The Philadelphia Inquirer, Jonathan Tannenwald from
… After last Wednesday’s 2-0 win over Nigeria in the last game before the roster is set, U.S. captain Becky Sauerbrunn observed that the camp around the Americans’ set of June games was more tense than usual. That was no surprise since it was the last chance for players to make their cases.
The Mewis sisters observed the same.
“Everyone is in their own head because they all want to be on the roster,” Kristie said.
“It’s a high-intensity environment, and that’s part of the reason why the team has been successful in the past,” Sam said. “Everybody’s just trying to, of course, perform as best they can, but also we’re aware that the deeper little things are going to matter.”
… Representing your country at the highest level never gets old, so getting that call from Callan this time around was special, the pair said. And as the team’s veterans, Taurasi and Bird are eager to show they can still be integral pieces to help the U.S. secure a seventh straight gold medal.
“Even at this age and everything I’ve accomplished, I still feel like I have something to prove,” Bird said Monday. “I’m sure there are people out there like ‘what’s a 40-year-old doing on this team?’ Well, thanks for the motivation.”
Effective training is impossible without proper sleep hygiene and adequate nutrition. Coach Michael On share his personal experiences on prioritizing both.
At the end of May, Birmingham City Council’s Planning Committee made a decision that could have big implications for Aston Villa and perhaps even the Academy system as a whole.
They approved plans for an Inner City Football Academy that Villa believe will increase opportunities for working-class youngsters in areas like Aston, Witton, Perry Barr, Handsworth and Nechells.
Like a lot of elite clubs, Villa’s Academy is based in a rural location a long way from both the city and their stadium. This means that kids need lifts to get there, because public transport isn’t a viable option, and many are excluded as a result.
The five-part series, a partnership between the Red Bulls, Bleacher Report, Audi and Major League Soccer, dives into what the culture is like in soccer academies and what opportunities there are for the players. We learn about how the system works in developing players and the life experiences that the players have as they learn what it takes to ultimate earn a professional contract. The players are placed in an environment that mirrors what lies ahead in the professional world and they experience a culture of professional soccer replicating what happens in the United States and in other countries.
… While a few collegiate sprinters and field event specialists earn podium spots just about every Olympic cycle, it’s very rare for those in running events from 800m to 10,000m. The last one to do it was Emma Coburn, who won the 3,000-meter steeplechase in 2012 while she was a senior at the University of Colorado.
Yet this year’s U.S. Olympic Trials has a lot of top young stars in middle-distance and distance events with fast qualifying times, and in the first couple of days of competition, collegiate athletes have been competitive in the men’s 10,000m final on June 18 and the first two rounds of the men’s 800m and women’s 1,500m on June 18-19.
“The collegians are really sharp. They’re really race-ready,” three-time U.S. Olympian Jenny Simpson said after her preliminary heat of the 1,500m on June 18. (Simpson made the 2008 U.S. Olympic team in the 3,000m steeplechase while she was a junior at Colorado.)
During last week’s U.S. Olympic Trials, news came to light that four-time Olympic medalist Simone Manuel had been diagnosed with Overtraining Syndrome (OTS) around early March, and ended up taking an extended three-week break out of the pool in April. … Below, find an overview of exactly what OTS is, and the resulting symptoms, from Shawn Trokhan, M.D.
Gerard Gallant is taking over a young team with potential as coach of the New York Rangers, just like his three previous stops.
Unlike Columbus, Florida and expansion Vegas, Gallant will be expected to win quickly, if not right away. The 57-year-old is embracing those high expectations in a big market, even if he insists he will handle this situation the same as his previous jobs.
“It’s a team that’s ready to take off, go to the next level and I’ll prepare the same way,” Gallant said Tuesday. “I feel very comfortable about what happened in the past, in the past six years with Florida and in Vegas and I’ll bring that forward to the New York Rangers and get to know their players, get to know their personnel. I think that’s really important, and I think that’s one of my strong points.”
Amazon’s body fat percentage scanner performs better than other, more cumbersome methods of calculating body fat, a new study showed. A body scan is one feature on the Amazon Halo Band subscription service, which the company announced last August.
