The NHL is targeting a Jan. 1 start date for next season, commissioner Gary Bettman said Tuesday.
In an interview with NHL Network, Bettman reiterated that the league hopes to play a full 82-game season and have fans in arenas. Bettman said planning discussions with the NHL Players’ Association will begin shortly after the free-agency period, which begins Friday.
On Tuesday, the 19-year-old consolidated her win over top-seeded Simona Halep with a straight-set victory over Trevisan at Roland Garros [video, pre-ad + 1:34]
After crafting a comprehensive game plan that required extensive preparation and intense discipline, the NBA appears on the verge of celebrating something more important than its league championship.
In about a week, the NBA will finish its resumed season at a quarantined campus during a pandemic that yielded zero announced infections among players, coaches and staff members. But commissioner Adam Silver faces another challenging goal in the coming weeks as the league determines what next season looks like while the nation continues to see a surge in positive cases.
“I know that Adam is hoping we’re going to have fans,” said Tarek O. Souryal, the medical director at Texas Sports Medicine who previously worked as an NBA physician. “But right now, I think it’s too early to tell.”
Professional basketball is evolving towards playing more matches, reaching up to 90 games per season.1 Because of this, the players’ training should help them to endure training loads on a regular basis, reduce the injury risk, mitigate fatigue symptoms, as well as achieving an optimal performance throughout the season.
That is why, according to the team’s game style and the players’ characteristics, physical demands will vary, and personalised training focused on boosting the game’s particular aspects will be required. In other words, the demands of a team with a “slow and exploratory” style will be different from the demands of a team with a greater pace in the game, with the implications this entails at a physical level and in decision-making. In this sense, monitoring physical demands in both training sessions and matches have become an important task to prescribe and monitor training sessions.
The aim of this study was to identify young elite athletes’ personality profiles using a person-centered approach, and to investigate whether the profiles significantly differ in stress and sleep. 260 athletes from a variety of sports completed a questionnaire package to assess neuroticism and conscientiousness traits, stress appraisals (i.e. intensity and directional interpretation of stress, challenge and threat appraisals), and various indicators of sleep (i.e. sleep quality, social jet lag, Ford insomnia response to stress test (FIRST)). A latent profile analysis (LPA) approach was used to identify personality profiles based on the scores of neuroticism and conscientiousness. A multivariate analysis of variance was performed to examine if the athletes belonging to different personality profiles differ on stress appraisals and indicators of sleep. Three profiles emerged: Maladaptive profile (high levels of conscientiousness and neuroticism); Highly adaptive profile (moderate level of conscientiousness and low level of neuroticism); Adaptive profile (high level of conscientiousness and moderate level of neuroticism). Results showed that athletes from the adaptive profile reported significantly lower scores of stress intensity and threat appraisal than those from other profiles. Athletes from the maladaptive profile reported significantly higher levels of FIRST than those from other profiles as well as worse sleep quality and lower levels of challenge appraisal than the athletes from the highly adaptive profile. These results suggest that investigating personality profile may be useful in identifying athletes at higher risk of stress sensitivity and worsening sleep that are likely to benefit from preventive actions (e.g. cognitive behavioural therapy interventions).
Introduction Initially described in a sports context in ice hockey in 1985, the relative age effect (RAE) refers to the performance advantages of youth born in the first quarter of the birth year when trying-out for select, age-restricted sports. The competitive advantage bestowed to the relatively older athlete in their age band is the result of the older athlete being more physically and emotionally mature. These more mature players will likely go on to be exposed to better coaching, competition, teammates and facilities in their respective sport.
Objectives Our study sought to characterise the ubiquity of this effect by examining the birth distribution of some of the world’s most elite athletes, Olympians.
Methods We extended the exploration of the RAE beyond specific sports by examining the birth quarter of over 44 000 Olympic athlete’s birthdates, born between 1964 and 1996. Our hypothesis was that the RAE would be prominent in both Olympic athletes as a whole and in selected subcategories of athletes.
Results and Conclusion The fractions of births in the first versus the fourth quarter were significantly different (p<0.001) from each other for the summer and winter Olympians, ball and non-ball sports, and team as well as individual sports. This significant difference was not gender specific. We found the general existence of the RAE in Olympic athletes regardless of global classification. Our findings suggest that coaching staff should be cognisant of the RAE when working with young athletes and should take relative age into consideration when evaluating a burgeoning athlete’s abilities. [full text]
… A recent study, Elite Women Coaches in Global Football, describes a sport where men have “dominated coaching for so long that they have become synonymous with what it means to be a coach”. Women coaches, it found, “exist in a system where they lack power, often do not feel supported or valued, and [which] leads them to experience many negative occupational, social and psychological outcomes”.
