B.J. Finney played his high school football in Andale, Kansas and was rated a two-star offensive lineman by Rivals.com. After leading his team to a section runner-up finish in 2009, Finney found himself without any scholarship offers to play football at the collegiate level. To this very day, Finney still does not know what caused him fall through the proverbial cracks of the recruiting process.
… “BLESTO came by, and I ran the 40 for them, I took the Wonderlic and they measured me, and I discovered that I had the same physical tools as some of the other offensive linemen,” Marpet said Wednesday at the NFL Scouting Combine. “So I said, ‘Why not me?’ I ran a sub-5 40 at 300 pounds, and I thought, ‘I can play football.’ I could play. It didn’t matter.”
Marpet, a native of Hudson (about 35 miles south of Albany), erased any doubt about his level of competition at the Senior Bowl, where he was one of the only lineman who was able to block Washington defensive tackle and likely first-round pick Danny Shelton.
High performance sport and the importance of successful performances have led athletes and coaches to continually seek any advantage or edge that may improve performance. It follows that the rate and quality of recovery is extremely important for the high performance athlete and that optimal recovery may provide numerous benefits during repetitive high-level training and competition. Therefore, investigating different recovery interventions and their effect on fatigue, muscle injury, recovery and performance is important.
Manchester United head of athletic development Tony Strudwick oversees the Manchester United youth system. While ensuring that his athletes are well rounded in their motor skills and comfortable with movements outside the soccer realm, he shared his thoughts on the American youth development system.
“A big part of our philosophy is making sure we’re .working outside of the football environment with athletic training and conditioning,” Strudwick said. Stressing the importance of multi-sport athleticism has been a growing priority of his for years. More often than not, Strudwick says, the best athletes in the world are able to distinguish themselves from the pack thanks to a range of motor skills beyond what is typically expected in a given sport.
From June 9-11, 2015 the Seattle Sounders FC will bring in some of the brightest minds in sports science and performance training to join their coaching staff in sharing the latest methodologies in soccer training, strength & conditioning, performance coaching, and data analytics. We invite coaches from professional, top college, club, or high school programs to join us in investigating the needs of elite level soccer players both on, and off, the field. The content provided within this seminar will be applicable for coaches working at the highest level of any team sport.
This unique seminar program will be limited to the first 80 applicants, who will all receive access in observing the inner-workings of a professional team sport environment. Attendees will have the opportunity to listen to some of the top experts in injury prevention & strength training, long-term & short-term recovery management, metabolic fitness theory, and athlete monitoring & development.
… We often explain consistency in psychological terms. But temperament and technique are inseparable. When I jotted down a list of sportsmen with exceptionally high baselines – the Italian footballer Paolo Maldini, the South African cricketer Jacques Kallis, the New Zealand rugby player Richie McCaw and the Spanish footballer Xavi Hernandez – they all had superb technique in common. Djokovic, too, has the best all-round technique in tennis. The most underrated benefit of great technique is that it reduces the burden of anxiety. A player with great technique might lose but he is less likely to collapse.
… the NFL and partner Reality Check Systems (RCS) created a means to make watching live combine coverage much more than just footage of largely unknown college football players running drills for an audience of pro scouts, personnel directors and coaches.
Now, for the first time, after each athlete is weighed and measured, his performance in relevant drills will be added to a database of past combine data to quickly match the prospects with the performance of one or more actual NFL players.
If you look very carefully at the C-curved squiggle taking shape on a 3-D printer at Columbia University Medical Center, you just might spot the future of knee repair. Layer by layer, the machine’s tiny needle squirts out a bead of white polymer, matching a virtual blueprint of a meniscus—the semicircular band of tough, fibrous cartilage that serves as the knee’s shock absorber. A bioprinter in the laboratory of Jeremy Mao can churn out three menisci in just under 16 minutes.
These particular parts are destined for sheep, the test animal for a new method of correcting a torn meniscus, one of the most common of all human joint injuries.
The magnitude of the injuries within NCAA athletics is significant. Injuries can hinder performance and negatively impact collegiate athletes’ mental health and well-being, including: threats to self-esteem, social isolation and motivational demands associated with rehabilitation. Therefore, injury is one of the most arduous physical and psychological tests confronting college athletes.
To an athlete, an injury can fall anywhere between mere annoyance or devastating event. The ability to avoid injury and to return to play quickly when injured is critical to success.
Sports Medicine Research: In the Lab & In the Field from
Take Home Message: Fear of re-injury, exercise importance, and age are associated with return to activities after an anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction.
After a long weekend of NBA All-Star game festivities I stumbled upon Greg Reda’s excellent blog post about web scraping on Twitter. In it he goes over how to find and use API’s to scrape data from webpages. The example he uses is the NBA’s very own stats website, which to my surprise provides a lot of very interesting data. I decided to dig a little deeper and see what I could find.
Can you summarize the NBA season in one chart? With 794 games, more than 152,000 possessions and some 372,000 plays, probably not, but we’ve given it a shot. What you see above is the 2014-15 season’s win probabilities, summarized. At any point in an NBA game, each team has a probability of winning based on the time remaining, the score and the situation (i.e. after a made shot, shooting foul, etc.). In the chart, each team’s in-game win probability is averaged over each minute of regulation time. It’s like watching a win-loss record develop in real time.
Toronto FC’s hiring of a manager of analytics is part of a long-term project to see how such information can be best used at the MLS soccer club, says general manager Tim Bezbatchenko.
The team hired Villanova professor Bret Myers as a consultant last year but decided it needed a full-time staffer to help establish its analytics framework.
Devin Pleuler has been given that role, tasked with number-crunching everything from on-field movements to working with others on the budget and medical/sports science area.
I am NBA Director of Basketball Analytics Jason Rosenfeld. I also previously served as the Director of Basketball Analytics with the Charlotte Hornets franchise.
In the past Bolton have even recorded their team meetings; where the players sit, their posture, their interaction, anything to gain an edge. The most important element of any analysis is how well it is delivered to the players or backroom team. What good is any insight if you can’t share it effectively with those that need it most?
Despite endless hours of time being put into analysis and research around how and what to analyse, there is very little written or published about how to effectively deliver that message (in a team atmosphere). Mark Upton, a skills acquisition specialist (EIS) has written a great piece on off field learning spaces. This is still a relatively new area for education never mind team sports but what are the characteristics of an effective learning environment?