The Halo Body feature works through smartphone cameras. Users take four photos of their bodies, which are then combined into a 3D image. Then, Amazon’s tool uses machine learning to calculate the user’s body fat percentage. When Amazon launched Halo, the company said it did an internal study to validate the feature. Now, they’ve released a study — which was funded by Amazon, but conducted with leading experts in the field — showing that the tool works well.
The results show that the tool could be a benchmark for people looking to get more information about their bodies, says Diana Thomas, a mathematician who studies body weight regulation at West Point and was not involved in the study. She wouldn’t use it for scientific research, but it could give users another data point. “It gives you more information,” she says. “If you have a high percent body fat flagged by this, it could be a red flag for you.”
Smart fabrics and wearable electronics can be developed using highly conductive and stretchy fibers. Most of these fiber conductors are, however, strain sensitive with limited conductance on stretching. As a result, a new strategy can be introduced by rearranging the geometry of the conductive path for stable conductance. In a new report now published on Science Advances, Lijing Zheng and colleagues in China and Germany, described a coaxial wet-spinning process to continuously develop intrinsically stretchable and highly conductive, yet conductance-stable liquid metal (LM) sheath-core microfibers. The team stretched the microfibres up to 1170 percent and fully activated the conductive path to obtain a very high conductivity of 4.35 x 104 S/m and a resistance change of only 4 percent at 200 percent strain. The microfiber could be woven easily into everyday glove fabrics and as excellent joule heaters, electro-thermochromic displays and self-powered wearable sensors.
STRIVE, the only platform proven to optimize muscle performance for elite athletes and teams, today announced a strategic partnership with KINEXON, a leading sports performance and analytics provider. By combining STRIVE’s unique ability to measure muscle movement and activation in athletes with KINEXON’s advanced player tracking technology, the companies will offer a first-of-its-kind, complete performance optimization solution for sports teams, athletes, and trainers.
Clinical nutritionists won’t be left out of the medical AI revolution, as researchers are exploring use cases for augmented diet optimization, food image recognition, risk prediction and diet pattern analysis.
The state of the science is described in a paper published this month in Current Surgery Reports.
Applications for AI and other digital technologies are “still young, [but] there is much promise for growth and disruption in the future,” write multidisciplinary specialists at UCLA Health, San José State University and the Mayo Clinic.
In the last decade, NBA has grown into a billion-dollar industry where technology and advanced game plans play an essential role. Investors are interested in research examining the factors that can affect the team value. The aim of this research is to investigate the factors that affect the NBA team values. The value of a team can be influenced not only by performance-based variables, but also by macroeconomic indicators and demographic statistics. Data, analyzed in this study, contains of game statistics, economic variables and demographic statistics of the 30 teams in the NBA for the 2013–2020 seasons. Firstly, Pearson correlation test was implemented in order to identify the related variables. NBA teams’ characteristics and similarities were assessed with Machine Learning techniques (K-means and Hierarchical clustering). Secondly, Ordinary linear regression (OLS), fixed effect and random effect models were implemented in the statistical analyses. The models were compared based on Akaike Information Criterion (AIC). Fixed effect model with one lag was found the most effective model and our model produced consistently good results with the R2 statistics of 0.974. In the final model, we found that the significant determinants of team value at the NBA team level are revenue, GDP, championship, population and key player. In contrast, the total number of turnovers has a negative impact on team value. These findings would be beneficial to coaches and managers to improve their strategies to increase their teams’ value.
Soccer is a game that features few stats. Unlike baseball, there aren’t too many metrics used to judge players. A lot of it, especially in decades past, was based on gut instinct. Whether a defender could make a tackle or a midfielder regained possession was based on consistent performances and overall team results. Individual metrics were limited to strikers and goals scored and goalkeepers and goals against.
That was a different era. Over the past two decades, technology has helped introduce several new metrics to assess players in an array of categories. The distance a player has logged in a game, a stat that highlights work rate, and passing accuracy measured to distinguish the most talented players are now commonplace.
So while soccer was a game of few stats, new ones like “expected goals” are gaining in mainstream popularity. What exactly are expected goals? Opta, a British sports analytics company, defines it as “the quality of a shot based on several variables such as assist type, shot angle and distance from goal, whether it was a headed shot and whether it was defined as a big chance.”