Joining NFL Network’s Good Morning Football on Tuesday, Smith rejected the idea that he’s too light to dominate in the NFL as he did in college.
“We play football. We’re in a football business. We’re not weightlifting. We’re not bodybuilders,” he retorted when asked about his weight. “It’s football. That’s what we’re here for. All the other stuff is irrelevant.”
The notion that a 6-foot, 170ish pound wide receiver could get pushed around breaks down when watching Smith’s film. He plays with a nuance that doesn’t allow defensive backs to bump him off course. The wideout runs routes with precision to create enormous separation and has excellent hands. Watching Smith play wideout, everything just seems to come easy
Jakob Fuglsang has said he wasted eight years of career by not eating enough.
The Astana rider has compared his own career to that of cycling’s rising stars like Tadej Pogačar and Remco Evenepoel, who are winning at the highest level after just a few short years in the peloton.
Fuglsang, 36, said he feels he would have performed better sooner if he was starting out his career now, but raised questions about how long these young superstars can sustain their current levels of success.
Six-year-old Justin Hilliard skated so fast and was so focused that the loud pleas from his older hockey teammates and chuckles from the crowd could not redirect him from his mission. He was going to score no matter what.
“He didn’t know he was going toward the wrong goal, but he was booking it because he really wanted to score,” said Hilliard’s older brother and teammate, C.J., laughing at the memory. “The goalie was confused. Justin scored. He didn’t feel bad because he’s always positive. He made up for it with two more in the right goal.”
That positive approach and determination is what carried Hilliard through some trying times during his football career, too. In high school, he rose from a fourth-stringer to one of the best prep linebackers in the country. At Ohio State, he persevered through a host of injuries and elevated himself from a special teams performer to a potential mid-round pick in this week’s NFL draft.
Co-coaches Severin Luthi and Ivan Ljubicic weighed in on the 20-time Grand Slam champion’s progress, as he still intends to return to action at the Gonet Geneva Open ahead of Roland Garros.
… On Thursday night, coach Sheldon Keefe started his third-string goaltender (and dressed his fourth-stringer as the backup), filled out a lineup card that didn’t include five or six of his ideal playoff skaters, tested three new defence pairings, jumbled the lines, and still saw his group dominate the Vancouver Canucks in a 4-1 beatdown.
“Guys haven’t played in a couple weeks, and it’s hard to shake off the rust sometimes, but I thought everybody that came in tonight really looked good and helped us win,” said Auston Matthews, after scoring his NHL-best 36th goal and NHL-best 11th game-winner.
Using their final back-to-back of the season as opportunity for load management, the Leafs granted veterans Jake Muzzin, Morgan Rielly and Nick Foligno a night off. Regulars Zach Hyman (knee) and Zach Bogosian (shoulder) are recovering from injury, as is new shutdown centre Riley Nash (lower body).
… “There’s a lot of value in putting yourself out of your comfort zone,” Cook said. “I came here knowing zero French, having to adjust to the culture, the European style of soccer. That’s been really great for my development, both on the field and off.”
Alabama football head coach Nick Saban believes that when NFL teams are evaluating players for the NFL draft, the key tie-breaker is the player’s off-field conduct.
Speaking on a Q&A with the Louisiana Football Coaches Association, Saban explained that he tells players that “And” and “But” are the two most important words when it comes to evaluating prospects.
“They read the player [draft report]. I’ll take a defensive back,” Saban said. “He’s got quick feet, change of direction, got good long speed, can play man-to-man, he’s a good tackler, he’s got toughness, got really good ball judgment and really good ball skills – and, he’s a really good person, he was a leader on the team, he graduated from school, coaches loved him.”
Christian Science Monitor, By Martin A. Davis Jr. from
A viral Instagram post in mid-March by Stanford University performance coach Ali Kershner quickly became national news. One side-by-side photo showing a well-stocked men’s training facility and a grossly underequipped women’s facility made plain the gross inequalities in the most high-profile college sporting event, the NCAA basketball championships.
“That weekend the story broke,” says Jeanne Rankin, director of strength and conditioning at Eastern Connecticut State University, “I was on my phone pushing stuff out [in response], and I was just exhausted. There’s just constant disrespect toward women’s sports.”
Corliss Fingers, director of strength and conditioning at Bethune-Cookman University, understands the frustration but has a more optimistic view. “I think this is going to be a watershed moment,” she says. These inequalities have “always been there, but every opportunity creates new conversations.”
… “It signals to me a modern team,” Kerr said. “This is the modern NBA; guys don’t box out. It’s just the way it is. Every night on League Pass, I see the same thing. Players let guys come in from the weak side, and they think, ‘I’ll just get the rebound.’ It’s a disease that’s rampant in the NBA. The problem is, if you’re a real small team like us, then it’s going to hurt you more than it will hurt other teams.”
… While these two types of box-to-box drills are likely efficient to get players to accumulate a substantial amount of HSR distance (> 600-1500 m) (Buchheit, 2019a), the fact that all players run together prevents a tight individualisation of their (external) mechanical work and in turn, their internal, energetic load.
