… the first half of the regular season can be much like a blowout: dangerous to read too much into. At the end of practice on Saturday, after Curry finished his usual routine of 100 threes—hitting 91, including his first 19 in a row—Warriors assistant Bruce Fraser, as close as exists to Steph’s shooting coach, explained Curry’s early-season play as both fatigue—mental and emotional, from two long seasons—and purposeful. “I think he came into the season trying to make the whole work, adding new pieces in KD, Zaza, and David West, and Steph was catering to all of them,” said Fraser. “He wasn’t getting his shots in his normal places, not just on the court, but in the sequence of things. I think that was a combination of him not being as aggressive mentally and also getting different looks.” Over the last month, though, Fraser says Curry has begun shooting it better in practice—“even if it didn’t’ translate yet to the game.” Now, midway through the season, Curry’s re-engaging. “Like okay, it’s been long enough, now it’s time to be aggressive.”
… And so it went: Proving doubters wrong then circling back again, rinse and repeat. Gomez started his career with the now-defunct San Diego Gauchos. He played indoor soccer for a spell. He thought about giving up the dream, a couple of times. He played in a World Cup.
Gomez was waived by Toronto last March, a cost-cutting move that led to a drastic drop in pay. He signed with the Sounders with fire in the belly unquenched, speaking openly about wanting to prove his former employer wrong. Having celebrated Seattle’s first MLS Cup title on Toronto’s home field last month, suffice it to say Gomez accomplished that end.
If no athlete’s retirement is ever 100 percent neat and tidy, this feels like something close to a storybook ending for one of the most remarkable American soccer stories of the modern era.
After a quiet period, Russian men’s tennis is stirring again.
Near the turn of the century, Russia had two No. 1-ranked men’s players and Grand Slam champions in Marat Safin and Yevgeny Kafelnikov, and the country won the Davis Cup in 2002 and 2006.
But since Safin’s retirement, in 2009, the country has fallen into relative obscurity on the men’s side, instead mainly drawing attention for its success in the upper echelons of the women’s game.
Hope is once again bubbling in the form of two young prospects, Karen Khachanov, 20, and Andrey Rublev, 19, who won their first-round matches at the Australian Open. And 207th-ranked Alexander Bublik, a 19-year-old Russian who represents Kazakhstan, pulled off one of the biggest upsets of the first round, defeating 16th-seeded Lucas Pouille of France.
The amount of water and electrolytes (primarily sodium, Na+) lost as a consequence of thermoregulatory sweating during exercise can vary considerably within and among athletes. The reported range in sweating rate and sweat Na+ concentration ([Na+]) is ~0.5 to 2.0 L/h and ~10- 90 mmol/L, respectively.
Sources of intra/interindividual variability in sweating rate and sweat [Na+] during exercise include exercise intensity, environmental conditions, heat acclimation status, aerobic capacity, genetic predisposition, body size/composition, protective equipment, sex, diet and hydration status.
Sweat testing can be conducted to estimate individual sweating rates and sweat Na+ losses to help guide personalized fluid and electrolyte replacement recommendations.
… Academy director Alex Inglethorpe admits that Jurgen Klopp’s willingness to put his faith in youth has energised players and staff alike.
“First and foremost, it gives everyone at the Academy hope,” he told the ECHO.
“It’s one thing talking about it, it’s another thing actually doing it. Jurgen and his staff have all bought into the young ones who are coming through.
RBC Training Ground is a talent identification and athlete funding program designed to uncover athletes with Olympic potential and provide them with the high-performance sport resources they need to achieve their podium dreams.
Register for an RBC Training Ground event near you, and test your speed, power, strength and endurance in front of the top coaches and sport officials in Canada.
UPDATE, Jan. 17: Oregon has suspended its strength coach and issued an apology on behalf of its athletic department after the players’ hospitalization.
At least three Oregon Ducks football players were hospitalized after enduring a series of grueling strength and conditioning workouts at UO last week, The Oregonian/OregonLive has learned.
How do you feel when bad things happen? Do you bounce back from adversity or sob indefinitely? Emotional resilience, the ability that some people have to withstand stress, was once thought to be a genetic gift. You were either lucky and had it, or you didn’t and struggled. Studies show that teenagers who fail exams have an increased risk of depression as adults, while athletes who lose can feel long-term guilt and humiliation. But recent psychological research suggests that emotional resilience can be developed. A systematic review of what makes people able to deal with failure looked at results from 46 studies.
We’ve all heard the stats telling us that one out of every four college students suffers from some sort of mental illness, including depression. For many people; however, depression seems distant, and the stigma surrounding mental health may cause them to deny having it. The University of Michigan Athletic Department is addressing this problem and has recently started a program called Athletes Connected. This initiative brings attention to, and provides support for, student athletes’ mental wellnesses.
Introduction Stem cells have emerged as a new treatment option for tendon disorders. We systematically reviewed the current evidence for stem cell therapy in tendon disorders.
Methods Randomised and non-randomised controlled trials, cohort studies and case series with a minimum of 5 cases were searched in MEDLINE, CENTRAL, EMBASE, CINAHL, PEDro and SPORTDiscus. In addition, we searched grey literature databases and trial registers. Only human studies were included and no time or language restrictions were applied to our search. All references of included trials were checked for possibly eligible trials. Risk of bias assessment was performed using the Cochrane risk of bias tool for controlled trials and the Newcastle-Ottawa scale for case series. Levels of evidence were assigned according to the Oxford levels of evidence.
