The question haunts Steven Stamkos. Especially in the good times, like now, when the 27-year-old Tampa Bay Lightning captain is leading the NHL with 24 points in 13 games and assaulting the record book along with linemate Nikita Kucherov.
What’s going to happen this time?
Will it be like in November 2013, when he had 14 goals and 9 assists in his first 17 games before being stretchered out of Boston’s TD Garden with a broken tibia, suffered in a collision with the goal post?
Will it be like in April 2016, when a 36-goal season was derailed by a blood clot near his right collarbone, requiring surgery that kept him out until Game 7 of the Eastern Conference finals?
… “Our kids, from a very early age, were connecting with kids that many of them didn’t look like them or spoke a different language,” said Springer’s father, who is a lawyer. “And if you watch George now, you see how he interacts with everybody.”
Early in high school, Springer was 5-foot-2. By his senior year, a growth spurt added nearly a foot. In college, he developed into a coveted prospect.
Yet even as he flourished on the field, he had to contend with a stutter that was evident at a young age. Self-conscious of it, he became withdrawn and avoided speaking in school or other public situations.
Meb Keflezighi vowed his first marathon would be his last. Caught up in the excitement of the race, he went out too fast and hit the wall about 21 miles into the 2002 New York City Marathon, eventually fading to ninth. Winner of NCAA titles at UCLA in cross country, the 10K outdoors and the 5K indoors and outdoors, and the American record holder in the 10,000, he considered himself a miler. Coaches told him he’d be a good marathoner. He disagreed.
Yet, aspects of the race appealed to him. He enjoyed strategizing and he relished testing his physical and mental strength. He had to be tough while growing up during tumultuous times in the East African nation of Eritrea, where his father’s support of the nation’s freedom fighters drew menacing notice from Ethiopian soldiers. His father, Russom, trekked to Sudan and reunited the family in Italy before they immigrated to San Diego in 1987. What was some discomfort and a run of 26 miles, 385 yards, in comparison to what his father, family and compatriots endured?
… The Bills, who were nine-point underdogs that afternoon, went on to defeat Atlanta. For Taylor, the win offered a temporary reprieve from the critics who have hounded him ever since he became a starter two years ago, but his peace was short-lived. A week later, after he struggled against Cincinnati, the calls for his benching returned, and Bills coach Sean McDermott was asked (for the umpteenth time) whether he believed in his quarterback. “Tyrod’s working hard to continue to improve,” he said. “I’ve got all the confidence in the world in Tyrod Taylor.”
Many in Buffalo don’t. On Monday during the following bye week, the bar at Duff’s Famous Wings — the best or second-best wings place in the city, depending on whom you ask — is brimming with Bills fans. Baseball is on, but the conversation turns, as it so often does around here, to football. A middle-aged woman in a Bills sweatshirt starts to explain why she’s optimistic about the team (then 3-2), with its unexpectedly strong defense, but she’s interrupted by her friend. “Tyrod blows,” he says. “He can’t throw the ball far enough.” He adds that Taylor is no better than draft bust EJ Manuel. “They’re the same quarterback.”
… The job is so much more than throwing the football. Everyone sees what happens in the six or so seconds of each play, but it’s what happens in the up to 40 seconds between plays that makes the job so mentally challenging, and it’s when the really great ones shine.
Good luck trying to find a position in any other sport that is more demanding. Quarterbacks must know what every other player on their team is doing, and they must know the other team, too. It requires an off-the-charts ability to multitask.
So what’s it really like being a quarterback? Let former Huskies Warren Moon, Hugh Millen and Damon Hu
… SA: Sports Illustrated’s Grant Wahl wrote U.S. Soccer needs: “full restructuring” and a “massive reboot?” Do you agree?
SASHO CIROVSKI: We need a reboot and a restructuring but maybe not massive. There is a tremendous amount of goodness in our current system and we must be careful not to panic. What needs to happen is for us to define the “American Way” of player development that is unique to our ideals, values, challenges and strengths.
We need to unite the various segments of the national soccer landscape. It has become very territorial and divisive. Big money is coming into play, and our shared values have been lost. Ethics in the recruiting wars of club soccer need to be discussed and implemented immediately.
Training load (TL) and recovery should be in optimal balance to obtain maximal performance gains. We aimed to study sleep as a recovery technique and its relationship with TL and performance in elite athletes. Twenty-six elite female artistic gymnasts were divided into an under 13 (n = 6), an under 14 (n = 6), a junior (n = 7; 14–15y) and a senior (=World Championship (WC) competitors, n = 7; ≥16y) category. Sleep, through sleep logs, and training parameters, using the session Rate of Perceived Exertion (sRPE) scale, were monitored to calculate total sleep time (TST), sleep efficiency (SE), TL, monotony and strain. Performance of WC competitors was evaluated through coach and WC qualification ranking. For the entire group, TST (effect sizes (ES) = −1.12, confidence intervals (CI) = −60:−47, P < .05) and SE (ES = −0.13, CI = −1.40:−0.10, P = .022) were shorter during week than weekend nights. TST and SE were highest in youngest gymnasts (P < .05). TL was lowest in under 13 and senior gymnasts (P < .05), while TL, monotony and strain were highest in junior gymnasts (P < .05). A negative regression was found between TST and TL the day after, while higher TL also led to lower TST the following night (P < .001). For the WC competitors, TST the night before the qualifications was shorter than the mean TST of the WC period (ES = −0.95, CI = −170:24, P = .030). TST correlated with coach ranking (r = −0.857, P = .014). Higher TL correlated with worse WC (r = 0.829, P = .042) and coach (r = 0.893, P = .007) ranking. This research in elite gymnasts indicated associations between decreased TST, augmented TL and inferior performance. Optimizing sleep and TL may therefore represent strategies to enhance performance.
