… With Julio Jones limited to nine games last year, there wasn’t a single wide receiver older than 28 who finished among the NFL’s top 10 in receptions, and there was only one – Buffalo’s Cole Beasley (then 31 years old) — who finished among the top 20.
Similar story with receiving yards. There wasn’t a single wide receiver older than 28 who finished among the top 10, and there was just one – Detroit’s Marvin Jones (then 30) – who finished among the top 20.
All of it makes the rare air in which Jones travels that much more impressive.
On Sunday, the 32-year-old will resume his quest to remain among the NFL’s elite at his position, despite a 1989 birthdate that makes him far more the exception than the rule among the top wide receivers in the game.
A new and significant moment has arrived for women’s football in Japan. The WE League, standing for Women Empowerment League, will be the first fully-professional women’s football league in the country and will begin on 12 September with the inaugural season running until May 2022.
Following the success of the 2011 FIFA Women’s World Cup™-winning team, women’s football in the country has gone from strength to strength. At youth national level, Japan won the U-17 Women’s World Cup in 2014 and the most recent edition of the U-20 Women’s World Cup in 2018. Many of the influential players in both of those successes will be involved in the inaugural season of the WE League and are expected to play key roles on their respective clubs.
… Raducanu looked as poised as ever when faced with the Good Morning America panel in the show’s Times Square studio and there she explained how she reached such levels of resilience so young.
“From a young age I’ve always been brought up to have mental strength,” she said on the ABC show.
“My parents played a huge part in my upbringing. They were pretty tough on me when I was young and it kind of shaped the way.
“I think now it is helping on the biggest stages in the world when you really need it.”
Scientific American, Alexander P. Burgoyne and David Z. Hambrick from
… Although mindfulness has its merits, psychological research has also revealed that in some circumstances it’s important to be mindless. That is, as we develop skill in complex tasks, we can perform them with increasing facility until attention seems to be unnecessary. Everyday examples range from riding a bike to chopping cucumbers to brushing your teeth.
Underlying this state of “automaticity” (as cognitive psychologists call it) are mental processes that can be executed without paying attention to them. These processes run off without conscious awareness—a chain reaction of mental events. We don’t perform all tasks automatically, but many can be performed this way once they are well practiced.
To be clear, paying attention is important when learning a new skill. In a study of our own, we found that measures of cognitive ability that tapped the capacity to focus attention predicted novice pianists’ ability to learn and play “Happy Birthday to You.”
But expertise research has also revealed that paying too much attention to what you’re doing can have damaging effects, particularly when you perform well-practiced skills.
The COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown created new stressors that could potentially attenuate mental wellbeing (MW) in athletes, who are already susceptible to poor MW. This study aims to describe fluctuations to MW during ‘lockdown’ and subsequent ‘return to sport’ protocols, in comparison to the normal ‘in-season’ in professional soccer.
Twenty-five English Premier League (EPL) soccer players completed the Warwick-Edinburgh Mental Wellbeing Scale (WEMWBS) every two weeks, during the 2019/2020 season, and every week during ‘lockdown’ and ‘return to training’ for 28 weeks. The duration of each physical activity (PA) session completed was recorded. No significant differences were found for MW between time points (In-season, lockdown, return to training, and the restart) (51.5±5.6 vs. 50.7±4.8 vs. 50.8±5.7 vs. 50.7±5.6 (p >0.05)) respectively. Individually, differences were identified; in-season weekly session duration (243±38 min) was higher than during lockdown (180±62 min) (p <0.05). During lockdown, weekly MW scores were related to the previous 7-day number of sessions (r = 0.151) and active min (r = 0.142) (p <0.05). Furthermore, participants that exercised >250 min in lockdown, had higher MW scores (52.46 ± 4.65) than <250 min (50.35±6.55) (p <0.05). MW responses to lockdown were best understood on an individual basis. Additionally, PA only had a measurable effect on MW when >250 min. Further, stressors imposed upon players during an EPL season, are potentially greater than those inflicted by the lockdown. Implications for monitoring MW in EPL soccer players and the potential inclusion of an in-season break are discussed.
Whether it is the director Márta Mészáros or the artist Jackson Pollock, those in creative careers often experience a particular burst of success.
Now researchers have used artificial intelligence to reveal such “hot streaks” are commonly preceded by an experimental phase followed by a focus on one particular approach once the winning period has begun.
Firstbeat Life is a subscription-based wellness solution that helps promote health, identify potential risks and support users perform at their best. Now, professionals in the field, such as occupational health practitioners and wellness coaches, can also use the accurate and reliable physiological measurement data to support their work.
“The importance of preventive health and well-being services is growing globally as a megatrend,” says Tero Lehtonen, CEO of Firstbeat.
“Managing stress and recovery is especially topical as remote and hybrid working becomes the norm. Many people struggle with the risk of overload and companies are looking for ways to support their employees’ health and capability to work.”
