The no. 1 overall pick has been piled on for his recent shooting and shoulder issues, but the organization’s handling of its prized rookie and his current situation deserves a harder look
… The Eagles are one of the best examples of the all too real truths in the NFL today: if you nail the quarterback position, everything else begins to fall into place. Philadelphia utterly and completely nailed it with Carson Wentz firmly entrenched as their franchise passer.
Against the Redskins on Monday night, Wentz showed the national stage what a fully fledged star he’s become. The second-year quarterback made several dazzling plays after his team’s offense sputtered under Washington’s strong defensive efforts early in the contest. As the night wore on, Wentz figured out how to work around some of those heated plays sent on by one of the NFL’s most blitz-happy teams.
Professional athletes are widely known for their huge salaries and lavish lifestyles. But that’s not the case for players in the National Women’s Hockey League, which begins its third season this weekend. These women are gearing up for the season-long grind of competing while also holding down day jobs to make ends meet.
“It’s not ideal, but the reality right now is we get to play hockey at the highest level,” says Corinne Buie of the 2017 NWHL champion Buffalo Beauts. “This is where we’re at right now, having to work two jobs. We hope that someday girls can focus 100 percent just on hockey and get paid to do that.”
Buie, who is in her third year in the NWHL, works about 20 hours a week as a barista at the Daily Planet Coffee Company in North Buffalo. She says she is in a good situation with her job, making enough to pay her bills while also having the time to work out and play.
Lance McCullers Jr. has a plea for headline writers framing the 2017 World Series. His Houston Astros teammate, Jose Altuve, will probably do something wondrous against the Los Angeles Dodgers. And McCullers knows what some folks will say.
“When Altuve does it, it’s kind of like, ‘Altuve, although super small, has success,’ or whatever the case may be,” said McCullers, the pitcher who closed out the American League playoffs to give Houston a chance for its first title.
“I just think people should take it for what it is and really enjoy what he brings to this game,” McCullers continued. “He’s beyond the point now where you have to say, ‘This guy’s so small and does great things,’ because he’s been doing it for years. I think we should just focus on: This is a Hall of Fame guy we’re watching.”
Clint Capela is not going to push around Joel Embiid.
He won’t intimidate Dwight Howard. He won’t overpower Marc Gasol. That was not the point. The strength he added is not about muscling NBA big men any more than it was to show off at the beach.
The change is as much about how he feels as he looks, how he competes as he fills out a uniform.
“That’s the whole key,” Rockets player development director John Lucas said of the Rockets’ fourth-year center. “That’s what we talk about. Poodle or pit bull? He’s changing his stripes.”
… “Whenever I talk about pressure and this team,” Ellis said, “it doesn’t matter what everybody else is doing. It’s the expectation that’s always put on ourselves.”
After last summer’s quarterfinal ouster in the 2016 Rio Olympics, the charge for Ellis was to avert the trappings of complacency. “If you want to find the magic fairy dust for being in this program,” she said, “it’s consistency.”
Ellis gave her players three directives, all with World Cup qualifying — to be held next fall — in mind. The next nine months would entail the most formidable slate of matches this team has faced in the aftermath of a World Cup-Olympics cycle: 16 matches, second in volume only to 1997, and a dozen meetings with countries ranked within the top 15, culminating with a home-and-home series against Canada in November. The roster would deepen, by way of the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL). And the group would get younger, with merit-based selections owing to their performance, or lack thereof, on their club teams. “I was willingly and actively looking for the future,” Ellis said of her post-Rio blueprint. She found it.
Valencia’s players were hungry. It was two years since they’d had a decent run of results and it felt almost as long since they’d had a decent meal.
For the 13th time in five years they were under new management and this time things were actually going to change. Not just the coach but the culture, everything from the president to the players to what was put on their plate. If you are what you eat, it was time to eat something good. At Paterna, the club’s training ground, food was prepared for them, but not much of it and not exactly the tasty treats either, while detailed diets were sent home: rigid new regimes written out to be followed to the letter, families called upon to help impose them on famished footballers.
Marcelino García Toral, Valencia’s new manager, has a reputation for obsessing over weight and physical condition. A pioneer, even now when professional football is catching up with him, every detail controlled, tests conducted daily, weight pinned on notice boards at training grounds worldwide, he goes further. He is so strict that stories circulate of players starving themselves or starting the day in the sauna, scared of arriving a gram overweight.
It takes most people several days to recover from the symptoms of jet lag when traveling overseas. By the time the Minnesota Vikings would have fully adjusted to the six-hour time difference, they’ll already be back in Minnesota gearing up for their bye week.
On Wednesday evening, the team will travel across the pond ahead of its Week 8 matchup with the winless Cleveland Browns. Upon arrival Thursday morning at 10 a.m. local time, they’ll have three days to get acclimated and prepared for Sunday’s game in London.
No one is immune to the fatigue caused by jet lag, not even NFL players with their chartered flights, training staffs and state-of-the-art technology to help their bodies recover quickly. Like some of his players, coach Mike Zimmer has never been to London and looked into “scientific things” to find the best methods to help the Vikings prepare for a long road trip.
