OZY, The Huddle, Matt Foley and Daryl "Truck" Bryant from
… The tiny southeast Austrian town of Fürstenfeld was my first stop. After 2012, my first year, I had to keep it moving. Since then, I’ve played in Italy, the Czech Republic, Greece, Hungary and Finland. This game has taken me some amazing places, man. The best basketball experience was this past season with my Finnish club, Kataja. We just won the top division championship. Greece was incredible — beautiful country, delicious food and the American dollar carries so much weight. But talk about a double-edged sword. Good luck getting paid over there. PAOK Thessaloniki, my Greek club, still owes me a check. I’m told that it should finally be coming soon. Hey, it’s only been a year and change.
The key to being a pro in Europe is finding a club to play long-term. Almost every league in Europe has limits on the number of Americans each team can have on the roster. Usually, the lower division leagues have the smallest limits, and it increases from there. We had four ex-pats on my Finnish team this year, but the top teams in Germany, for instance, can sign eight Americans. Obviously, American players increase the overall athleticism and diversify the competition but, as Euro leagues continue to grow, they try to keep strong local ties and provide jobs for the homegrown players. That’s why I’m working on dual citizenship.
Noah Syndergaard is devising a new training strategy. The previous one emphasized packing more muscle onto the solid 6-foot-6 frame that had helped him earn the nickname Thor, and throttling up pitches that had already made him the hardest-throwing starter in the major leagues.
“I’m always going to try to raise that kind of bar,” he said when he showed up at spring training this year looking stronger than ever.
But Syndergaard, 24, has not appeared in a game since April 30. Instead, he has spent almost three months on the Mets’ disabled list, tending to a partly torn latissimus muscle on his right side and trying to figure out what went wrong. He initially rejected suggestions that his ambitious off-season weight training might have been counterproductive for a pitcher, that a better regimen would have focused on improving his fluidity of motion rather than building brute force.
On Zé Roberto’s 43rd birthday, Gabriel Jesus took to social media in order to thank “a man who helped [him] no end in [his] arrival as a professional”. His “biggest reference” and an “excellent person”. Given Zé Roberto’s age and the fact that Jesus, who turned 20 himself recently, has only been plying his trade in the paid ranks for a few seasons at the most, one would assume that Zé Roberto provided mentoring and tutelage to Brazil’s number 9 in a player-coach capacity before his high-profile move to Manchester City.
However, until as recent as December last year, the two lined up with one another as on-field teammates for Palmeiras with Zé Roberto continuing to defy the laws of physics as a key component of the Brazilian champions’ quest to defend their title, but more importantly, conquer the Copa Libertadores in the supposed final term of what has been an illustrious and barrier-breaking career.
Few people have done as much to push baseball’s front office revolution over the last quarter century as New York Mets general manager Sandy Alderson. During his tenure with the Oakland Athletics, Alderson hired Billy Beane and turned him on to the idea that much of the game’s conventional wisdom was hooey. Alderson has also been at the forefront of a new approach to player psychology. With the As, he hired Harvey Dorfman, one of the game’s earliest gurus. And now, with the Mets, Alderson is building one of the biggest “mental skills” coaching staffs in baseball.
The Mets began rethinking their approach three years ago after longtime team psychologist Jeffery Foote left the team. Under Foote, the club had run a fairly standard employee assistance program, similar to what many companies offer rank and file workers. If a player was dealing with depression, anxiety, or addiction, Foote offered confidential counseling and helped to arrange treatment. His successor, Jonathan Fader, who had been working with the team at the minor league level, put a greater emphasis on providing help with the everyday stress of baseball and persuaded the Mets to hire more staff.
In the past two years, the team has nearly tripled its mental skills staff to a total of eight. After Fader left last year for a consulting job with the NFL’s New York Giants, his job was split in two: Will Lenzner took over duties with the major league roster while Derick Anderson oversees the mental skills staff. Mets’ coaches work with players at every level, from the major league club to the academy in the Dominican Republic. “We have a position coach at every affiliate. We have a pitching coach at every affiliate, a hitting coach,” says Mets assistant general manager John Ricco, “So why wouldn’t we have somebody who’s helping the players with the mental side of the game?”
… Since January, about 30 players from the men’s national team pool — and 50 to 60 from the women’s pool — have had sophisticated blood analysis.
The screenings can be used to help determine the overall health of the players and can help answer health-related questions, including whether they have anemia, high cholesterol or high blood pressure of which they were unaware. But the analysis of biological markers is also meant to aid in performance, recovery and injury prevention by identifying certain vitamin and mineral deficiencies that could be improved with changes in diet and lifestyle and the use of nutritional supplements.
This is not the first time that the national teams have used blood screening, United States Soccer Federation officials said. But this evaluation is more in depth, individualized and strategically implemented.
