… All of this flies in the face of the sports code and an always-try-your-best ethos. Aren’t we supposed to treat every game the same? Doesn’t each play matter? And, yes, it stinks for the fans, when you go to the arena expecting LeBron and get Channing Frye instead. It was Rockets guard Patrick Beverley who championed the cause in March, when debate about resting starters was filling sports-talk radio. “I think that’s a disgrace to the league,” Beverley said. “I think the fans deserve better.” But then his All-NBA teammate, James Harden, did go full bore during the regular season; by the playoffs he resembled a cellphone drained of its battery.
It’s all a reminder that the labor market behaves like, well, a market. Management can schedule all the games it wants. The workers, especially those at the top, are going to try to maximize value and efficiency, and take off some shifts accordingly. And if these breaks extend careers—enabling the likes of James, Brady and Federer to sustain their excellence deep into their 30s—everyone wins.
A relentless training regimen. Battling through concussions. The ability to withstand hundreds of pounds of force slamming against your body. If that sounds more like what it takes to be an NFL linebacker than a figure skater, then you haven’t met Ashley Wagner. After posing for this year’s Body Issue, the 26-year-old Olympian sat down with reporter Morty Ain to explain just how much strength and athleticism it takes to make all those triple axels look “effortless,” and combat the image of figure skaters as porcelain dolls. Here’s how Wagner describes her body and her sport, in her own words:
I think figure skating has this stereotype as a sport for little girls — that we are these pretty porcelain dolls. I don’t think people put a lot of thought into the athleticism that goes into the sport. But that’s totally understandable because people only see the finished product. Our job is to take something that is ridiculously technical and difficult and make it look perfect and effortless and seamless.
… Afterwards, the media went into a clubhouse that was almost devoid of players, and soon Duffy was circled, explaining why his error cost the Red Sox the game.
Out of the trainer’s room came Eckersley. He walked over to the media scrum and hollered, “leave him alone. Talk to me. He didn’t load the bases. He didn’t hang the (—) two strike slider to Bucky Dent. The L goes next to my name. Come over to my locker and question me.”
Years later, Duffy hadn’t forgotten it. I never will.
Today, few doubt Wayne Smith’s passion for the All Blacks jersey. But it was not ever thus for the side’s cerebral assistant coach, whose command of defence, counterattack and skills was to the fore as New Zealand defeated the British & Irish Lions in the first Test. “In 2001 I got sacked as All Blacks head coach,” he says. “NZ Rugby’s then CEO told me John Mitchell had the job. When I asked him why, he replied: ‘He showed more passion than you.’ I said: ‘Maybe he wears his on the outside; mine’s on the inside.’”
In the lead-up to New Zealand’s 2015 Rugby World Cup final win against Australia, both Conrad Smith and Ma’a Nonu were of the belief that Smith, who will leave the All Blacks this year, was the best coach they had ever had. Tana Umaga, now Blues coach, is also a fan. “Smithy’s had a big influence: the old master. [It’s] his work ethic, what he’s done to be the coach he is. But first and foremost, he’s just a good man,” says Umaga, hailing Smith’s “better people make better players” mantra. “Smithy treats everyone with respect, and sees the good. He wants to keep teaching. That’s what engenders everyone’s trust; buy-in from players. That’s why people think he’s one of the best coaches in the world, if not the best.”
The imposing partnership between Smith and the New Zealand head coach, Steve Hansen, goes back to the 1980s, when Smith was the Canterbury Bs player-coach. Smith says they are like an old married couple. “That’s what Shag [Hansen] and I are like,” he laughs, “and you have your disagreements like everything else.”
Twenty-three All Blacks woke with the strangest feelings on Sunday morning. It was not their aching bodies, the sprains, strains, and bruises, stiff shoulders, throbbing legs, sore chests – all that was familiar enough. They expect nothing less after a Test. But another, more novel, sensation, altogether more painful. Defeat.
Their captain, Kieran Read, is about to play his 100th game. In the past 99, he has experienced this 11 times. His mate Sam Whitelock, who has won more caps at lock than any other All Black, has lost seven. Beauden Barrett, who just won his 50th cap, four. On Sunday we asked their loosehead prop Wyatt Crockett how many Tests he had lost. “Two,” he said, quick as a shot. Crockett has played 61 games.
