… “It’s always a big shock to leave United as I had been there for over 10 years so it’s basically all I had known,” [Sam] Hewson says. “But I also knew one day this could happen if I didn’t manage to break into the first team.
“I had a lot of niggling injuries when I left United so that didn’t help with trying to get a club. My friend had some factory work and asked me to help so I said I would, just to try and see if it was for me.
“I didn’t mind the work, but it did give me a kick up the bum to get my football back on track. I signed for Altrincham because I needed game time and to get myself in shape after the injuries. I enjoyed my time there, it is a really nice club.”
… “I think that definitely got our guys attention if we didn’t have it before,” Bucks forward Khris Middleton said of the closure in Portland. “We definitely have to be smart. We have to be cautious. We have to be safe because it is a real problem. It is a real pandemic going on right now, even if it doesn’t seem like it when we’re out on the court.
“Once we step off this court, we have to do the right things. Not just for ourselves, but for the people around us.”
Over the summer, a physiologist named Karlman Wasserman, formerly of UCLA, passed away at the age of 93. The name may not ring a bell, but you can consider your next threshold workout an unofficial tribute to one of the giants of the field. He’s the guy who’s credited with coming up with the idea of the “anaerobic threshold” back in the 1960s—a concept that originally seemed straightforward, but that in the half-century since has turned out to be endlessly controversial and confusing.
As it happens, the Journal of Physiology recently published a massive new overview of this tangled history, called “The Anaerobic Threshold: 50+ Years of Controversy,” by four of the most prominent researchers in the field, David Poole, Harry Rossiter, George Brooks, and Bruce Gladden. The main takeaway from the paper is that, contrary to the hand-waving explanations we’ve all heard, the anaerobic threshold does not represent the point at which you’re exercising so hard that your muscles can no longer get enough oxygen. What, if anything, it does represent is the topic of the other 73 pages of the paper. It’s heavy sledding, but here are a few of the highlights I took from it.
Level up your game with High Performance Academy! This unique program includes exclusive insights and instruction from Olympians, Paralympians, coaches and others like USA Volleyball Chief of Sport, Peter Vint. [video, 1:38]
Enjoyed using @1080motion
to get some LV Profiles on a few of the boys yesterday. Also thank you to @les7spellman
and @jb_morin
, @mathlacome
for the support on helping us sort out this process
EurekAlert! Science News, Washington State University from
States with college teams in strong conferences, in particular the Southeastern Conference (SEC), were among the last to take up regulations on youth concussions, according to a recent study. The study, which investigated the association between youth sport participation and passage of concussion legislation, uncovered the importance of SEC affiliation, and found a similar connection in states with high rates of high school football participation.
In contrast, states with higher gender equality, measured by the number of women in the labor force, were early adopters.
Washington State University sociologists Thomas Rotolo and Michael Lengefeld, a recent WSU Ph.D. now at Goucher College, analyzed the wave of youth concussion laws from 2007 to 2014, specifically looking at return-to-play guidelines: a mandated 24-hour wait period before sending a player with a possible concussion back on to the field.
Ask any player if they want to be substituted at any time and I suspect they would say no.
You don’t want to come off and as a player you need to have that mentality to be able to go through the pain barrier because to make it to the top you must be able to answer a lot of mental and physical questions, so I totally get why some professionals are of the opinion they are best-placed to decide their fate after a head injury.
I remember playing on with a bandage around my head for Chelsea in the FA Cup third round against West Brom at Stamford Bridge the year we won the competition in 1997 under Ruud Gullit. It’s what we did.
… GQ: Financially, how dire would the consequences have been if the season had to be canceled?
