… With a national Judo champion and former footballer for a father and a professional volleyball player for a mother, the path towards young Robert Lewandowski’s potential future career as a professional sportsman appeared clearer than most. It seemed not a matter of if he would allow for sports to be his calling but instead which sport he would ultimately choose to excel in.
After taking to football effortlessly as a small child, it was evident to Mr and Mrs Lewandowski exactly which sport their ambitious son would come to devote his life to, only they could hardly have imagined just how great a mark he would one day leave upon the game, particularly given the early setback their son was forced to endure.
With his team playing the Vikings in London, the Browns left tackle shares his feelings on missing his first regular season game in 11 seasons as a pro
… In recent years, there has been a steady revolution. Today’s NBA has eschewed the traditional definitions of those positions in exchange for players who possess the tools of all five positions, with teams searching for lineup combinations that allow for a type of flexibility on the floor that we’ve not seen in past eras. The Golden State Warriors provide one such example of this trend. Stephen Curry, Klay Thompson, and Kevin Durant are three of the best individual offensive players in the league, but many have attributed the team’s success—two championships in three seasons, sandwiched around a league-record 73 regular season wins—to Draymond Green, an agile defender who can switch onto any opposing player and guard any of the five positions as needed.
Throughout the league, teams are building around athletes who provide that kind of flexibility, who are no longer defined by their positions and can thus flourish in numerous ways on the court. Philadelphia’s Ben Simmons and Joel Embiid, as well as the New York Knicks’ Kristaps Porzingis, are not constrained by traditional positioning. And with all of these unique qualities, the next question becomes: What if a player can do absolutely everything on the floor?
About 100 words into Lord Ouseley’s latest statement on behalf of Kick It Out on Thursday questioning the suitability of those in charge of the Football Association to continue in their posts after the Eni Aluko/Mark Sampson controversy, there were two sentences that stood out. “When you look at the recent success of England’s youth sides, particularly the achievements of the under‑17s men’s team, you will see a high level of diverse representation on the field,” he wrote. “That is the only area in which English football seems to treat black and minority ethnic people fairly.”
Whether a young player makes it as a top-class professional footballer often comes down to just two factors: talent and attitude.
The astonishing success of England’s Under-17 side in winning the World Cup – particularly the stylish manner in which they did it – has answered the question of whether these young players have the talent to make it.
But crucially, according to their manager, Steve Cooper, the attitude of his youngsters is just as good. Indeed, he believes that too many young English players are maligned, with the enjoyment and professionalism shown by his charges showing why too many judge teenage footballers too swiftly.
… Marian is still the hotbed of Nebraska girls sports. Over the past 20 years, the Crusaders have seized almost 25 percent of Class A championship trophies — 44 titles across nine sports. But this all-girls Catholic high school off North 72nd Street — and perhaps more specifically this closet — is ground zero for a broader evolution in Omaha.
Specialization.
When Brusnahan started taping ankles, the Metro’s best athletes juggled multiple sports until college. Now, early recruiting and the pursuit of college scholarships is driving kids to prioritize clubs over high schools, stirring tension between the two sides. Kids increasingly commit 12 months a year to one sport, ignoring pleas from their high school coaches, defying warnings of overuse injuries and mental burnout.
There is no silver bullet to solving the complex problems ushered in by the information age. But there are some good places to start, and one of them is counterintuitive: solitude. Having the discipline to step back from the noise of the world is essential to staying focused. This is even more important in a highly politicized society that constantly incites our emotions, causing the cognitive effects of distractions to linger. In our book, Lead Yourself First, Ray Kethledge and I define solitude as a state of mind, a space in which to focus one’s own thoughts without distraction — and where the mind can work through a problem on its own.
The ability to focus is a competitive advantage in the world today. Here are some thoughts on how to stay focused at work:
He’s a longtime professor at the University of Chicago. He’s been called the father of “behavioral economics,” which, according to the Harvard Business Review, “combines insights from psychology, judgment, and decision making and economics to generate a more accurate understanding of human behavior.” And he just won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.
Yet, despite Richard Thaler’s impressive credentials, his philosophy is the epitome of simplicity: “My mantra is if you want to get people to do something, make it easy. Remove the obstacles.”
… Even the very first advances in civilization had this cyborg quality. The marriage of humans with technology is what made us the masters of other species, giving us weapons and tools harder and sharper than the claws of any animal, projecting our strength at greater and greater distance until we could bring down even the greatest of beasts in the hunt, not to mention engineer new crops that produce far more food than their wild forebears, and domesticate animals to make us stronger and faster.
In short, there are two types of augmentation, physical and mental, in a complex dance. One frontier of augmentation is the addition of sensors to the physical world, allowing data to be collected and analyzed at a previously unthinkable scale. That is the real key to understanding what is often called the “Internet of Things.” Things that once required guesswork are now knowable. (Insurance may well be the native business model of the “Internet of Things” in the same way that advertising became the native business model of the internet, because of the data-driven elimination of uncertainty.) It isn’t simply a matter of smart, connected devices like the Nest thermostat or the Amazon Echo, the Fitbit and the Apple Watch, or even self-driving cars. It’s about the data these devices provide. The possibilities of the future cascade in unexpected ways.
WHEN Mark Crane started to investigate which Academy to send his son to, he struggled to find out the category each was in, let alone how successful it had been.
“A young player and their parents have little objective basis on which to judge whether it’s in their interests to join a club’s Academy,” he said.
When you can consider that only 0.5% of eight-year-olds in Academies make it into professional football, you can see why kids and parents want as much information as possible before entering the system.
… The potential relocation of the Crew has many debating the team’s ceiling if it stays in Columbus. There’s no reason why Columbus can’t be just as successful as Sporting Kansas City. Berhalter has them on that path, and there are a number of similarities.
Vermes has been uber successful in KC despite a smaller budget than most in part because of his resourcefulness and ability to get the best out of MLS talent. He has won 115 regular season games in his eight seasons as coach of Sporting Kansas City, an average of about 14 per year. He’s taken Sporting KC to the playoffs in seven straight seasons, missing once, in 2010, his first full year in charge.
It’s been a remarkable consistency, and Berhalter is trying to match that production in another small market. This season showed he is building just that kind of club.
Pitchers and coaches from both the Dodgers and Astros complained Saturday night about the World Series baseballs—and this time the controversy is not just about liveliness. They say there is a new problem: the baseballs used in the World Series are slicker than the ones used in the regular season because of a difference in the grain of the leather. The slicker World Series balls particularly make it hard to throw a good slider, they claim.
“We had a well-pitched game tonight from both sides,” Astros pitching coach Brent Strom said after Los Angeles won Game 4, 6-2. “I’m not taking anything away from the players. I just want to know why? Why in the world would the baseballs in the World Series be different? Because you can see the difference. You can feel it. I don’t understand it at all.”