Steve Hansen, who sometimes comes across like a particularly lugubrious bloodhound, managed to find the bright side. “Nice to see the sun’s up,” he said. Time was when some of his countrymen used to think an All Blacks defeat meant it would never rise again. After the 1999 World Cup, the head coach John Hart was spat at when he went out in public. Things are a little different now. “We’ve had a little bit of success since,” Hansen said, in his understated way. “Our fans are a little bit more accepting of when things don’t go right.” They saw the team “give it everything they had”, he said. “It’s when you lose and you feel like people haven’t turned up is when people get frustrated. Our guys turned up, they just didn’t get the job done.”
While preseason may no longer inflict the same fear and loathing into the hearts of footballers as it once did, this week, as players report back for training, behind the smiles for the cameras, the host of social media posts declaring their delight to be back, the familiar sense of trepidation will remain.
Knowing what awaits — the long days of sweat and toil under a glaring sun, a battle with mind and body, and against teammates — means the flutter in your stomach will remain until the whistle blows on that first preseason run.
Across the 15 seasons of my career, the advance of sport science transformed the type of work involved. Where once a jump on the scales would have sufficed, today, days of testing — height, body fat, jump, speed and agility tests, as well as full body screening — determines power and flexibility and flags up any areas that may require attention.
The majority of Premier League clubs reported back for pre-season training on Monday, although for many of the players it will feel as if they have never been away. That is partly because the six weeks since the final league game of last season have passed in the blink of an eye but more to do with the fact that so few players have a proper break these days. Indeed, some are so determined to stay in shape that they take the fitness coach on holiday with them.
“Steve Cook wanted to really push on in the off season, so he asked if I’d go away with him,” says Ben Donachie, who works closely with Dan Hodges, Bournemouth’s head of sports science. “We went away for a week to do some training, between 17 and 24 June, and I had to pull the reins in a little bit because he always wanted to do more.”
Cook, who played every minute of last season’s Premier League campaign, is not alone in that respect. Tyrone Mings regularly posted footage on social media of his gruelling work-outs during June and a number of other Bournemouth players were turning up at the stadium when they could have been putting their feet up. “We’ve had probably 50% of the squad in over the six weeks that they’ve had off,” says Hodges, who is taking his sixth pre-season at the club. “They will text me or Ben, saying they want to do a bit of work.”
College football is nearly 24/7 work for players, but after Washington lost to Alabama, Chris Petersen didn’t even want players in the building for three weeks.
The NCAA continues to push for more off-time for players. Petersen knows the best teams push to the limit, but they have to figure out the balance and when to rest. Washington’s bowl schedule and school schedule have played a factor.
“One thing that’s been interesting, the last couple years, we’ve played in these late bowl games. With the quarter system, we start early January back in school,” Petersen said on Brock & Salk. “We played in that late bowl game last year, they got three days to go home and had to come back. We didn’t do anything with them — football-wise, weight room, anything — for three weeks. We told them to not even come in the building.
… On the caveman-to-scientist continuum onto which people in his position fall, Woodfin stands way down it toward the pure-scientist end of it.
He seemingly explains to the athletes the science behind every prescribed move in the weight room, the dining room and the great outdoors, where players partake in dynamic stretching and running.
Woodfin blends his experience as a college football player, knowledge gained as an exercise science major at UAB, a strength and conditioning instructor for professional athletes and Olympians for four years, a three-year stint with the Green Bay Packers, heading the UAB’s football strength and conditioning staff and then serving Southern Miss in a similar role.
arXiv, Computer Science > Computers and Society; Valentin Kassarnig, Enys Mones, Andreas Bjerre-Nielsen, Piotr Sapiezynski, David Dreyer Lassen, Sune Lehmann from
Identifying the factors which influence academic performance is an essential part of educational research. Previous studies have documented the importance of personality traits, class attendance, and social network structure. However, because most of these analyses were based on a single behavioral aspect and/or small sample sizes, we lack a quantification of the interplay of these factors. Here, we infer the academic performance among a cohort of almost 1,000 freshmen based on data collected through smartphones, which the students used as their primary phone for two years. The availability of multi-channel data from a single population allows us to directly compare the predictive power of individual and social characteristics. We find that a student’s performance is best inferred from their social ties. Network indicators out-perform models based on individual characteristics. We confirm earlier findings indicating that class attendance is the most important predictor among the individual characteristics. Finally, our results indicates potential presence of strong homophily and/or peer effects among university students.
