[Taj] Gibson, having played for Thibodeau at all three stops in his coaching career in Chicago, Minnesota and now New York, can spot one of his own.
“A tough guy,” Gibson explained. “A tough dude, man. Because when you’re a Thibs Guy that just shows that he can count on you. Ups and downs, highs and lows, you know that he believes in you and he believes that you can go in there and help the team overcome — through injuries, through it all. It’s being a tough-minded guy, fight for the team.”
… Flach, 20, was purchased in March by Philadelphia from St. Pauli for reportedly around $350,000. Thus far he has looked like a bargain.
“It was a big step for me,” Flach told ASN. “I think everyone here made it really easy for me, the team, the coaching staff, for sure.”
The move from St. Pauli in the 2.Bundesliga to Philadelphia came at a time when Flach was beginning to earn first team minutes at St. Pauli – and as a former German youth international – was one of their better prospects.
… The women’s 1,500 makes its Olympic debut in Tokyo, and it’s Ledecky’s strongest event. But getting to the final will require that she compete in the 200 and 1,500 preliminary heats in the same evening session, Then assuming she qualifies, the finals of both events are in the same session a day later.
“I would point out that the men do not have that double, so any male swimmer who wants to compete in all [the freestyle] events does not have to double,” Ledecky stated during a Team USA Media Summit in April.
Further, should Ledecky qualify to compete in the 200, 400, 800, 1,500 and 4×200 freestyle relay in Tokyo, she will race a total of 6,200 meters over the course of seven days. When Michael Phelps won eight Olympic gold medals at the 2008 Beijing Games, he swam about half this distance (3,300 meters) in eight days.
After training in Ethiopia, an elite marathoner starts to learn their success stems as much from how they approach running as from what they do in training.
Aaron Trunt is a biomechanist at the Sanford Sports Science Institute who has been steering the Augustana Vikings baseball program’s pitchers toward the best they can be.
So far their best has been excellent. It’s not all about biomechanics, of course, but enough of it is to be curious about what is going on at the SSSI in respect to throwing a baseball.
To start with, what does a biomechanist do?
In Trunt’s words: “We talk about the way that the body produces forces and torques and how that can either have injury risk indications or improved performance.”
Since Mary Cain spoke out about the Nike Oregon Project in 2019, a growing wave of young runners have come forward with their own allegations of negligent coaching and toxic team cultures across the sport
Tony Strudwick is leaving Sheffield Wednesday after two years to become Head of Academy Performance at Arsenal.
He effectively replaces Des Ryan, who left the Gunners last month after eight years as Head of Academy Sports Medicine and Athletic Development to become Director of Coaching and Performance at Setanta College.
Strudwick, who will continue in his part-time role as Head of Performance with the Wales national team, is a heavyweight appointment by Academy Manager Per Mertesacker.
… Rather than solely relying on the patients’ subjective assessment of their mental health, [Farzan] Sasangohar and his team also developed a whole suite of software for automatized hyperarousal analysis that can be easily installed on smartphones and smartwatches. These programs gather input from face and voice recognition applications and sensors already built in smartwatches, such as heart rate sensors and pedometers. The data from all of these sources then train machine-learning algorithms to recognize patterns that are aligned with the normal state of arousal. Once trained, the algorithms can continuously look at readings coming from the sensors and recognition applications to determine if an individual is in an elevated arousal state.
With the return to FIFA World Cup qualifiers on the horizon, it felt time to give a more detailed look at the series of projects which Victoria University and TRACK were commissioned to do by FIFA.
The project was designed to create a transparent overview of the different accuracies of various electronic performance tracking systems, in order to create minimum standards for athlete tracking technologies. Identifying what systems are out there, what accuracies these systems have and being transparent about the findings was important for both global football stakeholders, as well as FIFA’s invested interest as a tournament organiser.
Victoria University and TRACK were chosen by FIFA to conduct these projects as we “offered a practical research approach” and are “one of the few universities in the world which are capable of conducting a research project of this scale”.
The NFL announced on Wednesday sweeping changes to its protocols for players who have been fully vaccinated against COVID-19, which largely allow vaccinated players to go back to pre-pandemic normal at work, while unvaccinated players will have to continue with the restrictions put in place to deal with the pandemic during the 2020 season.
The new protocols, which were forged in an agreement this week with the NFL Players Association, were relayed to owners during a virtual meeting on Wednesday. Fully vaccinated players will no longer have to be tested daily, will not have to wear masks at team facilities, will not be subject to quarantine after exposure to a COVID-positive individual, will have no travel restrictions, may eat in the team cafeteria and use the sauna and steam room. They also will not be subject to capacity limits in the weight room and will be allowed to interact with vaccinated family and friends during travel.
A new report claims that a dietary tool can be used to simultaneously reduce unhealthy eating and climate change impacts. The “double-pyramid”, which takes into account cultural differences in the consumption of food, has already been used with success in areas such as Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, and Latin America, researchers say.
… On Aug. 5, 2018, Bielsa’s Leeds kicked down the doors of the Championship and announced that this was no gimmick. Hosting Stoke City at Elland Road – a team freshly relegated from the top flight and armed with one of the second tier’s best squads, Leeds made their case not by the weight of the 3-1 scoreline but for the way in which they had played. From the team who had finished 13th the previous season, this version was unrecognisable in its redeeming features. Bielsa’s 4-1-4-1 system was characterised by its vibrancy in possession and ferocity without it; an attacking style that was unique in the Championship, and far beyond the consensus capabilities of the squad that he had inherited.
Perhaps the most seductive aspect of Leeds’ victory was the fact that only one player in the starting XI against Stoke had been signed under Bielsa. That was left back Barry Douglas. Besides the Scot, the other 10 players had all spanned at least two previous managers at the club. And then there was the array of positional changes: Pablo Hernández moved to an inverted wide role, Mateusz Klich switched from a deep-lying midfielder to an attacking No. 8, Kemar Roofe was suddenly a hard-pressing centre forward, and Kalvin Phillips — a player whose seven league goals in 2017-18 were surpassed by only two teammates – was sent in the opposite direction to become a defensive midfielder.
Between the personnel and existing style, it was a remarkable transformation within the space of a few summer months: the type that most managers would have been allowed the rope to instil over the course of multiple years, never mind a single pre-season. As the weeks turned to months, with their evolution continuing to roll, Leeds’ new project looked like it could at last be the defining one.
For this week’s review of sports news, let’s look at two different developments side by side: FIFA’s year-long study of the global talent development ecosystem, launched just last week, and Genius Sports’ $200 million acquisition of optical tracking provider Second Spectrum, announced earlier this month. Data is central to both: an increasingly developed data landscape enabled FIFA’s deeply insightful findings, which point to talent development as global football’s next frontier. And Genius Sports’ acquisition of Second Spectrum shows the value of the data collection tools that forward-thinking organizations will use to reach that frontier.
Taken together, these developments portend a tectonic change for the beautiful game, as a growing number of formerly disadvantaged communities gain greater access to powerful analytical tools. Let’s dig in to see how.