Look around your local club: even the most junior coaching roles are somehow the preserve of dads, despite the ever-present “soccer mums” lurking on the sidelines. My own experience was one of sudden invisibility when well-meaning club officials came looking for volunteer parents. What was missing from my football CV that I couldn’t hold a whistle in a pre-schoolers’ kickabout?
Women as coaches are indeed football’s blind spot.
Myant Inc., a global pioneer in textile computing, has unveiled concept designs for connected PPE that utilize VOC sensing, enabling new ways of holistically assessing health and performance as part of an expanding interconnected system of biometric garments being realized by the company.
Their compact Hyperspectral Stripe Projector (HSP) is a step toward a new method to collect the spatial and spectral information required for self-driving cars, machine vision, crop monitoring, surface wear and corrosion detection, and other uses.
“I can envision this technology in the hands of a farmer, or on a drone, to look at a field and see not only the nutrients and water content of plants but also, because of the 3D aspect, the height of the crops,” says Kevin Kelly, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at Rice University’s Brown School of Engineering. “Or perhaps it can look at a painting and see the surface colors and texture in detail, but with near-infrared also see underneath to the canvas.”
As a volleyball student-athlete at the University of Denver, Dr. Julia Cawthra resisted initially when her coach required each team member to schedule a session with the program’s sport psychologist.
The meeting, however, opened her mind.
“After having that conversation, I started to realize more and more in my games, in practices and even in weightlifting, how much my thoughts were impacting what I was doing,” she said. “When I finally asked for help, I realized I don’t have to do it all on my own.”
There are several supplements to improve sports performance. However, only a few of them are scientifically proven to be effective. Caffeine is probably one of the most consumed substances by the adult population in general, and interestingly, one of the most contrasted ergogenic aids.
The benefits of caffeine in performance
Besides bringing certain benefits to health, caffeine could improve performance through central and peripheral mechanisms. For example, it boosts the nervous system activation increasing the production of catecholamines and endorphins, and activating the muscles.1 Moreover, it has been suggested that caffeine could partly attenuate the feeling of pain, which would increase tolerance of highly intense training.
No Grass in the Clouds newsletter, Ryan O'Hanlon from
Sam Goldberg had just been laid off by the Chicago Cubs due to the coronavirus pandemic. Michael Imburgio was working on his PhD in Cognition & Cognitive Neuroscience. They’d never met, never even heard of each other — until Sam reached out after seeing something Michael wrote for the site American Soccer Analysis. A couple months later, they’d still never met and hadn’t even exchanged a phone call, but hundreds of emails back and forth produced a model that makes some bold claims about the soccer world: We can tell how valuable your players are; all you need is publicly available data. Oh, and you’re thinking about positions all wrong, too.
Meet “Determining Added Value of Individual Effectiveness including Style”, or rather: DAVIES. You already know about Goals Added — and if you don’t, go read the interview I did with John Muller about the model built by American Soccer Analysis that figures out the value of every action a player takes, adds them up, and determines — you guessed it — how many goals a player adds to his team’s performance. Equipped with that info, Goldberg and Imburgio tried to create a model that closely mirrored the results of Goals Added but only used easily accessible data. They wanted their model to be useful to clubs that can’t afford more expensive data packages — and they wanted people like you and me to be able to access it, too. Which we can; it’s all right here.
Duke University, The Chronicle, Andrew Griffin from
A Friday panel tackled a major debate in the world of college sports today: the rights of student-athletes and how they should be compensated.
The event was attended by several professors and two United States senators, including former presidential candidate Cory Booker (D-NJ). Moderated by David Duncan, co-president of the Duke Sports and Entertainment Law Society, and Zack Flagel, director of Duke’s Future College Sports Initiative, the event kicked off with a brief overview of the NCAA’s battle to address student-athletes’ rights and compensation in a clear and systematic way.
“The attacks on the structure of NCAA regulation have come in two forms,” said Paul Haagen, a professor at the School of Law, including antitrust lawsuits and “increasingly, in state-level legislation aimed at enjoining the NCAA from preventing athletes from monetizing their athletic fame by entering into name, image and likeness—or NIL—contracts.”
The NFL is waging a war against the inherent physical dangers of football. So consider the recent drop in NFL onside kick recovery percentage collateral damage.
The root of the recent changes to the kickoff process in pro football is the NFL’s effort to make what statistically is the most dangerous play in the sport less perilous. The league claimed concussions suffered on kickoff plays dropped 35 percent in 2018 after it tweaked the rules in the name of player safety. Yet the onside kick recovery rate dropped even more than the concussion rate.
