… the best way to contextualize how far Adebayo can go? Refer to how far he has come.
Consider present-day Bam’s scouting report on seven-years-ago Bam, when those neighborhood friends initially coaxed him into street ball games. “I sucked,” Adebayo says. “It was my first time picking up a basketball. I watched it on TV, but I never knew what to really do with it. I mean, I needed help with everything.”
His size and potential earned him a spot on a local AAU team, which brought him to a camp where he caught the attention of Graves, who convinced Adebayo to join his Karolina Diamonds program for the next summer. Graves was struck by Adebayo’s foot speed and how fluid his lateral movement was for an adolescent with such an outsize frame. He also was astonished by just how untrained Adebayo was. “When I say ‘super raw,’” Graves says, “he wasn’t a basketball player.” Thus began the building of Bam Adebayo. Before he could learn about hook shots, he had to master basic footwork. In three-on-three drills, in three-man weaves, Adebayo traveled constantly. So Graves put his pupil through guard drills for years, thinking: If I make you do jab step drills and stutter drills, guess what? Your post moves are going to be easy.
The 19-year-old central defender has returned to the states after a half-season in Portugal, and will look to be a difference-maker for both Sporting Kansas City and the U.S. under-20 national team.
A fence separates the training grounds of Arsenal and Watford in Hertfordshire, England, and one day Martyn Pert, the current Whitecaps assistant coach, was a fly on the wall for a talk between then-Watford boss Malky Mackay and Arsenal legend Arsene Wenger.
“(Wenger) said, ‘Never put a ceiling on a player, because once you put a ceiling on a player then all your behaviours and actions are based on that,’” said Pert, who was head of conditioning and reserve team manager at Watford.
It’s one of the many lessons that’s stuck with Pert, a 39-year-old from Norwich.
… Fundamental to Atlanta’s postseason progress has been the availability of key players at crucial moments, whether it has been Julio Jones rampaging in wide areas, Matt Ryan strengthening his case for MVP at quarterback or Vic Beasley sacking Ryan’s counterparts in imperious fashion, the Falcons have been a force to be reckoned with.
Prior to their sterling season, the Leaders Performance Institute spoke to Marty Lauzon, the Director of Sports Medicine and Performance, at the Falcons. Our primary concern at the time was the matter of extending professional playing careers, with players such as veteran kicker Matt Bryant, now 41, very much in mind. All the same, the interview covered considerably more ground.
… Your own bias is your worst enemy — make it your mission in life and work to conquer it. Accept that you are human, that all humans are biased, and that you’re just as bad as everyone else. Accept that objectivity is a fantasy, and that data science is no more objective than any other way of knowing.
Spend your time trying to falsify the things you believe. Chase evidence that proves you wrong, not evidence that proves you right. Your best strategy for doing this is to cultivate an ability to deeply understand the perspectives of others. To make their bias your bias. To get inside their heads and their hearts.
KQED, MindShift, Hechinger Report, Nichole Dobo from
By design, some students go through two years of kindergarten in Middletown, New York.
People associate repeating grades with disastrous consequences. But in the Middletown City School District, the kindergarten repeaters often end up ahead of their peers in later grades — standout students who avoided getting forever labeled as performing “below expectations.” They’ve had the extra instruction they needed, when they needed it. The district has worked to remove the stigma of being “slow,” and has stopped moving children in lockstep through school in grade bands defined by age. They now focus on each child’s individual needs.
“We have proven the fact that all children can learn — and can learn well — under the right instructional circumstances,” said Kenneth W. Eastwood, the district’s superintendent.
Sportsmen and women who spend half their lives glued to their smartphones should look away now. According to the expert hired to improve the hand-eye coordination of England’s rugby team, there has been a significant decline across all sports in skill and visual awareness over the past six years – a period when staring at a screen has become increasingly normal for all ages.
Dr Sherylle Calder, a South African vision specialist recruited by the England head coach, Eddie Jones, has worked in American football, golf and motor racing as well as rugby and, ahead of the Six Nations Championship this year, has already advised England’s players to spend less time on their mobiles if they wish to become the best in the world.
“We have seen in the last five or six years when we assess elite players in different sports that there is a decline in skill levels,” said Calder, who also worked with England’s 2003 World Cup‑winning squad. “In the modern world the ability of players to have good awareness is deteriorating. When you look at your phone there are no eye movements happening and everything is pretty static.
Researchers from the University of Newcastle (UON) will work alongside the AIS and Basketball Australia to improve injury prevention and rehabilitation strategies for athletes, as part of a new study investigating hamstring and adductor muscle strain injuries.
Dr Suzi Edwards and her team will study top male Australian basketball players over three years to determine the different biomechanical factors involved in muscle injuries, which could minimise risk factors in other sporting codes nationally and internationally.
