… Then the regular season started and Bennett missed the first sixteen shots of his career. He didn’t score his first basket until the Cavs’ fifth game. His only points prior to that were two from the free- throw line. He was booed by home fans within the first month and he ended his rookie year with meager averages of 4.2 points and three rebounds. He did not start any games and never even got off the bench in nearly half of them. Brown tried everything to get him acclimated. He tried him at small forward and power forward. He tried playing him during garbage time. He tried giving him a few days to clear his head. It didn’t matter. What the Cavs steadfastly refused to do was send him to the Development League. He clearly needed to play and wasn’t getting enough minutes, but the team feared sending him to the D?League would damage his already- fragile psyche. It was a wasted pick.
“The issue with Anthony was, and we had no way of knowing it at the time, the kid had no desire to overcome adversity whatsoever. As soon as it was hard, he was out,” (David) Griffin said. “His whole life, he rolled out of bed bigger, better, and more talented than everybody else. As soon as it was hard, it was over. And I was the one on campus at UNLV. I’m the one who got sold the bill of goods and I bought it hook, line, and sinker. You fuck up sometimes. But I feel bad Chris took it for that, because Chris was the one guy who wasn’t sure.”
Sean Dyche is explaining the nature of “positive realities”, the phrase he uses for being honest with his players about the challenge they face at the Etihad Stadium on Saturday against a Manchester City team that are not just top of the Premier League but playing like they very much intend to stay there.
The Burnley manager has not built the career he has now from being unrealistic about his teams’ capabilities and in his third season as a Premier League manager, it is impossible to ignore how far he has come. After Craig Shakespeare’s sacking at Leicester City this week we are down to four permanent English top-flight managers, and top of them all is Dyche with a side that has lost just once in the league this season and begin the day in seventh place.
… Many of Gesicki’s 24 catches this year have come thanks to his impressive jumping ability. The 6-foot-6, scheme-altering weapon has a mixture of size and athleticism that makes it virtually impossible to effectively cover him. His hurdling touchdown celebration was the latest addition to a growing video library of his battle against gravity.
Where do those hops come from? Gesicki gives much of the credit to his career as a high school volleyball player. Yes, volleyball. Imagine the poor teenagers who had to go head-to-head against this athletic behemoth with nothing but a thin layer of twine between them. Now, that’s a reason to flinch.
The first recruiting letter Gesicki received from Penn State was signed by a man named Mark Pavlik. Pavlik doesn’t coach tight ends or wide receivers for the Nittany Lions. He doesn’t work in the recruiting office, either. He’s the head coach of the men’s volleyball program.
… There are several more vaunted clubs who do not emit such powerful sense of purpose and are below Huddersfield. Indeed, the biggest risk to the team’s survival this season may be the fact their success could lead others to try to entice Wagner away. But the German has already turned down offers since arriving in Yorkshire, including from Aston Villa and Wolfsburg, and one gets the sense it would take something exceptional to lure him from a club where everyone, from the chairman to the players, is on his wavelength. That is Huddersfield’s strength and it has fuelled a marvellous odyssey that reached its highest point with this deserved victory over United.
“I have no problems to work on the extraordinary but we should not take for granted extraordinary performances,” said Wagner. “There are three things why we have had this little bit of success: ambition, realistic expectations and great togetherness. If we change one of these things, we start to struggle as a football club. That’s why we have to make sure we keep these three things right, which are our Terriers’ identity.”
… “my job is to get players to the first-team and the best example I can give is that, a couple of years ago, we were given an absolute doing by Chelsea in the FA Youth Cup. I was sat in the stand, I wasn’t in my current role at the time, but I was still cringing.
“But fast-forward two years and we have Marcus [Rashford] playing over 50 first-team games last season — more than anyone else in the squad — and playing for England.
“With all due respect, Chelsea haven’t produced one of their players for the first-team, and the end-game for me is to get players into the first-team.”
MOST sports science graduates could only dream of a career trajectory like this: job with a top Premier League side within two months of leaving University and promotion a year later.
But that’s been the journey of Sebastiano Pochettino, son of Spurs manager Mauricio. The 22-year-old is the youngest first-team sport scientist in the Premier League, having been promoted to the role by the club this summer.
He is a prominent figure during Spurs training and sits in the dugout on match days. When Pochettino Snr visited the Aspire Academy in Qatar last summer, he took three key members of staff with him – his assistant, Jesus Perez; the Head of Medical & Sport Science, Dr Shabaaz Mughal; and Sebastiano.
… We define a clutch performance as any better-than-usual performance that occurs under pressure, and our research suggests that anyone can be clutch – provided they’re in the right mental state.
For example, feeling like you’re in control of the situation – in sports or anything else – can help a lot. In our lab, we tested hundreds of basketball free-throw shooters, both novices and experts. After they warmed up, we asked them to take 15 shots while we videotaped them (to simulate pressure). Afterward, we gave them a questionnaire; those who indicated that they had felt in control were the most likely to succeed under pressure.
Arsenal Football Club attempted to push the boundaries of what their players can do by introducing VR headsets to training in order to improve their players’ reaction times and decision making, and making them more ready for in-game situations before they happen.
But they also found out exactly where the boundaries are with the tech from their own players’ point of view – several were left complaining of motion sickness from using the gear, which is now being used for youth teams rather than with the first team.
It shows, of course, that there is a very real downside to VR technology when it comes to enhancing player performance, and that side to the tech will certainly have to improve before it becomes a genuinely useful piece of kit for coaches of professional sport.
