From his youth soccer days to helping Maryland win the College Cup to emerging as a top defender in Major League Soccer with D.C. United, 22-year-old Clarksville native Donovan Pines has always taken the same principle to the playing field.
“I try not to overthink things too much because it’s a game I love and play every day,” he said. “I try to take it as more of a game/practice perspective, always going in wanting to do my very best because you always want to see growth and you can’t squander opportunities. So I always want to seize the moment whatever moment that is.”
… Bird, a 17-year WNBA veteran, will wait for the rest of Seattle’s salary cap situation — including with core player Natasha Howard — to resolve itself before her deal is signed.
Diana Taurasi, a 16-year vet, re-signed a multiyear deal with the Phoenix Mercury on Monday. That both would stay with the franchises that drafted them was a forgone conclusion, but their situations are different. Phoenix’s cap situation is less tight, so Taurasi’s deal could go ahead.
Both, as is the case with other WNBA stars over the years, historically have taken a little less money to help their teams keep other talent — which raises this question: Does the WNBA need its own Bird exception to the salary cap? Some insiders say it should be considered.
That would allow players such as Bird and Taurasi — two of the WNBA’s most iconic players who have spent their entire pro careers, with a combined seven championships, in Seattle and Phoenix — to sign deals that somewhat exceed the salary cap.
Sidney Crosby loves playing hockey. The more games crammed together for the Pittsburgh Penguins longtime captain, the better.
Getting some unexpected time off after a COVID-19 outbreak among the New Jersey Devils forced their visit to Pittsburgh this week to be postponed is less than ideal. Then again, Crosby is well aware that nothing in a pandemic is ideal, so the Penguins will adapt on the fly and see how it goes.
The break gives Pittsburgh a chance to catch its breath following a whirlwind stretch both on the ice and off. The season’s first three weeks have brought the abrupt resignation of general manager Jim Rutherford, a steady stream of defensemen to the injured list and now the first of what could very well be multiple COVID-19 interruptions.
Road trips in the NBA these days are somewhere between dreadful and boring. Favorite restaurants are off limits. Hanging out with friends or old teammates is difficult or impossible. Leaving the hotels for anything other than games and practices is pretty much a no-no, all in the interest of safety during the pandemic.
The plus side: There’s more winning than usual.
Home-court advantage this season in the NBA is basically nonexistent. Through Monday, home teams were winning 51.7% of the time — on pace to be the lowest such rate in NBA history.
… College soccer didn’t get the games in, at least not the complete season and the College Cup tournament. Instead, college soccer is moving from a fall sport to a spring one. The Atlantic Coast Conference and Sun Belt Conference both played an abbreviated fall season. Clemson ultimately captured the ACC, while Coastal Carolina won the Sun Belt Conference. The rest remained idle, leaving little opportunity for scouting in advance of the MLS SuperDraft. For the collegiate game, the move to spring even for one season represents a major change.
A dozen conferences will kick off on Wednesday, although some like the Ivy League have opted not to hold a season during the current academic year after classes went remote. As a result, the College Cup will feature 36 teams, a scaled-back tournament than the usual 48. May 17 is the new date to crown a national champion, capping off what the NCAA said is “important to try to give students that championship experience.”
Overtime, a multimedia sports company, is planning to launch a semi-professional basketball league that will provide compensation for high school basketball prospects, multiple sources tell 247Sports.
The expectation is that Overtime will announce the league this month with the goal to begin competition September of 2021, sources told 247Sports.
You’d never think that Tessa Virtue had any self-doubt. But the recently-retired Canadian ice dancer—and most decorated female Olympic figure skater in history—remembers worrying about falling in front of judges, despite the countless hours she spent practicing. “The moments of uncertainty, self-doubt, stress, pressure, and anxiety are endless as an athlete,” says Virtue.
To succeed as a professional athlete, it takes not just physical strength, but also mental strength. Virtue credits her ability to manage her negative thoughts to Jean François Ménard, mental performance coach and public speaker. “His approach ensured I not only expected nerves, but rather embraced and practiced handling them,” says Virtue.
Ménard’s coping strategies aren’t just reserved for athletes ahead of a game or performance. Virtue also applies Ménard’s advice to her everyday life, when facing worries during the pandemic. “Crafting healthy routines, being comfortable within the uncomfortable, and celebrating little wins are three pillars I have held onto (tightly),” says Virtue.
