna from
… “I just wanted to put myself in a position to be the absolute best that I could be, and in the environment I was in I just didn’t think that was happening for me,” the 22-year-old tells BBC Sport.
“As stressful as its been moving across the Atlantic Ocean, I think that I definitely will get out of it what I came here for, which is just like a mental health break, just getting out of that atmosphere that was really happening in America right now.”
When Tyler Motte arrived in Vancouver last year for Canucks training camp, he underwent a physical with team doctors.
They took Motte’s vitals, conducted measurements, made sure all of his limbs worked correctly. Everything looked fine. Then the doctor asked: “Is there anything else you have going on, anything else we should be concerned about before camp?”
Motte, now 25, paused for a moment. “Actually,” he said. “There is one thing.” Then the words started flowing out of his mouth before he could consider the significance.
“Earlier in the summer, I was diagnosed with anxiety and depression,” Motte said. “Do we have somebody for that?”
… So the question becomes: what should coaches bring their athletes’ attention to during practices and drills? The same question can be asked about the gym; does cueing differ on the field vs in the gym? Surely learning to hit a 95mph fastball with the game on the line isn’t the same as setting a bench press PR in the weight room.
That’s what we’ll explore in this post. We’ll set the stage by outlining the difference between two types of cueing strategies: internal and external. We’ll then present additional focus of attention research (a branch of motor learning theory) – and suggest a rebuttal to that research. Finally, we’ll provide additional examples to gain some clarity from a coach’s perspective.
… When you’re coaching a star, you have to earn their respect. If they see you working really hard, they’re more likely to listen and buy in. It’s similar to winning over a star teammate and getting them to respect you on the court. You also have to find common ground with each guy and figure out how to communicate with them.
During my first season with the Cavs, the respect was there from LeBron, but it developed gradually over time. At one point, I was in charge of scouting our next opponent and we were in the middle of a funk. We were losing and some of the guys were pointing the blame at everyone else. When I presented my scouting report before our game, I wrote on the board: “THAT TASTE” and “THAT SMELL.” Basically, to sum it up, I told them that we had a bad taste in our mouth from all of the losing and we had to get rid of it. Also, I said, “When you smell something you don’t like, you’re looking around and thinking it’s something or someone nearby; you think it’s everyone else but yourself. At the end of the day, it could be you who stinks!” I basically told them rather than pointing the finger at everyone else, consider that you may be the one who’s the problem. Afterward, LeBron told me, “Pose, that’s some real shit. I like that a lot.”
China is sabotaging its own Olympics efforts, imposing arbitrary physical tests on athletes in qualifying events for international competitions. In the national swimming championships, held through Oct. 2 in Shandong, many top competitors have already been eliminated—for reasons that have nothing to do with their swimming ability.
The swimmers are the latest victims of a bizarre new set of rules for qualification imposed in February that could eliminate as many as half of all athletes based on a set of arbitrary physical challenges that have nothing to do with their individual sports, such as pushups, endurance running, and bench presses. Several of China’s best skiers were blocked from traveling to Norway this summer for training due to failing the tests, while champion snowboarders were kicked off the team for underperforming at long-distance running.
One of the measures involved in the new rules is body mass index (BMI), a dubious but commonly used measure of body composition that is especially unreliable for athletes.
Abbott is introducing the world’s first glucose sport biosensor, Libre Sense Glucose Sport Biosensor, which is designed for athletes to continuously measure glucose to better understand the correlation between their glucose levels and their athletic performance. The Libre Sense biosensor is based on Abbott’s FreeStyle Libre continuous glucose monitoring technology, which was originally developed for people living with diabetes. Based on that technology, this is the first personal-use product that allows for use beyond diabetes.
