… As a marketing tool for the game, spring training has never been better, but as a prep tool for the championship season, it’s never been worse.
Spring training is terribly, horribly, utterly broken.
It is too long. It is used for experimentation, but not really evaluation. It is an exercise not so much in preparation anymore as it is in trying to avoid attrition. The Rangers know about that: They lost Yu Darvish for the season two weeks and one inning into camp. The Rangers are hardly alone when it comes to catastrophic spring injuries.
One freezing night this January, I was sitting in the Camp Nou with a Barcelona official, watching Barca-Atletico Madrid in the Spanish Cup. When the game kicked off, the official said, “Watch Messi.”
It was a puzzling sight. The little man was wandering around, apparently ignoring the ball. The official explained: “In the first few minutes he just walks across the field. He is looking at each opponent, where the guy positions himself, and how their defense fits together. Only after doing that does he start to play.”
What is most remarkable about the Golden State Warriors’ season has nothing to do with their N.B.A.-best record or their league-leading shooting percentages or the ease with which they regularly dismantle opposing teams of highly paid professionals.
Instead, it is the simple fact that Coach Steve Kerr is glad that two weeks remain in the regular season.
“I still think we can get better,” he said. “I really do.”
For three weeks each spring, the nation is in a basketball frenzy as millions tune in to watch the NCAA March Madness tournament and follow their favorite teams. While Cinderella stories and coaching rivalries fight for headline space, one or two lines about a player’s injury could threaten to break a fan’s perfected bracket.
From the very first tipoff, 68 Division 1 teams set off on a marathon of athletics, similar to professional level scheduling, in hopes of still standing come April 6. To prepare for such high-intensity play with minimal time for rest, athletes must pay attention to each signal their bodies are sending, said Dr. Riley J. Williams, a specialist at Hospital for Special Surgery and head team physician for the New York Red Bulls and Iona College Athletics.
Panos Sainidis is Technical Director at Coever Coaching in Greece. He has a degree in physical education from the Università degli Studi di Scienze motorie e sportive (ex-ISEF) in Italy, played for a local amateur clubs in Athens for several years and futsal at a high level during and after he finished his studies. Panos has been coaching for twenty years in several sports but during the last five years has been teaching football using the “Coerver Coaching” method.
Compared to the general populace, multisport buffs are as tough as they come. There’s even research to back up that contention. To gain an understanding of what accounts for that tenacity, a new study sought to examine the important link between pain and performance. Indeed, those who are able to push harder and longer are usually the ones who end up atop the podium on race day.
“Don’t worry, I’m not going to take off all my clothes,” said Robert Kaul, president and CEO of Cloud DX, as he unbuttoned his shirt in front of a crowd at SXSW Interactive last week.
Kaul was showing off the components of his entry in the Tricorder Xprize, the $10-million competition that requires teams to develop a sci-fi medical scanner worthy of Star Trek. Each device must be able to diagnose 15 different medical conditions and monitor vital signs for 72 hours.
Cloud DX was ready to unveil its prototype at SXSW, but all ten finalist teams must be nearly done tinkering with their devices. They’re required to turn in their entries on 1 June in preparation for a six-month round of consumer testing.
Designing better protective gear against severe impacts for civilians and soldiers requires a detailed understanding of how soft tissues in the body actually respond to such impacts, whether from concussions, ballistic attacks, or blast wounds. MIT researchers are developing new synthetic polymer-solvent gels, called tissue simulant gels, which mimic the response of natural tissue.
Biological engineering graduate student Bo Qing is studying the impact of traumatic force on brain tissue from rodents and modeling synthetic substitutes to enable better insight into preventing such injuries. “If we can design a material that mimics this impact response, it would be very helpful to serve as an injury model and use to assess new protective equipment that can minimize this harm,” explains Qing, who works under MIT Associate Professor Krystyn J. Van Vliet.
For a little more than two months now, Toronto FC’s players have trained donning red and white shirts; neon green, pink or orange pinnies; and black sports vests wrapped tightly around their chests.
When they sit down for stretches, assistant coaches come around and yank pebble-sized plastic-covered chips from the back of those mysterious new chest bands. All the while, cameras perched atop massive, metal-framed towers loom overhead, recording everything.
“It definitely keeps you on your toes. You can’t get caught doing anything you’re not supposed to now that the cameras are on,” TFC midfielder Jonathan Osorio said.
… In a perfect world, you would have a system that could provide real data to coaching and training staffs to anticipate injuries or downturns in performance, not just relying on someone to decide, “he looks tired” or “his bat looks slow.” That’s the idea behind The Profiler, a system designed by Kitman Labs, an Irish sports technology company. It has been used by Irish rugby teams and now is being adapted for major league baseball teams. The Los Angeles Dodgers have signed on to use The Profiler, with at least two other clubs, including the San Francisco Giants, expected to follow.
If you’re imagining an app that will tell Clayton Kershaw to miss two starts in July because of a five percent decline in shoulder range of motion, forget it.
“No, no, no,” said Dodgers vice president of medical services Stan Conte. “At the end of the day, it’s not the data, it’s the analyst that makes the decision.
While Duke University makes a play for a national championship at the NCAA tournament, a cadre of business school students is busy fashioning a platform that could revolutionize what it means to be a Duke die-hard—or a fan of any college basketball team.
The project, led by four students at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business and set to launch in the next month or so, will let visitors to GoDuke.com dive into a trove of esoteric Duke basketball statistics that goes back 80 years. It will eventually record details as minute as how long a certain player dribbles before making a basket, the specific patterns the ball makes as it moves across the court, and the tempo of play when a team wins vs. when it loses.
When it goes live, the Web platform will feature chart-heavy visualizations that allow people to compare the finer points of current players’ games with the techniques of Duke legends from past seasons.
Our eyes are drawn to several dimensions of an object—such as color, texture, and luminance—even when we need to focus on only one of them, researchers at New York University and the University of Pennsylvania have found. The study, which appears in the journal Current Biology, points to the ability of our visual system to integrate multiple components of an item while underscoring the difficulty we have in focusing on a particular aspect of it.
“Even when we want and need to focus on one dimension of things we come across every day, such as the texture of your cat’s fur rather than its lightness, we have difficulty doing so because our eyes want to survey several features at once,” explains Michael Landy, a professor in NYU’s Department of Psychology.
Humans are much smarter than mice—key to this is the relative thickness of the human brain’s neocortex. Florio et al. combed through genes expressed in the progenitor cells that build the neocortex and zeroed in on one gene found in humans but not in mice. The gene, which seems to differentiate humans from chimpanzees, drives proliferation of the key progenitor cells. Mice expressing this human gene during development built more elaborate brains.