Results 4 published and three unpublished/pending trials were found with a total of 79 patients. No unpublished data were available. Two trials evaluated bone marrow-derived stem cells in rotator cuff repair surgery and found lower retear rates compared with historical controls or the literature. One trial used allogenic adipose-derived stem cells to treat lateral epicondylar tendinopathy. Improved Mayo Elbow Performance Index, Visual Analogue Pain scale and ultrasound findings after 1-year follow-up compared with baseline were found. Bone marrow-derived stem cell-treated patellar tendinopathy showed improved International Knee Documentation Committee, Knee injury and Osteoarthritis Outcome Score subscales and Tegner scores after 5-year follow-up. One trial reported adverse events and found them to be mild (eg, swelling, effusion). All trials were at high risk of bias and only level 4 evidence was available.
Conclusions No evidence (level 4) was found for the therapeutic use of stem cells for tendon disorders. The use of stem cell therapy for tendon disorders in clinical practice is currently not advised.
… Not long ago, I was talking to Asaf Bitton, a thirty-nine-year-old internist I work with, about the contrast between his work and mine, and I made the mistake of saying that I had more opportunities to make a clear difference in people’s lives. He was having none of it. Primary care, he countered, is the medical profession that has the greatest over-all impact, including lower mortality and better health, not to mention lower medical costs. Asaf is a recognized expert on the delivery of primary health care around the world, and, over the next few days, he sent me evidence for his claims.
He showed me studies demonstrating that states with higher ratios of primary-care physicians have lower rates of general mortality, infant mortality, and mortality from specific conditions such as heart disease and stroke. Other studies found that people with a primary-care physician as their usual source of care had lower subsequent five-year mortality rates than others, regardless of their initial health. In the United Kingdom, where family physicians are paid to practice in deprived areas, a ten-per-cent increase in the primary-care supply was shown to improve people’s health so much that you could add ten years to everyone’s life and still not match the benefit. Another study examined health-care reforms in Spain that focussed on strengthening primary care in various regions—by, for instance, building more clinics, extending their hours, and paying for home visits. After ten years, mortality fell in the areas where the reforms were made, and it fell more in those areas which received the reforms earlier. Likewise, reforms in California that provided all Medicaid recipients with primary-care physicians resulted in lower hospitalization rates. By contrast, private Medicare plans that increased co-payments for primary-care visits—and thereby reduced such visits—saw increased hospitalization rates. Further, the more complex a person’s medical needs are the greater the benefit of primary care.
I finally had to submit. Primary care, it seemed, does a lot of good for people—maybe even more good, in the long run, than I will as a surgeon. But I still wondered how. What, exactly, is the primary-care physician’s skill? I visited Asaf’s clinic to see.
Home-field advantage isn’t always considered a matter of great importance in baseball. Crowds aren’t as close to the action as they are in basketball. There’s nothing comparable in the sport to something like raucous Cameron Indoor Stadium. There are no 100,000-seat, canyon-like stadiums cascading noise to the playing surface like in college football.
But home-field advantage is a real thing in baseball, and significant, and has remained constant for better than a century.
It can look like a tsunami of statistics, but live tracking of every bounce and shot that has become a mark of the NBA has made it a more “beautiful game”, according to the executive who introduced the technology.
Steve Hellmuth, NBA Entertainment executive vice-president for media operations and technology, told AFP that tracking had been a revolution for the sport and has changed strategies used by the 30 teams.
Courtside cameras at every NBA stadium capture shots, assists, rebounds, even the territory that a player covers.
Coaches and fans can now assess how effective a shot or a defence strategy is.
Matt Ryan’s blistering hot season may be one for the record books, but he has more than just himself and his teammates to thank. Ryan and all recent quarterbacks have been riding on a wave of inflation in passing statistics. Although Ryan’s 2016 rivals Kurt Warner’s 2000 “Greatest Show on Turf” season, the two seasons aren’t easily compared — Warner’s passing yards were much harder to come by 16 years ago than they would be today.
It’s no secret that the passing numbers in the NFL keep climbing. Analysts have been calling the NFL a passing league for the past few years, but the truth is it has been so for two generations, and there’s no end in sight for passing’s ascendancy.
Passing’s nadir came in the mid-1970s, just prior to rule changes that opened things up for offenses. In 1977, teams averaged 142 yards on 25 attempts per game. After the rules were altered in 1978 to prevent contact with receivers downfield and to allow linemen to block with extended arms, those numbers jumped to 159 yards on 26 attempts and have steadily climbed to where they are today. In 2016, teams averaged 242 yards on 36 attempts per game. All the while, rushing averages have hovered near 4 yards per carry throughout the entire period.
… it’s hard for a player drafted from any round to make the majors. In fact, a recent study by Rick Karcher, a professor of sports management at Eastern Michigan University made waves among baseball people for demonstrating that the percentage of players drafted in rounds one through five who reached the big leagues didn’t differ as much as you’d expect—and the difference between rounds three and five were even slimmer. College players are slightly more likely to reach the majors than high school players. But a third-round pick is still only a few percentage points more likely to reach the bigs than a fifth-rounder.
Studies like this are important, they provide context for all the factors working against a player as they embark on what they hope will be a major league career. But the MLB Draft is not a crapshoot. You can never know beforehand with 100 percent certainty that a player will make the majors, or become a star. But teams do their best to try. The MLB Draft is much more scientific and calculated than you might imagine, for a few important reasons.