… “For me, everything happened a little bit too fast,” Pulisic said during a Tuesday afternoon news conference in Manhattan. “The past year has been a roller coaster.
“Being able to play at club level at a high level, and then getting called into the national team, it’s amazing. But I’m just trying to stay on as level ground as I can.
“I just try to keep [the hype] out of my mind as much as I can. It doesn’t really matter to me. I put enough pressure on myself.”
… When teachers asked McCollum his ideal career path, his answer remained the same.
“I’ll never forget [my middle school teacher] telling me the chances of making it as a professional athlete were very slim. She gave me the percentages. She gave me the breakdown,” said McCollum, now a Portland Trail Blazers standout. “And I used to say to her…one day you’re going to be begging me to come back and speak to the kids. Now we fast forward, and I talk to [the kids].”
McCollum, who never lost sight of his dreams, returned to Bethlehem and his alma mater last Thursday (July 27) to share his insights with teens participating in the LEADership, Education and Development (LEAD) program hosted by Lehigh’s College of Business and Economics for the second consecutive summer. McCollum, who told the students that anything is possible, was the keynote speaker at the program’s closing dinner at the ArtsQuest center at SteelStacks.
The 5-foot-11 wide receiver is always looking for whatever edge he can get, and he reports quicker recovery times and smoother joints after giving up all animal products. Defensive linemen Carl Davis and Michael Pierce are paying attention.
… Porter soon realized the effect from the weight room. By his junior season of high school, he weighed more than 200 pounds. Because he was one of the strongest on the field, he was able to play through injuries and without much use of his hands. He barreled past mostly everyone. Scholarship offers from powerhouse programs rolled in after the season.
“Once you see results in the weight room, that’s when you get hooked,” Porter says. “But a lot of people don’t go long enough in the weight room to see the real results and how it transfers over to the field. That’s the part you really have to get over. And at that point, it’s how can you not lift?”
He was definitely hooked.
On hunting trips with his dad, John, and Higginson, who is also John’s first cousin, Porter packed 50-pound dumbbells.
… Burnout is an especially real and immanent danger for cross-country runners—especially those who aren’t top dog. The cohesive, team-focused quality that makes the sport so special can easily turn into a double-edged sword. Parallel to this sense of cohesion, many runners feel pressure to keep up on every run and in every workout, however fast or new it might be. Any given run might be controlled by whoever happens to feel the best that day. Good coaching and team leadership goes a long way in preventing zealous young runners from falling prey to this, but in the end, one must learn to exercise good judgment. After all, when it comes to burning out, you’re your own last line of defense.
So what’s the secret then? How do we prevent burnout?
I can’t promise a perfect answer, but my suspicion is that it starts with knowing your body well.
New AIS chief executive Peter Conde concedes the institute faces a challenge to stay relevant, but declared he has “absolutely no doubt” the Canberra campus can help reinvigorate Australian sport.
The AIS base has been the target of critics for more than 12 months, with speculation major assets and venues will be sold to the ACT government sparking concern the site could be shut down as a sports hub.
In a physical sport like football, conditioning a player’s body is paramount. Giants strength and conditioning coach Aaron Wellman explains to David Diehl how he’s preparing Big Blue’s players for the long season ahead.
… we’re seeing more examples of prototypes that point to thinner, near-invisible wearables, such as this flexible, breathable nanomesh that can relay electronic signals, without the need for a substrate to connect the electronics over the skin.
In a paper published earlier last month in Nature Nanotechnology, a team of researchers from the University of Tokyo, the Japan Science and Technology Agency, and Riken describe how they created this ultra-thin mesh using gold as a conductor, laid directly over the skin using an innovative laminating process.
UFC® and Kitman Labs® today announced a multi-year partnership to deliver an innovative sports science and medicine program to all athletes competing under the UFC banner as they visit the UFC Performance Institute in Las Vegas.
“We’re thrilled to partner with Kitman Labs and provide this one-of-a-kind program to UFC athletes,” UFC Vice President of Operations James Kimball said. “Kitman Labs are industry leaders in performance analysis and injury analysis, both of which are essential in allowing UFC athletes to compete at the highest level. We look forward to offering this service to our entire active roster to help optimize their performance.”