Wearable fabrics imprinted with p- and n-type semiconductors could make all clothing fabrics capable of converting a person’s body heat into electricity to power biosensors — or, when used in reverse, to cool the wearer, according to researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology (Atlanta). By using David Hilbert’s famous geometric spaces — in particular, his space-filling curves — as the pattern for their imprints, the researchers have demonstrated that printable thermoelectric energy-harvesting wearables’ output voltage and power can be fine-tuned to match the precise needs of particular applications.
Georgia Tech’s first demonstration was on paper, but the researchers say the circuitry pattern could be printed on various flexible conducting polymers to yield materials that would harvest energy from body heat to power simple biosensors for measuring vital signs such as heart rate and respiration.
E Ink Holdings, “E Ink” (8069.TW), the leading innovator of electronic ink technology and LTS Lohmann-Therapie Systeme AG, “LTS” leading in the development and manufacturing of transdermal therapeutic systems, today announced their partnership to develop a “Smart Patch” prototype. The Smart Patch prototype is a transdermal therapeutic system (TTS) which delivers medication to patients in a convenient, controlled and comfortable manner and features an E Ink display to deliver and to convey relevant information about patch performance.
The latest superfood rippling through the sports world isn’t derived from an obscure Amazonian berry or a Himalayan tree bark. Instead, it’s a holdout from 1970s dinner parties.
Earlier this year, a team of researchers published data suggesting that daily doses of gelatin – the magic ingredient that made Jell-O salads so beguiling – combined with ultrashort bouts of exercise could help strengthen tendons, ligaments, bones and cartilage. While the results remain preliminary, professional athletes looking to speed their rehab from injury have eagerly seized on the findings – and the early buzz is encouraging.
The idea of using gelatin emerged from a long series of studies led by Keith Baar, a Burlington, Ont.-raised scientist who heads the Functional Molecular Biology Lab at the University of California, Davis. Baar and his colleagues developed “engineered ligaments,” lab-grown tissues that can be stretched to their breaking point (and beyond) to investigate which factors affect the risk of injury.
Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports from
Both athletes and coaches should have adequate nutrition knowledge to understand the importance of diet on athletic performance, recovery, and health. Nutrition knowledge can be assessed reliably only by validated knowledge questionnaires. The aim of this study was to develop a reliable and valid questionnaire for assessing the nutrition knowledge of young endurance athletes and their coaches. The questionnaire was developed with an expert panel and pilot tested by athletes, coaches, and students. Content, face, and construct validities both as test-retest reliability and internal consistency reliability were ensured when the current questionnaire was developed. Athletes (n = 16) and coaches (n = 13) pilot tested the 127-item questionnaire. After item analysis and proposals from the expert panel, 41 items were removed. Internal consistency of the 86-item questionnaire in the pilot study was 0.87, measured using Cronbach’s α. Construct validity was evaluated by the difference in knowledge between nutrition (n = 20) and humanities students (n = 22). Nutrition students had significantly higher knowledge scores (P < .001). Test-retest reliability for all knowledge sections between those groups was 0.85 measured using Pearson's r. Final adjustments to the questionnaire were made on the grounds of feedback from the respondents and proposals from the experts (n = 6). These adjustments resulted in minor changes in the construct of the items, the layout of the questionnaire, and the removal of 7 items. The final questionnaire had 79 items. The questionnaire can be used to measure the overall nutrition knowledge of endurance athletes and their coaches and to find potential gaps in nutrition knowledge.
Risk is one of the many excuses for failing to grant opportunities to young players in the first team. With ever increasing stakes, coaches often prefer the perceived reliability of experience at the expense of blocking the talent pathway. With average tenure hovering a little over 12 months, coaches are naturally inclined to focus on the short term often at the expense of granting opportunities to young prospects.
There are two things here. The first is the misconception that playing youth players is a material risk. The data suggests that when teams have given greater opportunities to youth players, the impact on results has been negligible on average. In other words, giving youth a chance is not correlated – positively or negatively – with success. Reducing the perception of risk is one way to unblock the pathway to the first team.
Predicting the outcome of sports events is a hard task. We quantify this difficulty with a coefficient that measures the distance between the observed final results of sports leagues and idealized perfectly balanced competitions in terms of skill. This indicates the relative presence of luck and skill. We collected and analyzed all games from 198 sports leagues comprising 1503 seasons from 84 countries of 4 different sports: basketball, soccer, volleyball and handball. We measured the competitiveness by countries and sports. We also identify in each season which teams, if removed from its league, result in a completely random tournament. Surprisingly, not many of them are needed. As another contribution of this paper, we propose a probabilistic graphical model to learn about the teams’ skills and to decompose the relative weights of luck and skill in each game. We break down the skill component into factors associated with the teams’ characteristics. The model also allows to estimate as 0.36 the probability that an underdog team wins in the NBA league, with a home advantage adding 0.09 to this probability. As shown in the first part of the paper, luck is substantially present even in the most competitive championships, which partially explains why sophisticated and complex feature-based models hardly beat simple models in the task of forecasting sports’ outcomes.
… If you look back on the history of advanced statistics and Moneyball, the main reason to use these numbers was to find undervalued commodities that came cheap and helped teams win on a budget. Yes, workhorse starting pitching is expensive, but that doesn’t mean teams with smaller budgets can’t compete.
To quantify workload, I have moved away from the traditional metrics of games, innings pitched, and pitch counts. There is extensive scientific literature that states these metrics do not serve a protective effect for pitchers. The metric I have created is called Fatigue Units, which aims to quantify the cumulative muscle fatigue of the forearm a pitcher will develop over the course of a game and during a season.