When WNBA veteran Lindsey Harding first started playing basketball overseas in 2008, the Duke alum’s residence was roughly a block away from the Mediterranean Sea in Mersin, Turkey, where she says it was beautiful and warm.
Some of her subsequent international teams were based in cities with climates that weren’t quite so pleasant — the Houston-raised Harding describes playing in Kursk, Russia, as “cold, that’s all I can say” — but playing overseas over the past nine years has been a joyous and enlightening experience, regardless of the weather.
“I think the whole thing overall is not just the opportunity to play in these countries, but to live,” said Harding, a guard who currently plays for Besiktas J.K. in Istanbul and also has played professionally in Lithuania and Russia.
It’s two minutes into a January regular-season game for the Celtics, and the team’s new big man, Al Horford, is defending Utah’s 6-foot-8 guard Rodney Hood more than 20 feet away from the hoop. With nobody else near, the advantage is Hood’s, if he can use his speed to move past Horford for an easy layup. A big man defending a quicker guard is a matchup all offenses want, and the 24-year-old Hood has it. But Horford is not your average big man. He’s got agility, smoothly sliding his feet toward the hoop, staying in front of Hood and forcing him into an off-balance 10-foot shot that misses. He’s got speed, and when the rebound is grabbed by Boston, Horford swiftly makes his way up the court, passing four Utah defenders as he runs more than 80 feet in a matter of seconds. And he’s got strength, corralling a pass about 8 feet from the hoop and slamming home a dunk for two points. It’s a four-point swing in a game the Celtics would go on to win.
The dunk shows up in highlights the next day, but it’s those complete plays on both ends of the court that led the Celtics to sign Horford to a 4-year, $113 million contract in July. And the agility, speed and strength that the 6-foot-10-inch Horford displayed on that play are some of the reasons the Celtics are betting that the 30-year-old—who’s surrounded by mostly 20-something teammates—is still near the peak of his basketball powers. Staying in shape is essential for the four-time All-Star, who’s been working hard off the court for nearly his whole life with a focus on fitness and nutrition. He’s garnered a number of different mentors along the way, but none more important than his first one. His father, Tito, was a professional basketball player, and 7-year-old Al would observe him lifting weights and working on conditioning.
John Bostock remembers walking through the gates of London Nautical School the day after making his Football League debut. “There were photographers from national newspapers who wanted to take my picture,” he tells FFT.
He was a 15-year-old wonderkid, a baby-faced youngster with talents beyond his years. Barcelona sent him boots signed by Ronaldinho, while Arsenal posted shirts worn by Cesc Fabregas as Europe’s biggest clubs sought to tempt him away from Crystal Palace.
He was labelled England’s next great hope, but nine years later he finds himself rebuilding his career at Ligue 2 side RC Lens. His story is a familiar one in English football, where young talents often burn brightly before fading into obscurity. FFT finds out why…
… The otherwise unnoteworthy sequence was one of mere folklore a year ago, when injuries stopped both Anderson and Gordon from forming a second act to Anthony Davis’s rise to superstardom in New Orleans. After the duo combined to miss 53 games in 2015–16, Anderson is now sniping off high ball screens set for James Harden, and Gordon has reestablished the slithery scoring style he honed during his early seasons with the Clippers. Many have Gordon pegged as the leading candidate for Sixth Man of the Year.
“It doesn’t surprise me how he’s playing,“ said Pelicans head coach Alvin Gentry, who voted for Gordon as an All-Star reserve. “I think he’s playing the way he’s played since he’s gotten into the league when he’s been healthy. And obviously, he’s healthy there.”
A simple intervention can improve the sleep of college athletes, report researchers.
In a survey of 189 student-athletes, researchers found that 68 percent reported poor sleep quality, with 87 percent getting less than or equal to eight hours of sleep a night and 43 percent getting less than seven hours. About 23 percent of the athletes surveyed reported experiencing excessive levels of fatigue.
While seven hours is considered the minimum amount of sleep a typical adult should get, college students—especially highly active ones, like athletes—need at least eight to nine hours for optimal functioning, says Michael Grandner, assistant professor of psychiatry and psychology and director of the Sleep Health Research Center at the University of Arizona College of Medicine.
… There’s no denying that the U.S. finds itself regressing during the current cycle. Sure, there was the high of reaching the Copa America Centenario semifinal, but that was countered by the lows of defeats to Jamaica in the 2015 Gold Cup and Guatemala in World Cup qualifying. Subsequent losses to Mexico and Costa Rica have only added to the concern over the team’s prospects.
Part of the problem is that the rate at which younger players have pushed older performers out of the lineup has been slower than hoped for, even if you include the likes of 18-year-old Christian Pulisic and two 23-year-olds: right-back DeAndre Yedlin and central defender John Brooks.
“There’s no secret that the team has gotten older and that development sometimes gets you to hit a ceiling,” said U.S. U-20 manager Tab Ramos, who also served under Klinsmann as an assistant to the senior team. “Experience is good, but you need that influx of young players to make a difference. And I think we have a few that are coming up who can make that difference. I think the key is whether this is the right time for those to take the lead at such a crucial moment in qualifying.
We often need to make decisions about sequences of things or people rather than just a single item in isolation. For instance, in an everyday setting, we might choose which smartphone to buy after trying out several. There are also more high-stakes situations, of course, like when Olympic athletes compete in a set order as they try to win the gold.
