Eagles offensive lineman Andre Dillard was asked last week about the competition with Jordan Mailata for the starting left tackle spot and speculation Dillard will end up on the trading block should he lose said competition.
“I haven’t heard anything because I don’t have any social media anymore as of last year,” said Dillard, the Eagles’ 2019 first-round pick out of Washington State, who has faced sharp criticism since arriving in Philadelphia for having not yet lived up to expectations. He started four games as a rookie, with mixed results, then missed all of last season after tearing his biceps in late August.
“I try not to pay attention to any of that stuff because it’s all noise. My job is to just keep my head down and work.”
Kevin Durant deleted the image a while ago. It was from June 12, 2019, the morning he announced on Instagram that he had surgery to repair a ruptured right Achilles’ tendon.
He looked somber and vulnerable, resting in a hospital bed with tubes in his nose and wearing a light blue gown in place of a basketball uniform. An IV bag hung in the left corner of the frame. Durant stared into the camera exhausted, numb.
“I’m hurting deeply,” he wrote, “but I’m OK.”
Later, he made his intentions clear: “It’s going to be a journey, but I’m built for this. I’m a hooper.”
Whether positively or negatively, our bodies help shape our identity throughout our lives. We have lots of choices about our appearance and whether we play sports, but nature and physical development can challenge us. As a result, our relationship to our bodies and athleticism can affect our psychological wellbeing, competitiveness, and more.
The University of Pennsylvania men’s soccer team apparently doesn’t need to practice all that much as the team has been busy with anti-racism activities.
According to The Daily Pennsylvanian, members of the Penn squad have been “cognizant of [the] challenges” presented by our post-George Floyd death society and “felt that [they] needed to have conversations surrounding current events in the U.S. and diversity in general.”
The team made use of “A Long Talk About The Uncomfortable Truth” which bills itself as an “anti-racism activation experience.”
… Today, defenseman Ivan Provorov puts himself through a year-round training program. No wonder he leads the Flyers in ice time year after year and places among the NHL’s top minutes played performers.
Which is why it was gratifying to learn of the Flyers’ decision to hire Ian Laperriere as new head coach of the Lehigh Valley Phantoms on Monday.
Not only does Laperriere bring a wealth of on-ice acumen to the position but off the ice as well.
Having covered the Flyers a few years or so, I can state without doubt Laperriere is the fittest coach to have worked in the Flyers’ organization.
Heart rate data from wrist-worn, optically-based devices is flawed but can still be valuable. Understanding that nuance is the key to leveraging your metrics, not getting lost in them.
Purdue University engineers have developed a method to transform existing cloth items into battery-free wearables resistant to laundry. These smart clothes are powered wirelessly through a flexible, silk-based coil sewn on the textile.
With Hormonix, provided by EIS and developed by @MintDiagnostics
will give players and coaches key info of how their menstrual cycles may influence their performance!
Using technology to give Australian Olympic athletes an edge in the 2000 Sydney Games made Catapult Group one of the most widely used tech companies in sports. Its wearable tech—think of a cropped tank top stuffed with sensors—won credit for helping its home country achieve an outsized medal count through intense monitoring of athlete training. Now, Catapult works with some 3,200 sports teams worldwide. In April the company inked a deal with the Atlanta Falcons, the last National Football League team not using its services.
Yet despite its ubiquity, Catapult’s shares on the Australia Stock Exchange are about half their peak price from five years ago. Shares were roiled by a plan to extend sales of its wearable tech to consumers, an effort resoundingly panned by shareholders and which led to the ouster of its CEO in 2019. In the wake of the turmoil, the company turned to Will Lopes, an American who spent the bulk of his career building Amazon.com’s Audible audio book business. The reason: Catapult had its business plan backwards, having focused on selling the hardware while treating the data largely as an afterthought, sales-wise. The real value, Lopes contends, is in the data—and in getting customers to subscribe to the analytics to understand it.
One of the most frequent questions I’m asked by runners is, “How should my foot land on the ground?” In the wake of the previous decade’s barefoot/minimal shoe movement, people continue to emphasize certain foot strikes over others. (Heel striking is the primary “other” in these discussions.)
Claims are often made about injury prevention, improved speed, improved running efficiency, and certain ways being more “natural.” As with most universal claims in running, there’s a great deal of misinformation here. Let’s look at the facts about foot strikes.
When muscle is damaged, resident stem cells mediate the repair of the injured tissue. At the same time, circulating immune cells race to the site to aid the repair. The presence of these infiltrating immune cells at injury sites raises questions about their role in coordinating with muscle stem cells to build or regenerate muscle tissue.
Shihuan Kuang, a Purdue professor of animal sciences, has identified a previously unknown subset of muscle stem cells, which he has dubbed “immunomyoblasts,” that have both muscle stem cell and immune cell properties and may shed light on how those cells interact. The National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases recently awarded Kuang $2.3 million over five years to develop a basic understanding of these cells’ origins and functions.
… University of Delaware senior Brandon Wu was a child of this “Moneyball” era. A fascination with data drove him to the University of Delaware to major in statistics, where he thrived in coursework in mathematics, computer science, regression and database management.
At a fall semester adviser meeting, Professor Tom Ilvento gauged Wu’s interest in a pilot internship program with UD Athletics led by Christina Rasnake, whose focus includes strength and conditioning coaching and sports analytics. Brandon was intrigued and, in January, Athletics hired Wu and Rasnake began supplying him with data.
When the spring semester started and student-athletes geared up for the season, Wu began collecting live data. Every morning, team members filled out a survey on stress level, performance nutrition, hydration levels, muscle soreness and sleep quality; the student-athletes indicated what they did the previous day, including work in the weight room, practice and injury rehabilitation. Wu analyzed the data to identify trends within each team.
He spent 30 at a single high school before working for his brother, Mike, in the NBA. Today Dan is the head coach at Marshall. In his office, he has rows of pictures hanging on the white wall behind his desk, all from different stops in his coaching career.
Among his favorites is a photo of him alongside current Brooklyn Nets coach Steve Nash. It captures both men laughing. Nash’s right arm is draped around D’Antoni’s neck.
The picture was taken during D’Antoni’s time in Phoenix, when he was part of a team that, led by Nash’s blazing brilliance, revolutionized the NBA. The picture captures just a single moment, but to D’Antoni, it represents one of Nash’s most important traits.
“I’m a high school coach, and he’s got his arm around me and is willing to treat me like I have something that can help him,” D’Antoni said in a phone interview with FOX Sports. “He treats everybody like they have value, from the superstars to the last guys on the bench to guys like me. It creates connections. That’s the thing those Phoenix teams had.”
Genetic Literacy Project, Wall Street Journal, Ben Cohen from
… This may be the weirdest thing about having a hidden physical idiosyncrasy known as mixed-handedness: It’s actually not that weird if you work in the NBA.
About 8% of the league’s All-Stars over the last decade write with one hand and play with the other, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis based on examining photographs of NBA players signing autographs.
There’s a difference between mixed-handedness and the more common phenomenon of ambidexterity. While being truly ambidextrous means being equally skillful with both hands, almost everybody in the NBA is ambidextrous to some extent.