… “Over the past five years, the Caltech Conte Center has uncovered the foundations of decision-making, allowing us to understand basic choices,” says Ralph Adolphs (PhD ’92), Bren Professor of Psychology, Neuroscience, and Biology and director of the Conte Center. “All of these studies highlight a core theme that will be investigated over the next few years: how complex decisions are influenced by context. ”
Recently, the center had its NIMH grant renewed and as a part of that process, outlined its plans for the next five years. Adolphs says the center will shift its focus from trying to understand the basic mechanics of decision-making toward trying to understand the complex ways in which social settings affect decision-making processes
Open any introductory neuroscience textbook and you’ll find a detailed description of David Hubel and Torsten Wiesel’s ground-breaking work on the developing mammalian visual system. This pioneering duo introduced the concept of “critical periods,” specific developmental windows when the brain is most open to change from outside sensory stimulation. While newer research has offered hints that visual “critical periods” may not be quite as fixed as Hubel and Wiesel once proposed, most scientists have held fast to the notion that primary visual cortex (V1) is fully developed by early childhood. But new research from McMaster University in Canada looking at the expression of synaptic proteins in V1 suggests that this primary visual region continues to subtly change throughout our lives.
A small patch of neurons in the brain can encode the movements of many body parts, according to researchers in the laboratory of Caltech’s Richard Andersen, James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience, Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Brain-Machine Interface Center Leadership Chair, and Director of the T&C Brain-Machine Interface Center of the Tianqiao and Chrissy Chen Institute for Neuroscience at Caltech. Understanding this neural code could help improve the lives of people with paralysis or with motor deficits from neurological diseases such as a stroke.
As a high school student in Rhode Island, Katie Morin swam the 500- and 1000-meter freestyle alongside elite athletes, including three-time Olympian Elizabeth Beisel. As she became more serious about swimming, she met with a sports psychologist, a general psychologist and a psychiatrist, and began taking anxiety medicine.
“It is pretty common in an individual sport where you compete against yourself, or the clock, to put immense amounts of pressure on yourself,” Morin said.
During college recruitment, she evaluated mental health resources at prospective schools along with the caliber of academics and the strength of their swim programs. Upon choosing Cornell University, she immediately made an appointment with a counselor at the general health center, who helped her schedule sessions all four years.
“The ease and anonymity of the entire process made me want to [seek] services,” Morin said.
Iowa fifth-year senior Sean Welsh chose the weeks before his final season of starting on the Hawkeyes’ offensive line to speak publicly about his battle with depression because “it would’ve been wrong not to” say something while he has a platform.
Welsh, a regular on conference honor rolls and a second-team All-American at guard last fall, wrote a detailed account of the mental health issues he has had during his college career for the Iowa athletic department’s website last week.
He answered a litany of questions about depression and his decision to talk about it during Big Ten media days on Monday.
He said he twice left the team — once during spring practice and once in August training camp — to deal with depression. He was first diagnosed with the disease as a redshirt freshman, when he was becoming a regular starter on the Hawkeyes’ offensive line.
Today, marathon nutrition is a closely dialed science. Runners prepare their bodies to eat and drink during the race the same way they train to run it.
It wasn’t always like this. A century ago, runners didn’t map out when it was time to pop that fifth gel, and running stores weren’t flush with blocks, beans, and chews promising to prevent the dreaded bonk. Back then, midrace brandy swigs and aid-stationless courses were the norm. How far have we come? We talked to marathon history experts, running enthusiasts, and modern-day racers to find out.
… We spoke with James Morton, team Sky’s head of nutrition to find out how their riders prepare for the Tour de France, how they fuel during the race and how they recover to fight another gruelling day.
Preparation in the build up to the Tour starts a staggering six months in advanced. James explained the build-up to the big race.
“We have our pre-season training camps in Majorca (in January). The riders will turn up, and as you’d expect they’re not in their optimal condition, they’re not in their optimal body composition. We have to try and put together that six-month individual rider program, so that they turn up on day one of the Tour de France really ready to race in their peak condition.”
… The accuracy paradox states that “A predictive model with low accuracy can have higher predictive power than one with high accuracy”. Under the classification system devised by American logician W.V. Quine, the accuracy paradox falls under the branch of veridical paradoxes – statements that are absurd, but nevertheless have a true conclusion. In contrast, Zeno’s paradoxes are falsidical – their conclusions are false. (A third branch, antimonies, consists of paradoxes that are neither veridical nor falsidical. Here’s an excellent explanation for them.)
It’s easiest to understand this paradox using some data: suppose we run a lending agency, and swept by the recent fervour for machine learning, decided to train a classifier on our set of data to predict whether a person with a given set of attributes is likely to miss a payment and go into arrears, or pay on time.
Last season 28 Premier League footballers suffered serious knee ligament injuries – that’s the highest number in the past five campaigns.
And there were 17 anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries – the most serious kind – which was again more than any of the previous Premier League seasons.
BBC Sport pundit and former Chelsea winger Pat Nevin says “knee problems appear to be at epidemic proportions in the game at the top level” and has called for further research.
Manchester City paid £18.3 million to injured players in 2016/17, more than any other club in the Premier League, a study has revealed.
Led by captain Vincent Kompany’s 255 days on the sidelines, City’s injury list included Sergio Aguero, Raheem Sterling, Leroy Sané, Bacary Sagna and Gabriel Jesus at various points in the campaign.
That calibre of absentee means that while they had one of the league’s shortest injury lists – just 30 across the season – it cost the club £611,204 on average for each. City finished third in the final league table, 15 points behind champions Chelsea.