Ideally, it wouldn’t matter when in the sequence you came across the best item or the most outstanding performance, and we certainly hope that scores will be determined in an unbiased way. If they weren’t, competitors would (rightly) complain about how unfair the process was.
But it turns out that people show many biases when performing these sorts of judgment tasks. Our subjective evaluations are influenced by context – that is, the other items to be judged have an effect, even though they probably shouldn’t. For example, people rate faces presented in a group photo as more attractive than when each is rated individually. My latest study adds to the body of psychology research showing that context also includes previously seen faces, athletes and so on.
Canada.com, The Canadian Press, Donna Spencer from
The Canadian Olympic Committee is teaming with a big data company to ramp up analytics for athletes.
The COC has announced an eight-year, cash-and-services sponsorship deal with SAS, an analytics software company whose clients include banks, hotels, universities and casinos.
The company’s sports division has worked with the Los Angeles Kings, Orlando Magic and New York Mets as well as Major League Soccer.
… Why haven’t smartwatches shrunk the way smartphones and laptops routinely do? Kedia notes that Moore’s Law—the famous observation that transistor density doubles every couple of years, allowing major gains in performance or power efficiency—doesn’t translate so well to smartwatches.
People will pay a premium for thin and light, he says, but they’ll also pay a premium for more sensors (such as GPS, heart rate, and microphones), greater connectivity (such as Wi-Fi and cellular), and better security. Each of these additions creates a trade-off in power efficiency—another thing that commands a premium—which necessitates a larger device that can accommodate a bigger battery.
“Taking all those things and putting it in a package, that is not easy to do,” Kedia says. “It is not a one-trick pony.”
In one way, the new partnership between General Electric and the Boston Celtics started 35 years ago on a Harvard basketball court.
It was there that GE CEO Jeff Immelt and Celtics co-owner Steve Pagliuca first struck up a friendship. Both members of Harvard Business School’s Class of 1982, they would play pickup games together at the Ivy League school’s rec center.
Decades later, the duo played key roles in a marketing deal announced Wednesday that will put GE’s logo on Celtics jerseys beginning next season, the first time a corporate logo will appear on the uniforms in the franchise’s 71-year history. The partnership ventures beyond just marketing, however, with GE committing to provide medical and lighting technology to the Celtics’ new training facility in Brighton, set to open in 2018, and lending its famed Predix operating system to improve the team’s analysis of player data.
When the NBA decided in April 2016 that it would allow teams to put the logos of corporate sponsors on their jerseys, GE (NYSE: GE) quickly rose to the top of the Celtics’ list of possible branding partners. Pagliuca told Celtics executives he’d give his former hardcourt teammate a ring to feel him out. It was only weeks after Immelt and GE executives had moved into the company’s temporary Fort Point headquarters in August.
One morning last winter, in the coaches’ conference room in the bowels of Marlins Park, the Miami Marlins’ decision-makers crowded around a table with a problem and a potential solution.
The issue was they wanted to start up an analytics department, a task with a fair degree of urgency given that most of the rest of baseball had already done so. The potential solution was the man at one end of the table, Jason Paré, whom they were interested in hiring to run it.
Paré had been an analyst with the Toronto Blue Jays. He had also been on vacation in Brazil for nearly two weeks. When the Marlins called the Blue Jays for permission to speak to Paré about the opening, per baseball norms, the parties realized Paré would have a layover in Miami on his way back to Canada. Did he want to come by the ballpark for a chat?
Sam Allardyce has admitted that Crystal Palace might make signings based off video analysis and not exhaustive scouting in this transfer window.
The Eagles chief admitted yesterday that the prices for domestic targets were driving the Premier League strugglers to look overseas.
“The risk depends on how much video you watch, how much info you get,” he said. “At Sunderland we only watched one of the four players we signed in real life. All the rest were looked at by video by sectioning down the individual strength and weaknesses of the player and looking a them for that specific position. The technology is exceptionally good now.
In 2032, 20 percent of all injuries to be in the back of the thigh. Moreover, the trend is that it becomes more and more ACL injuries.
– Is this trend remained unchanged, some men’s teams in fifteen years have two or three ACL injuries per year, says researcher Mark Walden to Football Channel.
Guardiola’s Manchester City hosted in-form Tottenham in a highly anticipated clash on Saturday evening. Fresh from their 4-0 defeat at Everton City were under pressure to win to keep alive their increasingly slim title hopes. This task was made tougher since they welcomed the league’s most in-form side with the North Londoners enjoying a 6 game winning streak.
City’s intense pressing out of 4-1-4-1
Perhaps the most impressive aspect of City’s performance was their intensity in high pressing actions. Starting from a base 4-1-4-1 shape City were able to prevent Spurs progressing from deep with a combination of sprints, man-orientations and accurate shifting movements.
… It’s a strange world, sports analytics, an industry in which the ‘best’ employees don’t always work for the best clubs. In fact, one of the better analysts I know deliberately chooses not to work for a club at all, preferring to provide consulting for little or no pay. This is before we touch on the true ‘pure’ statistical analysts, many of whom you see are very active on Twitter and who are undoubtedly (in my mind) better than many analysts currently employed at clubs.
For a couple of years now I’ve been thinking of the reasons for this imbalance, and every time I can only come to one logical conclusion…money.
If you scroll through the jobs page on a site like thevideoanalyst.com (a great website dedicated to all things performance analysis based) you’ll see a plethora of job openings, varying from volunteer work at local clubs, to unpaid internships, to full time paid positions. Despite the lack of remuneration, these openings are greeted with incredible enthusiasm.