“We know that the brain replays remembered experiences during rest to extract important information, this consolidation process preserves memories for recall in the future. But replay is also important for planning” explained lead researcher, Dr Freyja Ólafsdóttir (UCL Cell & Developmental Biology).
“We wanted to see how replay changed while animals carried out simple spatial tasks and found that it only takes 10-15 secs for the brain to switch from a mode in which replay occurs to support planning – when the rat is engaged in a task – to a mode supporting memory consolidation – when it is resting.”
The study, published today in Neuron and funded by Wellcome and the Royal Society, provides the first evidence that switching between modes occurs dynamically according to the demands of the task and that replay is important for spatial behaviour.
The British Psychological Society, Research Digest, Emma Young from
Will you get a better result from a business negotiation if you get angry or remain calm? What about a creative task – will you come up with more solutions to a problem if you’re excited, or relaxed?
The answer, according a new study in Emotion, is that it depends at least in part on what you expect the impacts of emotions to be.
Some theories linking emotion and behaviour hold that emotions activate fixed behavioural “programmes” (anger activates aggressive actions, for example). Others hold that while emotions do influence behaviour, how they do so depends upon the individual’s past experiences, and the current context. (Faced with a bullying boss, the anger you feel may lead you respond aggressively, if this has worked for you in the past; alternatively, it may prompt you to go off and strengthen bonds with colleagues.)
Scientists from the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and Harvard University’s Wyss Institute have created a way to print flexible electronic devices. The development may herald future ubiquity of flexible body-worn products that can monitor various health parameters, provide therapy, and guide users in exercise and rehabilitation routines.
The new technique is called Hybrid 3-D printing, and it uses thermoplastic polyurethane as the substrate on which a flexible silver-based ink is laid down. Components such as chips and LEDs are placed onto the substrate and touching the conductive ink to create electrical conductivity.
“This is the first time a 3-D printer has been shown, in a single process, to print stretchable sensors with integrated microelectronic components,” in a statement said Dr. Dan Berrigan, a research scientist at the AFRL Materials and Manufacturing Directorate. “Starting from nothing, the printer builds an entire stretchable circuit that blends the mechanical durability of printed components with the robust performance of off-the-shelf electronics.”
General Motors has acquired Strobe, a lidar startup that could give the giant automaker a leg up in the race to make self-driving cars a mainstream technology. Kyle Vogt, founder of the self-driving car startup Cruise (which GM acquired last year), announced the acquisition in a Monday blog post.
Lidar—short for light radar—is widely seen as a key sensor technology for self-driving cars. By sending out laser pulses and measuring how long it takes for them to bounce back, lidar builds a detailed 3-D map of a car’s surroundings.
It’s widely recommended recovery drinks consumed within 30-45mins of finishing exercise for maximum effectiveness. They consist of a combination of protein, carbohydrate and, sometimes, electrolytes. The protein is included to assist with muscular repair and the carbohydrates to re-stock muscle glycogen levels. If present, the electrolytes replace those lost in sweat.
1. When you ingest a recovery drink shortly after exercise, the body is at its most receptive to re-stocking muscle and liver glycogen. The carbohydrates in the drink are broken down quickly into glucose, absorbed into the bloodstream via the small intestine, and shuttled off into muscles and liver cells where they’re bound as glycogen molecules for use later on (in much the same way that an energy gel works during exercise).
USA Today Sports; Erik Brady, Steve Berkowitz and Christopher Schnaars from
… Alabama’s push for growth began before Saban was hired. Still, Witt says signing him was a key portion of a master plan for expanding enrollment, though it’s difficult to measure how much growth would have followed had someone else been hired as coach. And someone else nearly was: Witt says Alabama was “truly blessed” when Rich Rodriguez turned down the job after Alabama fired Mike Shula in 2006 and Saban at first rebuffed an Alabama offer.
Mal Moore, then Alabama’s athletics director, at last pried Saban away from the NFL’s Miami Dolphins and then told Witt to go explain the landmark deal to the school’s board of trustees. The pitch Witt made, as he remembers it, was simply this: Think of Saban’s salary as an investment rather than an expense — “and that he was going to become an important part of our effort to turn the University of Alabama into a truly national university.”
Since, Alabama will have paid Saban a total of at least $65 million through his 11 seasons, including this one, and that doesn’t even count incentive bonuses and the value of other perks.
Another aspect of Pochettino’s coaching style that says a lot about him is his ability to promote young players into the first team and help them improve there. Of the last 30 debutants for the English National Team, 15 were managed by Pochettino at Southampton – his previous club – or Spurs. Him and his coaching staff create an ideal environment for young talent to flourish. Beside having a clear plan for their teams’ technical, tactical and physical training, they are also great at man-management.
Impulsing this revolution at the North London club there is a lot of effort from Pochettino and his coaching staff. Guillem Balagué spent the 2016/17 season closely following their work with his impressive amount of access. That access became the key element of his new book, Brave New World, Inside Pochettino’s Spurs, which is coming out this Thursday the 26th of October and can be preordered on Amazon — (The book is already within Amazon’s best sellers and it has not even gone out).
The book explores how Pochettino has revitalised Tottenham through insights from the engine room, as Balagué had regular conversations with his coaching staff and Pochettino himself, as well as players.