Sleep watches, actigraphs and fitness trackers all have different names and different brands, but all claim to do the same thing — measure sleep. In 1973 (the year the very first cell phone call was made) Daniel Kripke, at the University of California San Diego, created the first actigraph or sleep watch — the first “wearable”. It was designed as a research tool.
The concept was that excessive wrist motion meant poor sleep. Proving this is much more complicated.
HRL Laboratories, LLC, announced it has received an award from the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, to develop spherically curved short-wave (SWIR) and medium wave (MWIR) infrared image sensors. This research will build on breakthrough curved visible-light image sensor technology developed at HRL. Curved image sensors have significant advantages over flat sensors in that they increase performance and reduce cost, weight, and volume of optics for many types of cameras. Curved sensor technology is poised to improve many optic-related scientific fields including photography, videography, computer vision and automation, reconnaissance and surveillance imaging, microscopy, and telescopy, among others.
“Infrared sensors and their optics have different challenges than visible light imagers,” said Geoff McKnight, HRL’s principal investigator on the project. “One of which is that they often must be operated at very low temperatures, which introduces thermal stresses from the contraction of the sensors. After curving the sensors, we will have to cool them to cryogenic temperature for operation, and the combination of the thermal stresses and bending stresses may potentially degrade or fracture the detectors.”
With low-cost 3D printed materials, a microchip common to smartphones, a few wires and a laptop, a 2D ultrasound machine can capture 3D images of infants’ brains, for example, with similar quality to MRI or CT scans while the baby is held in a parent’s arms.
The development from doctors and engineers from Duke University and Stanford University was presented on October 31, 2017, at the American College of Emergency Physicians Research Forum.
“With 2D technology you see a visual ‘slice’ of an organ, but without any context, you may mistake it for another part, or mistake one disease process or injury for another,” said Joshua Broder, MD, emergency physician and director of the emergency medicine residency program at the Duke University School of Medicine.
… Bundling wellness together with mental health in the context of employee well-being is pernicious, more so than it may sound. One term encompasses a slew of wonderful lifestyle perks, while the latter is a crucial and critical healthcare service. By conflating them, we imply that mental health is not as serious as other health problems. The reality is that mental health is not getting a massage or eating salads for lunch; for many, it’s a matter of life or death. Mental health is not an indulgence.
Equating mental health and overall wellness keeps mental health on the sidelines. It presents mental health as a choice you can opt into, rather than a universal concern with real consequences. Without proper emphasis placed on the importance of mental health, people will continue avoiding proper treatment and accessing professional care.
Your skeleton is much more than the structure supporting your muscles and other tissues. It produces hormones, too. And Mathieu Ferron knows a lot about it. The researcher at the Montreal Clinical Research Institute (IRCM) and professor at Université de Montréal’s Faculty of Medicine has spent the last decade studying a hormone called osteocalcin. Produced by our bones, osteocalcin affects how we metabolize sugar and fat.
In a recent paper in The Journal of Clinical Investigation, Ferron’s team unveiled a new piece of the puzzle that explains how osteocalcin works. The discovery may someday open the door to new ways of preventing type 2 diabetes and obesity.
… My first finding was a significant relationship between Involvement and Recovery. For now, it seems plausible that the relationship is circular; positive player attitudes lead to higher involvement on the pitch, and higher involvement leads to more positive attitudes. However, I failed to find any relationship between performance and Stress or any relationship with the quality of performance as measured by the WhoScored ratings.
My second finding revealed raised levels of frustration in players when they were not included in the starting line-up. However there was no evidence that this frustration built up throughout the analysis period.
Overall I found the results quite encouraging; although by no means conclusive, they provide evidence of the validity of psychometric instruments in a footballing population.
Could the NBA’s age limit be on its way out? In October, during an appearance on ESPN’s Mike & Mike, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver said that “it’s clear a change will come.” Silver indicated that he was open to working with the players’ union to potentially eliminate or at the least revise the age restriction. It was a reversal for Silver, who, as recently as 2014, made raising the league’s age minimum from 19 to 20 years old his top priority.
The commissioner cited three reasons for his change of tune: recent NCAA scandals; that the two most recent No. 1 overall picks came from programs that didn’t make the the NCAA tournament;1 and an increase in one-and-done college players declaring for the draft.
Silver’s comments suggest that the league is ready to acknowledge that the age restriction is broken. In fact, the recent draft cycles indicate the draft is trending in the opposite direction of the age policy’s intended effect: Prospects are getting younger, not older.
Houston built their championship team on talented youngsters and undervalued castoffs. Other teams are now asking if it’s worth investing in superstars