… The London-born former investment banker was regarded as one of the best academy coaches around long before he took over from Uwe Rosler in December 2013. [Mark] Warburton is from the same school of thought as Brendan Rodgers, Sean Dyche, Malky Mackay and Aidy Boothroyd, all of whom he worked with in a four-year spell at Watford and remain his close friends.
Warburton was overlooked for the Brentford manager’s job when Rosler was hired in 2011, becoming the club’s sporting director instead, and it was in this role that he built the footballing infrastructure that proved so successful.
Not only did Warburton strive for one of the best medical departments in the country, but he fully embraced sports science and cutting-edge player analysis software, creating an environment from which his players have thrived on the pitch.
… In the hierarchy of international tennis, America’s status has fallen, but few things inspire this country’s citizens like the threat of non-exceptionalism. Recently, strong voices have emerged onto the tennis landscape. It seems tennis aficionados want more for this nation of rugged individualists, and the idea of a national governing body is antithetical to that individualism. Some would dismantle the entire PD program and allow the private coaching community to continue its work to produce the next American champions. “After all,” they say, “PD has never turned out a champion. It’s always been private coaches doing the hard work in the trenches, giving millions of feeds and with intense concentration on the individual athlete, that has produced the Grand Slam titlists.” Others would suggest PD be reconstituted into something else – perhaps an advisory board for emerging players, maybe a group of coaching educators that travels around the country disseminating the best practices to the private coaching community, or possibly the entity just continues to run tournaments in a fashion that offers enough prize money to help support young Americans trying to make their way in the professional arena. Whatever the decision, PD requires new thinking.
Whoever you select to wear the crown, help is here. This is a conch shell call to all parties interested in US player development. We are at a critical and crucial time for expression. The absence in PD now needs a significant presence. We need your thoughts, your ideas, your words – now.
The NFL scouting combine has arrived, another major piece of the pre-draft puzzle with 323 college standouts invited to Indianapolis this week to partake in medical testing, interviews with teams and, of course, the all-important strength and speed testing the event is best known for.
Over the past decade, the increased exposure on the combine has fueled an explosion in pre-combine training programs, set up at athletic performance facilities nationwide with an aim to help aspiring prospects prepare for all they’ll face.
Six teams of researchers will receive a total of $100,000 through the NCAA Innovations in Research and Practice Grant Program, which funds research aimed at benefitting college athletes’ psychosocial well-being and mental health.
The projects, chosen from a field of 94 applicants, will offer insight into such topics as sexual assault prevention and how to help graduating student-athletes transition from competitive training to healthy, physically active lifestyles.
… 1. How have your expectations of a strength training program and the coach/trainer changed throughout your career?
When I started coaching at a university I was the strength coach, a very scary thought. So everything has changed!! There is actual data now, studies have been done on female volleyball players in the US and around the world. We now train very specifically for our sport and for each athlete. Our strength coach is very well trained and our department works to be at the edge of the growing knowledge base. I trust their methods. I believe all training should be based on long term health of the athlete and our trainer has to be able to explain what we are doing within that context.
Everything changed at Port Adelaide after Ken Hinkley was appointed senior coach and Darren Burgess returned as the high performance manager two years ago.
Burgess brought with him not only a broad perspective after working with Liverpool in the English Premier (soccer) League, but also a punishing approach.
The first thing that was identified by Hinkley, Burgess, and then-senior assistant coach Alan Richardson was that the club needed to get better at running.
GLOBAL football giants Real Madrid will take in sport science students from Victoria University under a five-year deal. … The Real Madrid alliance is likely to result in about 50 VU master students spending about two weeks in Madrid at no extra cost to their current course fees. VU may look to raise the fees to help cover the costs next year.
The NFL Combine is where more than 300 of the top college football players, who are preparing for the NFL draft, perform physical tests for evaluation by NFL coaches, general managers, and scouts. It has been announced that during the combine’s physical examinations, a CARESTREAM DRX-1 detector will be used with the X-ray system currently in place at Lucas Oil Stadium to produce high-quality diagnostic images within seconds. This will help to dramatically speed up the combine process and comes as no surprise as multiple NFL teams, along with many sports organizations worldwide, have already utilized Carestream’s advanced digital radiology products to diagnose player injuries and do so as quickly as possible.
The ability to execute data analytics to track and company an athlete’s performance over time has become invaluable for sports teams to identify enhancement and trading opportunities. Sport Testing Inc. is a Toronto-based company that offers an accurate, comprehensive and real-time method of assessing and benchmarking performance across the entire spectrum of sports assessment.