Adam Silver: I mean, I wouldn’t use the word dire, only because I tend to look at our business over a longer-term horizon. Even though we had an opportunity, of course, to restart the season, the financial implications are still pretty traumatic. The players will still take a significant pay cut, and most of our teams will also lose significant amounts of money—not just from their NBA team but [also from their] arenas and all of those nights that have remained dark. Again, I’m trying to take a longer-term perspective and with a recognition that this too shall pass, whether it takes another six months for a vaccine to be widely distributed or it takes another year to get back up and running. Meanwhile, we’re watching what’s happening around the world. For example, we have Game 4 of the Finals taking place on Tuesday night in Orlando. So on Wednesday morning in Shanghai, in fact, there is a viewing party at an arena where they’re going to have 5,000 fans, and they’re comfortable doing that. They have protocols for doing that.
As the Miami Heat gear up for another run toward the NBA Finals this season, they do so after the shortest turnaround from the end of one season to the beginning of another in history.
After just seven weeks off following the loss to the Los Angeles Lakers in the NBA Finals in mid-October, the Heat enter into the 2020-21 campaign trying to build up a fresh supply of physical and emotional energy needed to maintain consistency on the league’s highest level.
As an organization, the Heat pride themselves on not using excuses — and as the proud team heads into an unprecedented season, Heat coach Erik Spoelstra is trying to accentuate the positives surrounding these circumstances.
Following a yearlong reexamination of college sports, the Knight Commission on Intercollegiate Athletics has recommended a significant restructuring of the Division I model, taking particular aim at the NCAA’s relationship with the top-tier Football Bowl Subdivision. Among the three major recommendations from the group of university and athletics administrators and education experts, the most drastic was the proposed formation of a new governing entity for football at the FBS level, splitting the sport’s most lucrative programs from the NCAA entirely.
Under the proposal, the NCAA would continue to govern all other sports in a reorganized Division I system, including the second-tier FCS football. Schools with FBS football programs would remain part of the NCAA in all other sports, but would lose some of their current revenue distributions from the March Madness basketball tournament. They would, however, hypothetically have a chance to grow their own already massive revenues from football as a separate entity.
Since mid-2015, when the recent Phillies hit their lowest point — bad, expensive and with a barren farm system — they have had four managers, not to mention five hitting instructors and five pitching coaches. “Managers,” Roger Angell once wrote, “are changed whenever it becomes apparent that something must be done, even though it is almost always plain that nothing can be done.”
But general managers are different. They’re changed when it’s apparent something must be done and something can be done — which, these days, usually means tearing everything down, getting the team to be as bad as possible and then rebuilding. New GMs generally come with five-year leashes and five-year plans, and that plan is both demanding and forgiving: They don’t have to build five good teams, just one — the one that’s playing at the end of the rebuild.
The Phillies hired Matt Klentak for that rebuild at the end of 2015. Like bank robbers digging underground to reach a vault from below, the Phillies dug and dug and dug — but when they emerged from their tunnel, they were in the Rite-Aid bathroom across the street from the bank. To date, they are the first team in what we might call baseball’s tanking era to fail at it.
… Interest in collective behaviour is not new. It’s been the research subject of organisation scholars, anthropologists, economists, ethologists studying group-living animals and evolutionary biologists interested in the evolution of cooperation. And, of course, it’s the chief occupation of coaches and managers building teams across a wide range of sports. Although many of us believe a team is more than just the sum of its outstanding individual performers, this kind of simple-minded thinking still dominates recruitment and team assembly in sports, finance, academia and other settings.
Part of the reason why recruiters and others resort to going after the best players rather than building the best team is that it remains unclear what other factors contribute to team greatness, and how to quantify them. Moreover, simply recruiting the best players is fairly straightforward, and some analyses suggest this approach might even be the most reliable: as the sociologist Duncan Watts and colleagues argued, overall talent level is often the single best predictor of team performance. Yet we shouldn’t be lured into thinking overall talent is the best predictor because it is the most important factor. It might be the best predictor because we’re not yet good at capturing the nuance of collective dynamics. Hints that this could be the case come from studies such as that of the management scholar Satyam Mukherjee and colleagues, in which they found that prior shared success can predict performance above and beyond what would be expected from the group’s composition and talent.
These seemingly at-odds results raise the question: how does a collective work exactly?