‘Hamstring and adductor injuries are the two leading myotendinous injuries in basketball players, but athletes of any sport are susceptible to injuring their thigh muscles when they attempt to suddenly slow down or speed up their running speed,’ Dr Edwards said.
Hunter-gatherers and farming villagers who live in worlds without lightbulbs or thermostats sleep slightly less at night than smartphone-toting city slickers, researchers say.
“Contrary to conventional wisdom, people in societies without electricity do not sleep more than those in industrial societies like ours,” says UCLA psychiatrist and sleep researcher Jerome Siegel, who was not involved in the new research.
Different patterns of slumber and wakefulness in each of these groups highlight the flexibility of human sleep — and also point to potential health dangers in how members of Western societies sleep, conclude evolutionary biologist David Samson of Duke University and colleagues.
… gadget makers are developing new UI paradigms in an attempt to evolve past screens. They attribute their push for voice and gesture control to users’ disinterest in staring at screens, but it seems their effort also relates back to bad Android integrations not getting any easier to maintain. There’s more at stake, too. The war for touchscreen software control has already been fought and won by Google and Apple, so whoever comes to dominate this next era of interaction could end up with all the money and investment.
We’ve seen hints of this battle before, but the success of Amazon’s Echo and the onslaught of connected devices has reinvigorated gadget manufacturers to give alternative interactions another go. The question is whether these companies can uncover something people like enough to change their behavior and keep the technology alive. The Echo probably represented a one-time jackpot, not a sign of the tides changing, but gadget companies seem to think the device was representative of things to come. It’s not like they have any other choice.
“The future of interaction is more subliminal and more of an undercurrent,” Gadi Amit, a designer of the Fitbit Force and principal designer at NewDealDesign, tells me. “[It’ll involve a] few carefully thought-through interactions where the computing environment is more in the background than the foreground.”
… We’ve looked at over 1,300 companies to date, and organised them by the patterns that emerge. We have 30 sectors right now that we have organised those companies around, and when you go into the platform you will see the companies and where they lie in a sector: where they are located physically; what their financial situation is; what round of funding; are they public are they private; and what their products and service are. What we tried to do is not just cut and paste what their marketing materials say.
In our first year we will do a deeper dive analysis into the four major trends: qualified athletes; next-generation sponsorship; immersive media; and smart venues. Those four trends will be areas that we will actually use our lab. We will invite vendors into our company to talk to the marketing staff, to talk to the engineers, to test products and services – we have relationships with MIT, Harvard education institutions as well as a great network of advisers that are domain experts that will help us understand those products and services. We are looking for the game-changers – those are the companies that have a strong sports focus and are backed on the tech side. It’s a B2B, subscription-based service. If our customers are interested, they can have access to these scouts or consulting or events or other products.
In our Wareable 50 run down of the hottest trends to go big in 2017, we tipped hardcore fitness metrics to truly go mainstream. Fitbit led the way last year introducing VO2 Max testing with its Charge 2 fitness tracker. Humon, a startup based out of Boston feels that while it’s a positive thing that companies like Fitbit are offering users more fitness data, there’s still some work to do to educate users what it all means and how it can help you get fitter.
That’s why it developed a wearable specifically for endurance athletes, although it wasn’t always the intention to be a wearable when the idea was first hatched. “I was at MIT Sloan and became very obsessed that biology and technology would intersect and help you learn more about your body,” Humon’s co-founder Alessandro Babini told us.
Eighteen months after feeding student-athletes and cost of attendance stipends dominated the national conversation in college sports, the first bill is in.
Rutgers spent $1.61 million on student-athlete meals not related to travel in fiscal year 2016, according to the athletic department’s report of revenues and expenses submitted to the NCAA and obtained by NJ Advance Media through an Open Public Records Act request.
… GIG formed in 2008 with the aim of becoming ‘the world’s leading authority on tennis science and helping the sport make up for lost time’.
Last year, GIG’s Dr Reid and our Associate Professor Stuart Morgan (working at the Australian Institute of Sport at the time), along with several other industry experts, published their internationally award-winning research.
The aim of the investigation was to deep dive into three years’ worth of Australian Open HawkEye data – that’s 37,727 shots – to identify the crucial shots and movement patterns of the world’s best players.
… The company founded by the four Northwestern undergraduates, called Zcruit, essentially borrows that same mentality, one of putting numbers behind what have long been gut-based decisions, and applies it to the recruiting landscape.
Think of this way: Every program in the Football Bowl Subdivision is chasing after the same pool of recruits; most programs recruit the same region as countless others; some programs offer hundreds of recruits to sign just 25 future student-athletes.
Boiled down, Zcruit’s goal is to assist a program’s efforts by streamlining the process — by taking all the streams of data at their disposal and creating a formula for recruiting success, in the same way a university’s admissions office attempts to pinpoint the best and most likely fits for the student body at large.