… A door briefly opened, and I saw flashes of color pinned to a wall. (This, Ive later explained, was the conference room where the Apple Watch film was being storyboarded.) Then we stopped in Ive’s office, a twelve-foot square separated from the studio by a glass wall. On shelves, Ive had set his Playmobil likeness and similar gifts, along with dozens of custom sketchbooks that had padded blue covers and silver edging. On the floor, behind a Marc Newson desk, was a rugby ball. Overlapping framed images leaned against the wall: a Banksy print of the Queen with the face of a chimpanzee, and a poster, well known in design circles, that begins, “Believe in your fucking self. Stay up all fucking night,” and ends, many admonitions later, “Think about all the fucking possibilities.”
That text could be thought of as a supplement to design principles set down by Dieter Rams, the German designer celebrated for pale, clean-lined, Bauhaus-inspired work, largely at Braun. (Ive greatly admires Rams, but his debt to him has sometimes been overstated, and it’s worth noting a difference of manufacturing scale: Rams’s Braun products sold in the thousands, occasionally the millions; Apple has sold one and a half billion things designed by Ive.) In Rams’s formulation, a new object should be innovative, useful, aesthetic, understandable, unobtrusive, honest, long-lasting, thorough, and environmentally friendly, and feature “as little design as possible.” Ive flicked through a sketchbook, giving me time to see that, like Leonardo da Vinci, he sometimes uses brown ink. There was a little drawing of something that may have been a latch and, in tall, skinny script, the words “pretension” and “smart.” On another page—Apple’s competitors may do with this what they like—Ive seemed to have written the word “Airbug.”
… How important is a physiotherapist to an elite athlete?
Jeroen: He/she is an important part of the whole team around an athlete, the athlete in the middle, with family, friends, colleague athletes, manager, coach, all assistant coaches and training camp staff around them. A physio is usually the first person to notify non-well being, as (he is) the person physically and mentally the closest to an athlete. In the line of the physio is another step to the specialized doctor to team up temporarily, when needed.
Professional soccer players from the first team (1st team, n = 27), under twenty-one (U21, n = 21) and under eighteen (U18, n = 35) squads of an English Premier League soccer team were assessed for whole body and regional estimates of body composition using dual-energy X-ray absorptiometry (DXA). Per cent body fat was lower in 1st team (10.0 ± 1.6) compared with both U21 (11.6 ± 2.5, P = 0.02) and U18 (11.4 ± 2.6, P = 0.01) players. However, this difference was not due to variations (P = 0.23) in fat mass between squads (7.8 ± 1.6 v 8.8 ± 2.1 v 8.2 ± 2.4 kg, respectively) but rather the presence of more lean mass in 1st team (66.9 ± 7.1 kg, P < 0.01) and U21 (64.6 ± 6.5 kg, P = 0.02) compared with U18 (60.6 ± 6.3 kg) players. Accordingly, fat mass index was not different (P = 0.138) between squads, whereas lean mass index was greater (P < 0.01) in 1st team players (20.0 ± 1.1 kg · m-2) compared with U18 players (18.8 ± 1.4 kg · m-2). Differences in lean mass were also reflective of higher lean tissue mass in all regions, for example, upper limbs/lower limbs and trunk. Data suggest that training and nutritional interventions for younger players should therefore be targeted to lean mass growth as opposed to body fat loss.
When the manuscript crossed his desk, Joshua Plotkin, a theoretical biologist at the University of Pennsylvania, was immediately intrigued. The physicist Freeman Dyson and the computer scientist William Press, both highly accomplished in their fields, had found a new solution to a famous, decades-old game theory scenario called the prisoner’s dilemma, in which players must decide whether to cheat or cooperate with a partner. The prisoner’s dilemma has long been used to help explain how cooperation might endure in nature. After all, natural selection is ruled by the survival of the fittest, so one might expect that selfish strategies benefiting the individual would be most likely to persist. But careful study of the prisoner’s dilemma revealed that organisms could act entirely in their own self-interest and still create a cooperative community.
Press and Dyson’s new solution to the problem, however, threw that rosy perspective into question. It suggested the best strategies were selfish ones that led to extortion, not cooperation.
As evidenced by Louis van Gaal’s World Cup goalkeeper switch, analytics can enhance rather than replace the Machiavellian instincts of sport’s master tacticians.