The aim of the study was to examine the test-retest reliability and agreement across methods for assessing individual force-velocity (FV) profiles of the lower limbs in athletes. Using a multicenter approach, 27 male athletes completed all measurements for the main analysis, with up to 82 male and female athletes on some measurements. The athletes were tested twice before and twice after a 2- to 6-month period of regular training and sport participation. The double testing sessions were separated by ~1 week. Individual FV-profiles were acquired from incremental loading protocols in squat jump (SJ), countermovement jump (CMJ) and leg press. A force plate, linear encoder and a flight time calculation method were used for measuring force and velocity during SJ and CMJ. A linear regression was fitted to the average force and velocity values for each individual test to extrapolate the FV-variables: theoretical maximal force (F0), velocity (V0), power (Pmax), and the slope of the FV-profile (SFV). Despite strong linearity (R2>0.95) for individual FV-profiles, the SFV was unreliable for all measurement methods assessed during vertical jumping (coefficient of variation (CV): 14–30%, interclass correlation coefficient (ICC): 0.36–0.79). Only the leg press exercise, of the four FV-variables, showed acceptable reliability (CV:3.7–8.3%, ICC:0.82–0.98). The agreement across methods for F0 and Pmax ranged from (Pearson r): 0.56–0.95, standard error of estimate (SEE%): 5.8–18.8, and for V0 and SFV r: -0.39–0.78, SEE%: 12.2–37.2. With a typical error of 1.5 cm (5–10% CV) in jump height, SFV and V0 cannot be accurately obtained, regardless of the measurement method, using a loading range corresponding to 40–70% of F0. Efforts should be made to either reduce the variation in jumping performance or to assess loads closer to the FV-intercepts. Coaches and researchers should be aware of the poor reliability of the FV-variables obtained from vertical jumping, and of the differences across measurement methods. [full text]
… Levels is a continuous glucose monitor that connects to your smartphone and monitors, tracks, and records your blood sugar levels 24/7. It’s the first gadget of its kind that is available to anyone.
Organic Robotics Corporation (ORC) won the top award among four finalists in the Innovations to Advance Athlete Health and Safety category, which featured pitches for products designed to improve player health and safety. ORC won $50,000 for its submission, a Light Lace™ sensor designed to use light to measure muscle fatigue and respiration. The stretchable sensor can be integrated into garments or even helmets, and the information generated aims to help athletes and training staff better assess injury risk factors while optimizing performance.
The runner-up in the Innovations category was Genesis Helmets, Inc., a helmet company applying its proprietary computational modeling and patented technology to try to create better-performing football helmets. Genesis Helmets, Inc. won $25,000.
During its pandemic season, the National Football League found that people can transmit the coronavirus in fewer than 15 minutes of interaction with others, according to a new report published Monday by the CDC.
Four major factors played into COVID-19 transmission: whether masks were worn, how well the room was ventilated, how long the interaction lasted and the distance between the people.
“The most impactful interventions were universal use of face masks, holding meetings outside and minimizing in-person meetings, closing dining rooms — those all have broad applicability outside of football,” Allen Sills, MD, the NFL chief medical officer, told NFL.com.
There’s no one-size-fits-all diet. If you want to avoid spiking your blood sugar with a snack, a banana may seem like a better choice than a sugary cookie. But some people in a 2015 study of 800 Israeli volunteers got their biggest blood sugar spike from bananas or bread instead of from sugar-laden baked goods. And as nutrition scientist Elizabeth Parks of the University of Missouri, Columbia, notes, “We all know people who lose weight easily, and others who don’t.”
Now, the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) is making a major push to understand these individual differences. Last week, the agency announced what it calls the largest study yet to probe “precision nutrition,” a $156 million, 5-year effort to examine how 10,000 Americans process foods by collecting data ranging from continuous blood glucose levels to microbes in a person’s gut.
The study “has the potential to truly transform the field of nutrition science,” generating new tools, methods, and “a wealth of data to fuel discovery science for years to come,” Griffin Rodgers, director of the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), said last year at an NIH board meeting where he introduced the project. Ultimately, it might enable nutritionists to tailor diets to an individual’s genes and microbiome.
The purpose of this study was to examine if relative age effects (RAEs) or the unequal birth-date distribution among a cohort group of individuals exist in Major League Baseball (MLB) draftees. This study comprised 7,078 men drafted in the MLB first-year player draft from 2013 to 2018. Data collected for each draftee included birth date, year drafted, academic-level classification, position, round drafted, batting side, and throwing arm. Draftee’s birth dates were categorized into quarters based on the calendar year for baseball in the United States (Q1: August-October; Q2: November-January; Q3: February-April; Q4: May-July). Player birth-date distributions were compared with average expected birth-date distributions and evaluated with the χ2 goodness of fit statistic. Significant χ2 tests were followed up by calculating the standardized residual for each quarter. Differences from the expected frequencies were found for the overall group (p < 0.001) with standardized residuals for baseball athletes born in Q1 (z = +4.45) and Q3 (z = -4.15) exceeding ±2.0. Similar patterns were noted for high schoolers (Q1: z = +3.30; Q3: z = -3.28), pitchers (Q1: z = +2.78; Q3: z = -3.12), early middle rounders (Q1: z = +3.08; Q3: z = -2.67), late rounders (Q1: z = +2.70; Q3: z = -2.61), right-side hitters (Q1: z = +3.23; Q3: z = -2.26), left-handed pitchers (Q1: z = + 2.12; Q3: z = -2.59), and right-handed positional players (Q1: z = +3.12; Q3: z = -2.12). Consistent with the majority of previous research, RAEs are apparent in MLB draftees, with specific patterns of unequal distribution among subsets of athletes.
The arrival of Johan Cruyff as FC Barcelona’s coach in 1988 caused a revolution in the way the game is understood and footballers are trained. One of his best-remembered comments was that: “All coaches talk about movement, about running a lot. I don’t think players need to run that much. Football is a game that’s played with the brain. You have to be in the right place at the right time, not too early and not too late”.1 His focus on possession of the ball and the use of space and superiority in numbers reduced the importance of physical performance in the game. In another quote, he noted: “My forwards should only run 15 metres”.