The consequence of this is that some players may not benefit from the fixed HIIT box-to-box drills as a conditioning stimulus, while others may be overloaded, with large levels of metabolic perturbation and associated increased (neuromuscular) fatigue.
Background Lateral ankle sprains are common in indoor sports. High shoe–surface friction is considered a risk factor for non-contact lateral ankle sprains. Spraino is a novel low-friction patch that can be attached to the outside of sports shoes to minimise friction at the lateral edge, which could mitigate the risk of such injury. We aimed to determine preliminary effectiveness (incidence rate and severity) and safety (harms) of Spraino to prevent lateral ankle sprains among indoor sport athletes.
Methods In this exploratory, parallel-group, two-arm pilot randomised controlled trial, 510 subelite indoor sport athletes with a previous lateral ankle sprain were randomly allocated (1:1) to Spraino or ‘do-as-usual’. Allocation was concealed and the trial was outcome assessor blinded. Match and training exposure, number of injuries and associated time loss were captured weekly via text messages. Information on harms, fear-of-injury and ankle pain was also documented.
Results 480 participants completed the trial. They reported a total of 151 lateral ankle sprains, of which 96 were categorised as non-contact, and 50 as severe. All outcomes favoured Spraino with incidence rate ratios of 0.87 (95% CI 0.62 to 1.23) for all lateral ankle sprains; 0.64 (95% CI 0.42 to 0.98) for non-contact lateral ankle sprains; and 0.47 (95% CI 0.25 to 0.88) for severe lateral ankle sprains. Time loss per injury was also lower in the Spraino group (1.8 vs 2.8 weeks, p=0.014). Six participants reported minor harms because of Spraino.
Conclusion Compared with usual care, athletes allocated to Spraino had a lower risk of lateral ankle sprains and less time loss, with only few reported minor harms. [full text]
… A pair of recent papers in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise explores the topic of heat stress in the Boston Marathon. Boston is a major outlier among marathons, with a traditional start time of noon that was changed in 2007 to 10 A.M. for the first wave of the mass start—still much later than most races. One of the papers, from a team led by sports science consultant Samuel Cheuvront, analyzes weather data from 1995 to 2016 to conclude that runners were 1.4 times more likely to face conditions associated with exertional heat illness—a spectrum that includes cramping, heat exhaustion, and heatstroke—with the old start time compared to the new one.
That seems entirely logical. But the other paper, from a team led by sports medicine physician Rebecca Breslow, digs into the actual heatstroke data from Boston Marathon medical records and ends up with a more complicated picture, both in terms of who gets heatstroke and what factors contribute to it.
… [Tim] Leiweke and [Ron] Francis were among a group that toured the revamped arena last week. Oh yes, a new training facility is part of the package, too.
“It’s an incredible building,” Francis said. “Our fans are absolutely going to love watching a hockey game in there. We’re more than comfortable that the building is going to be ready when the season should be starting in October. I certainly hope we can open with a full building. I certainly hope by then everybody’s vaccinated, and this pandemic is behind us.”
Pro Football Focus, Cade Massey and Zach Drapkin from
… Let us introduce The Fortune Teller’s Chart.
This chart is based on what actually happens in the future. It tells you how much the first pick is worth, relative to all other picks, if you were granted the best player in the draft. And we mean the best, not the player who is forecast to be the best. After playing for a few years and picking up a second contract (or not), what are they worth? This is a trade chart without uncertainty.
Making Sense Of: Post-Pandemic Youth Sports
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel newspaper has a two-article package on problematic aspects of Wisconsin youth sports. One problem is injuries. The other is diversity. I believe that the two are related.
St. Louis Public Radio described the effort that St. Louis FC is making to create an equitable, diverse youth academy. The team’s Sporting Director, Lutz Pfannenstiel, told the reporter that “it will take five to seven years to develop more equitable access to the sport in the region.” To reach that goal, the club “plans to provide free community training to kids under 13, create more green spaces in neighborhoods and develop programs to train coaches at high schools and other youth clubs.”
Stats from the public radio report: less than 5% of Missouri youth soccer players receive financial aid needed to participate; almost 300 athletes tried out for 46 spots in the St. Louis FC free-to-play academy. From the Journal Sentinel: Wisconsin “recreational soccer leagues lost as much as 60% of their players in the last year, while the club/travel levels dropped only 10%.”
There’s an enormous gap separating incomes and participation. The 5-7 year timeframe for St. Louis FC to work out of it shows how much effort it will take. The club’s plan for fields and coaches’ training is a mere band-aid when evidence of social determinants of health show that low-income is, by itself, a challenge to healthy living. And in many places Covid-19 has increased the challenge.
Wealthier athletes see increases in injuries due to overtraining and an underclass of wannabe-but-can’t athletes don’t see the playing field. Rush University Medical Center in Chicago serves both low- and high-income neighborhoods, and sees a twenty-year difference in life expectancy between them. The Center recently made health equity it’s top strategic objective. There’s a reason why equity is the right thing to do; it’s also the path to improvement.