When UFC athletes visit the UFC Performance Institute, staff members will use Kitman Labs solutions to gather and consolidate information that will be used to monitor performance and analyze injury trends.
Oxford University spin-out Oxehealth is to receive the annual award for the development of Oxecam, a system that monitors vital signs – including heart rate and breathing rate – by tracking micro-movements or colour changes on the body with a standard digital video camera without the need for attachments such as contact sensors.
The software processes data from an off-the-shelf digital video camera equipped with infra-red illumination. Heart rate is measured by detecting small, visually-imperceptible changes in reflected light that occur with each heartbeat, and the camera can monitor a subject who may be anywhere in the room or even covered by a blanket. The system provides alerts and information to those responsible for the person’s care.
At first, Pete Carroll referred to the mysterious treatment linebacker K.J. Wright received two weeks ago as “the process.” Then, when five more Seahawks players left this week for parts unknown to undergo the same procedure, Carroll joked that they had “entered the circle.”
What they had entered, in reality, is a new frontier in sports medicine, one that could either revolutionize the treatment of injuries or one day be regarded as a passing fad.
It’s called Regenokine, just one tentacle of a growing field called biologic medicine. It contains vast promise but is also surrounded by many questions, the most pressing of which is: Does it really work?
In a season when the Los Angeles Dodgers are dominating everything in sight, they also lead the majors in a less praiseworthy category: trips to the disabled list. Two weeks ago, prized trade-deadline acquisition Yu Darvish was sent to the 10-day DL; last week, dark-horse Cy Young candidate Alex Wood was. Those are just some of the latest moves in what has become essentially a weekly ritual for the Dodgers, marking their 37th use of the short-term DL so far this season (25 of which have been for pitchers), more than any other team in baseball.
Critics charge the Dodgers with exaggerating these kinds of injuries to game the DL, allowing the team to rest some of its starting pitchers without giving up a roster spot. And the Dodgers are certainly leading the way in this practice, which became much easier to pull off after a rule change this season shortened the length of a short-term DL stint from 15 days to 10. But the Dodgers aren’t the only outfit to make heavy use of the new disabled list — teams across the league are stashing more players on the short-term disabled list this season. Nor is this a completely new development: Even before the rule change, short-term DL use had been on the rise for years.
In an age of one-inning relievers, roster size is a major limitation for modern front offices. Any unusable players — for example, a starting pitcher who threw yesterday — can cost a team, as their spot could be taken by yet another flamethrowing bullpen arm. So teams have come up with all sorts of ways to overcome roster-size limitations, ranging from sending an endless churn of relievers back and forth between triple-A and the majors to creating potential dual-role position player-pitcher hybrids.
… While this roundtable model is often touted as a decent ‘middle path’ between traditional club management and data analytics, I actually think there is a better, more consistent and less luck-prone way for clubs to accommodate both worldviews–the tactical and analytical–within a single club.
That model involves distinguishing between conditions and causes for winning. This distinction is brought up a lot in Buddhism, for example. Buddhists will sometimes point out that meditation, mindfulness and right speech/action/livelihood don’t cause enlightenment, but form its ideal conditions. The metaphor they use to illustrate this is sleep: you can’t cause yourself to fall asleep (except maybe by downing a bottle of sleeping pills); rather, through turning off the lights, tucking into a cool bed and turning off your phone, you set the conditions for sleep to occur.
Top receivers Julian Edelman and Cameron Meredith went down this weekend, bringing the total number of confirmed NFL players felled by ACL tears to 23 since the start of training camp.
Many are calling it an epidemic.
Is that the case? Or is the label overdramatizing the rash of ACL injuries to top players?
The Athletic, Nicole Auerbach and Chris Vannini from
… Myriad on-field struggles were only exacerbated by a fractured locker room, one marked by chemistry issues and a lack of strong veteran leadership.
“The biggest thing with culture is making sure there is leadership at all levels,” Miller said. “I think the leadership took a pause last year.”
Word began to spread about possible racial tension in the Spartans’ locker room — stemming in part from co-captain Riley Bullough’s support of Donald Trump during last year’s presidential election. The rumor percolated to the point where players were asked about it at last month’s Big Ten Media Days.