On the morning of Tuesday 27 June, a young man walked into an office in northern California, signed a consent form and picked up two devices that will monitor his heartbeat, sleep patterns and a range of other bodily functions. He is one of the first participants in a planned 4-year, 10,000-person study being run by Google’s spin-off company Verily Life Sciences, which aims to find out how readings from smart devices can be combined with genetic tests and other data to improve overall health and to predict when someone might suffer a medical emergency such as a stroke or seizure.
Verily’s study, Project Baseline, joins a handful of similar experiments, including one led by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), which enrolled its first person earlier in June and will collect data from wearable devices on some of its one million participants. Together, these studies are part of a broad effort by companies and researchers to take advantage of the data generated by smart electronics.
EVERY FOUR YEARS or so, some of the world’s most prominent scientists gather to synthesize and summarize the latest in brain-injury research. Since first meeting in 2001, the assemblage, called the Concussion in Sport Group, has grown in size and influence. Doctors, athletic trainers and media types around the world take their cues from the recommendations it publishes and from the Sport Concussion Assessment Tool (SCAT) it has developed. When members gathered in Berlin last October, Jiri Dvorak, then FIFA’s chief medical officer, said they worked on behalf of some 1 billion professional and amateur athletes. For that 2016 symposium, around 400 medical and sports professionals met in the Grand Ballroom of the Ritz-Carlton hotel, with art nouveau stylings that hark back to the days before the world wars and trappings so posh that guests enjoy breakfast honey harvested from a rooftop beehive. Over two days, a stone’s throw from where the Berlin Wall used to stand, the leading lights of the sports neuro-establishment made clear their role as gatekeepers of concussion research. Organizers closed the conclave to the media and swatted audience members off social media.
There was another group almost entirely shut out of the 5th International Consensus Conference on Concussion in Sport: female athletes.
… In the sports world, the owners, the president of [pick your sport] operations, the general manager, assistant general managers, and coaches are the decision makers.
When they gather to hash out the basics of an offseason plan, the group might be unanimous that the team needs an upgrade at point guard, but argue over the means to make the acquisition. After some discussion, it may be decided that free agency has the most appealing and feasible options, and a short list of candidates could be assembled.
Then the analytics are brought in. The front office or coaching staff would like evaluations on the candidates, specifically focusing on their playmaking ability. The analytics staff will have some freedoms in the analysis. For example, they might decide to split pick-and-roll situations depending on if the screening teammate rolled or popped, or they might look at the point guard’s turnover rates split by whether or not the opposition switched.
Seemingly any behavior can be “gamified” and awarded digital points these days, from tracking the steps you’ve walked to the online purchases you’ve made and even the chores you’ve completed. Tracking behavior in this way helps to spur further action and new research shows that even meaningless scores can serve as effective motivators, as long as those scores are accelerating.
The findings are published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
“We all know that people like high scores, but what is less known is how to give scores,” says researcher Luxi Shen of the Chinese University of Hong Kong Business School. “Our research shows that what matters is neither how high the score is nor how fast the score increases, but rather the way it increases: It’s most motivating if the score first increases at a relatively slow rate and then increases faster and faster.”
… At the OptaPro Forum this year, I looked at data from the past five Premier League seasons and used a sprinkling of maths to categorise shots into different types.
One such style I identified was ‘fast attacks from deep’, which were a distinct class of shots born of fast and direct possessions originating in the defensive zone. While these aren’t entirely synonymous with counter-attacks, there is likely a lot of overlap; the classical counter-attack is likely a subset of the deep fast-attacks identified in the data.
These fast-attacks from deep typically offer good scoring chances, with above average shot conversion (10.7%) due to the better shot locations afforded to them. They made up approximately 23% of the shots in my analysis.