Fatigue is a multifunctional and complex phenomenon that affects how individuals perform an activity. Fatigue during running causes changes in normal gait parameters and increases the risk of injury. To address this problem, wearable sensors have been proposed as an unobtrusive and portable system to measure changes in human movement as a result of fatigue. Recently, a category of wearable devices that has gained attention is flexible textile strain sensors because of their ability to be woven into garments to measure kinematics. This study uses flexible textile strain sensors to continuously monitor the kinematics during running and uses a machine learning approach to estimate the level of fatigue during running. Five female participants used the sensor-instrumented garment while running to a state of fatigue. In addition to the kinematic data from the flexible textile strain sensors, the perceived level of exertion was monitored for each participant as an indication of their actual fatigue level. A stacked random forest machine learning model was used to estimate the perceived exertion levels from the kinematic data. The machine learning algorithm obtained a root mean squared value of 0.06 and a coefficient of determination of 0.96 in participant-specific scenarios. This study highlights the potential of flexible textile strain sensors to objectively estimate the level of fatigue during running by detecting slight perturbations in lower extremity kinematics. Future iterations of this technology may lead to real-time biofeedback applications that could reduce the risk of running-related overuse injuries. [full text]
Wireless wearable sweat biosensors have gained huge traction due to their potential for noninvasive health monitoring. As high energy consumption is a crucial challenge in this field, efficient energy harvesting from human motion represents an attractive approach to sustainably power future wearables. Despite intensive research activities, most wearable energy harvesters suffer from complex fabrication procedures, poor robustness, and low power density, making them unsuitable for continuous biosensing. Here, we propose a highly robust, mass-producible, and battery-free wearable platform that efficiently extracts power from body motion through a flexible printed circuit board (FPCB)–based freestanding triboelectric nanogenerator (FTENG). The judiciously engineered FTENG displays a high power output of ~416 mW m−2. Through seamless system integration and efficient power management, we demonstrate a battery-free triboelectrically driven system that is able to power multiplexed sweat biosensors and wirelessly transmit data to the user interfaces through Bluetooth during on-body human trials.
From the moment an athlete gets injured, to the moment they come back to the competition, there are months of rehab behind the scenes. It takes physical and mental strength from the athlete to return from an injury. It also takes a staff of world-class professionals, from athletic trainers to physical therapists, physicians and sports performance coaches, to get the athlete comfortable returning to the sport that got them injured in the first place.
Duke’s athletic medicine department prides itself on the state of the art equipment they’re able to provide to their athletes. But they mostly pride themselves on the group of people working together to achieve the common goal: a recovered athlete.
A unique part about Duke’s program is that all of the athletic trainers, physical therapists and physicians are in-house, meaning athletes don’t have to go to a third-party medical facility to receive treatment. And because of that, athletes are able to build relationships with their medical staff in a way other schools might not.
In just over three weeks’ time, college football has helplessly watched as 22 of its 94 games were postponed or canceled due to COVID-19. That’s an eye-catching 23.4% of its schedule. Remember, four of the 10 FBS leagues (Big Ten, Pac-12, Mountain West, MAC) haven’t played a game. The SEC just started this past weekend.
College basketball’s schedule, 57 days out from the planned Nov. 25 start, could be at even greater risk. If the sport were to have a cancellation/postponement rate that matched college football’s first month, hoops would easily see more than 100 games impacted with a high percentage of them being cancellations as there isn’t one game per week per team and there won’t be makeup dates in the nonconference portion of the schedule.
… With the Tennessee Titans’ headquarters shut down until at least Saturday following a COVID-19 outbreak that consists of four players and five staff members testing positive, Vrabel had to pursue alternate modes of communication while awaiting word on when and if his team would face its next opponent, the Pittsburgh Steelers.
Vrabel knew the NFL would postpone Tennessee’s upcoming contest originally scheduled for Sunday. But he had yet to receive a decisive ruling whether the game would take place Monday or Tuesday.
In the meantime, he wanted to learn his players’ views about facing the Steelers without conventional preparation time.
“I asked them questions, tried to engage with them,” Vrabel said in a news conference.
… The past five years were a harsh education for this group. Their 2-0 victory to eliminate the Dallas Stars, capture the Stanley Cup and officially pop the NHL playoff bubble was their graduation.
In order to raise the Stanley Cup, the Lightning had to lean how not to fumble it away.
“Once you get to the playoffs, the difference in talent between the teams is minimal. It really does come down to resiliency. Taking advantage of the breaks that you get along the way, and overcoming the ones that go against you,” said Lightning GM Julien BriseBois. “Once you have a good enough team to get into the playoffs, it comes down to who is going to find a way.”
… Clubs will have to go deeper into their starting pitching rotations, which will likely help some teams and hurt others. Which teams could benefit, and which might be hurt? Let’s look at this question in a couple of different ways.
First, let’s use FiveThirtyEight’s pitcher ratings, which are based on rolling game scores.1 These scores try to predict how a pitcher will perform in a typical start; they’re not perfect — because of the shortened season this year, performance during the end of last year’s season still contributes to each pitcher’s rating — but they offer a good first cut at the question. We looked for teams that had at least one high-end, ace-type starter and depth — meaning four or more active starters with average-or-better rolling game scores. When examining MLB playoff rotations, there are clear haves and have nots.
In the American League field, the Cleveland Indians, Minnesota Twins and Tampa Bay Rays all appear to enjoy the greatest advantage from the playoff format, based on our criteria.