… A year ago, Demetri Mitchell went through this when his lengthy association with Manchester United, whom he joined at the age of 10, came to an end. He was expecting the news, but it didn’t do much to soften the blow.
“Coming towards the end of my contract at Man United, I knew that my time was up,” Mitchell tells ESPN. “I knew it was coming, but when you get the news, it still hits you hard. I didn’t think it was going to be [hard] because I already knew that my time was up, but when I was told, it was tough.
“My lowest point was not knowing if I would play again. I was probably overthinking and being a bit dramatic, but in my head I was thinking, ‘Am I going to play again, am I going to be all right, what am I going to do if I can’t play?’
“That period was a very mentally challenging time for me. I tried not to show it as much as possible, but the people around me who are close to me could pick up on it and luckily I had that support.”
The purpose of this study was to examine to what extent the physical match performance of professional soccer players is both position and player specific. First, official match data from the 2019/20 German Bundesliga season was used to search for players that met the inclusion criteria of playing a minimum of four entire matches in at least two different playing positions. Overall, 25 players met the criteria prior to the COVID-19 induced break, playing a minimum of eight matches. Second, the physical match performance of these players was analyzed separately for each position they played. The following four parameters were captured: total distance, high-intensity distance, sprinting distance, and accelerations. Third, the 25 players’ physical match performance data was then compared to normative data for each position they played to understand whether players adapted their physical performance (position dependent), or maintained their performance regardless of which position they were assigned to (position independent). When switching the position, the change in physical match performance of the respective players could be explained by 44–58% through the normative positional data. Moreover, there existed large individual differences in the way players adapted or maintained their performance when acting in different positions. Coaches and practitioners should be aware that some professional soccer players will likely incur differences in the composition of physical match performance when switching positions and therefore should pay special consideration for such differences in the training and recovery process of these players.
This is the first in a series on modern football analytics. It is written for people working in football – the coaches, the analysts and the players – for the people who want to apply numbers in football – the data scientists and the statisticians – and for the fans who want to understand how numbers are changing the game. It is written for you.
Let’s us start with a key point which we will use as a basis for these articles.
Football is not baseball. Football is not basketball. Football is not American football. And football certainly isn’t cricket. Football is unlike any other team sport because, and I hope I don’t offend fans of these other sports by saying this, football is the most complex of sports.
What do I mean by complex? Well, it is that definition we are going to look at in this article, because before we recognize the true complexity of football (and how this makes it different from other sports), we can’t start to find ways to understand the game.
Repeated, almost relentless points of tension in each set. Think every Fernandez service game went to 30, many of Raducanu’s too. I’m exhausted. What a match.
Bates College, The Bates Student student newspaper, Ellie Wolfe from
When Michael Lopez ’04 was a student at Bates, having a career in analytics at a major sports league wasn’t an option.
“There weren’t careers and football data that existed, at least for folks to sort of aim for,” he said. “But now that there is an influx of rich and informative data and [in] a lot of these leagues, there are more job opportunities.”
Those employment options greatly benefited Lopez, a former professor of statistics at Skidmore College: he swapped out academia for professional sports and is now currently serving as the Senior Director of Data and Analytics at the NFL.
The AIhub coffee corner captures the musings of AI experts over a 30-minute conversation. Inspired by the Olympics and Paralympics, this month we discuss sports and the role AI and robotics could play. There are two aspects to this. Firstly, building AI-based robots to play sports (as is being done with RoboCup). Secondly, using AI techniques for performance analysis and improvement.
Joining the discussion this time are: Sanmay Das (George Mason University), Tom Dietterich (Oregon State University), Steve Hanson (Rutgers University), Sabine Hauert (University of Bristol), Michael Littman (Brown University) and Oskar von Stryk (Technische Universität Darmstadt).
Although coaching is a co-created process, researchers investigating the psychological aspects of Olympic coaching have tended to overlook the perceptions of athletes and whether these distinguish between performance-related outcomes. The objective of this research was to examine whether athletes’ perceptions of their coaches discriminate between world-leading (i.e., Olympic gold medal winning) and world-class (i.e., Olympic non-gold medal winning) coaches. Observer-reported psychometric questionnaires were completed by 38 Olympic swimmers who had collectively won 59 Olympic medals, of which 31 were gold. The questionnaires assessed perceptions of 12 variables within the Big Five personality traits, the dark triad, and emotional intelligence, and the data was analyzed using three one-way multivariate analysis of variance and follow-up univariate F-tests. The results showed that world-leading coaches were perceived to be significantly higher on conscientiousness, openness to experience, perception of emotion, and management of others emotion, and lower on narcissism, than world-class coaches. This suggests that athletes’ perceptions of their coaches may discriminate between world-leading and world-class coaches. The implications for coaches’ psychological development are discussed and compared with previously reported Olympic coaches’ perceptions of themselves.