… A US youth international who inked a Generation adidas contract after the league’s initial bank of GA signings was unveiled, Lewis describes himself as a “late bloomer” who picked up the game late and did not see a professional career as a realistic possibility until a year or two ago.
“I only started playing soccer in fifth grade and I only made my first national-team appearance last summer, when I was 18,” he said. “I played in a club team, I didn’t actually go into an academy team until I was about 17. I just happened to get noticed later. But I just kept working hard on my own and eventually things started to come together.”
… “It’s always exciting to start a new year, new coach and have a bunch of new faces,” he told ussoccer.com. “Everybody is raring to go and it’s just about getting ourselves going in the first couple weeks and then we have two good games at the end of the camp.”
One of eight players in camp who have previously played for Bruce Arena, Altidore actually gained his professional debut under the new MNT head coach when he became manager of New York Red Bulls following the 2006 FIFA World Cup. Altidore thrived in a season-and-a-half under Arena, racking up 12 goals and four assists in 29 matches before his 18th birthday, with the performance eventually leading to his MNT debut that November in a 1-0 friendly win against South Africa.
At first, it was just a vision. Eric Gordon, a free agent at the time, listened as Mike D’Antoni, the newly installed coach of the Houston Rockets, described his offensive system and how Gordon would fit as an important piece.
Gordon, a 28-year-old shooting guard, could begin to see it unfold at that meeting in July: all the transition layups, all the defenders collapsing on James Harden, all the open 3-pointers against opponents that the Rockets had stretched like rubber bands with their unremitting ball movement. D’Antoni made a convincing case.
As Gordon said in an interview last week, “Why not take a chance?”
… “At 35, I don’t think he acts his age at all,” said Mary Carillo, who will anchor Tennis Channel’s coverage of the upcoming Australian Open. “Artists live by different rules and create their own environment. He’s aware of the beauty he creates.
He deserves the most credit for his success this season, but he has been quick to praise those around him: offensive coordinator Scott Linehan, quarterbacks coach Wade Wilson and quarterbacks Tony Romo, Mark Sanchez and Kellen Moore.
“They’re the reason I’m prepared for each and every game,” Prescott said. “All the credit goes to each and every one of them. The little different things they bring to me, the little nuances they get from the defense they add into the game plan, that just helps me out. Having all those quarterbacks around me, great quarterbacks, great men, it’s the reason for my preparation each game.”
Marco Silva knows what it feels like to be captain of a sinking ship. That is how he felt at Estoril in 2009, near the bottom of the Portuguese second tier, with not enough money to pay his team-mates and the club facing imminent collapse.
Silva was coming to the end of his own unremarkable playing career, but he knew that the duties of a football captain and a sea captain were the same. He knew that he must be the last man to abandon ship, when all other hope was lost. So when exasperated unpaid team-mates were threatening to leave, Silva persuaded them all to stay. He knew that help was on its way, in the form of Brazilian agency Traffic Sports whose money would save the club.
By persuading his team-mates to stay on board and keep playing, Silva ensured that the club continued to exist. He was, according to one well-placed source, the “only reason the club did not shut down”.
Demanding. Hard-ass. Tough. These words used to conjure images of NFL head coaches and the successful programs that they ran. But that’s not quite the trend these days … Just look at Jack Del Rio and the Oakland Raiders this season
Musical training yields many cognitive benefits, including an enhanced ability to multitask. New research uncovers yet another practical advantage that has ramifications far beyond the concert hall: quicker reaction times.
“The long-term playing of an instrument is sustained exposure to an enriched sensory environment, which leads to changes in cortical connectivity and behavioral ability,” write Simon Landry and Francois Champoux of the University of Montreal. “These results strongly point towards musicians being better at integrating the inputs from various senses.”
Los Angeles Lakers nutrition consultant Cate Shanahan shares her theories on how eating traditional foods and removing protein powders and excess sugars from your diet can lead to a healthier life.
… The Thunder coaching staff typically decides close to morning shootaround on game day who will be inactive. Sometimes the decisions are made later in the day with a player’s health in the balance.
The first three games Oladipo missed, he was active but ultimately did not dress. He was still a game-time decision. When it became apparent Oladipo would need more time to heal, Josh Huestis was activated for four consecutive games.
A majority of Huestis’ inactives are a product of him being assigned to the Oklahoma City Blue.
Right from the start, it was going to be tough for the Seahawks and Texans to come away with road victories on Saturday.
Seattle was a 6.5-point underdog by kickoff in Atlanta, while Houston came in at a staggering plus-17, the second-largest spread for a playoff game since 1978. Both teams were competitive, but neither really came close to winning. The Seahawks gave up 19 points in the second quarter en route to a 36-20 loss, while the Texans were within eight points in the fourth before collapsing and losing 34-16.
Both teams left big plays on the field. The Seahawks had a long Devin Hester punt return called back for a holding penalty at the line of scrimmage (an 88-yard penalty based on where they would have had the ball vs. where they ended up) which led to a safety. The Texans had a rare dime from Brock Osweiler fall through Will Fuller’s hands in the end zone, costing them a touchdown. Those were frustrating missed opportunities.
The Australian Open, once the clear laggard among the four Grand Slam tennis tournaments, has regained its luster by expanding relentlessly and taking chances.
It was the first major tournament to build a stadium with a retractable roof and is now the first with three such stadiums. This year, it will become the first Grand Slam event to sell a small block of on-court tickets that will allow spectators to sit opposite the chair umpire, less than eight meters (or 26 feet) from the sideline on the Open’s main show court, Rod Laver Arena.
But the tournament director Craig Tiley is interested in more than facilities and revenue. Tiley, a former college tennis coach at the University of Illinois, has long been interested in improving the information available to both tennis insiders and fans. In his role as chief executive of Tennis Australia, he pushed to create an entity at the federation called the Game Insight Group, or GIG.
… For Dr Machar Reid, head of Tennis Australia’s Game Insight Group (GIG), the rise of analytics in tennis is long overdue. Since its inception in 2008, the team has built up an impressive body of research and produced scores of scientific papers, making GIG the world’s leading authority on tennis science and helping the sport make up for lost time.
“For the last 40 years, tennis matches have been described in a particular way – first serve percentage, second serve percentage, unforced errors, forced errors, etc.,” says Reid, who worked with Greg Rusedski and Li Na before pursuing a doctorate that focused on the science behind the sport.
“It represented a logical starting point, but we haven’t really progressed since.
Andrew Gelman, Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science blog from
… your decision plans may very well influence your analysis. Here are two ways this can happen:
– Precision. If you know ahead of time you only need to estimate a parameter to within an uncertainty of 0.1 (on some scale), say, and you have a simple analysis method that will give you this precision, you can just go simple and stop. This sort of thing occurs all the time.
– Relevance. If you know that a particular variable is relevant to your decision making, you should not sweep it aside, even if it is not statistically significant