The agonizing wait to play again is over for Isaiah Thomas. Vengeance on the Celtics is still on hold.
Thomas, sidelined with a hip injury since last season’s Eastern Conference finals, will make his debut for the Cleveland Cavaliers on Tuesday night against the Portland Trail Blazers.
After months of rehab, the All-Star point guard will take the floor for the first time with the Cavaliers, who acquired him last summer in the blockbuster trade that sent Kyrie Irving to the Celtics.
It was a bittersweet Christmas for me. Having not been selected in the squad for Brighton’s game at Chelsea, I was afforded, for the first time in 16 years, the benefit of a Christmas Day off to spend with my wife and children at home without the worry of preparing for a game the next day or being away in a hotel in the evening stuck to my phone with them on FaceTime.
While it was amazing to be the recipient of a privilege that not only footballers but also nurses, paramedics, police officers and people with far more important jobs than me yearn for at this time, I couldn’t help but miss the adrenaline high I’ve been conditioned to getting from the age of 16 in the build-up to a big Boxing Day match.
With a World Cup summer coming up, the discussion is already taking place about the fact England’s top flight is the only major competition without a winter break and whether by the time the tournament begins its players will be too exhausted to perform at optimum level for their respective nations. Other countries have a rest period when players can recuperate from niggling injuries and mentally wind down in preparation for the crucial second half of a season.
It’s a small motivational touch, one of many little things that are adding up to a seismic cultural shift for this long-struggling program. Like the glass door Pikiell installed, so players would feel more welcome to step into his office. Or the larger beds he ordered so his big men don’t have to sleep with their feet hanging off the edge. Or his consolidation of player housing, so they live close to the RAC instead of being scattered all over the sprawling campus.
“It’s attention to detail, and following through on those details,” said Brian Kelley, president of the Rutgers Court Club. “It’s not just lip service anymore. It’s actual action behind those things.”
A variety of reasons. Sometimes female coaches may stay in assistant coaching positions because they think that might be more accommodating with having a family. But I don’t know if they’re given the opportunities to get head coaching positions.
On the club level, I see it all the time — women given positions to work only with the younger kids. Not given the head coach positions in the clubs at the higher levels. You need to give them an opportunity to prove themselves, to dive in, get it done, to deal with parents … I was fortunate in that I was given an opportunity at the college level.
Throw out the 0-16 record and every time Hue Jackson himself or owner Jimmy Haslam has pointed to the Browns playing hard as a sign of coaching acumen.
Coaches in a rebuild like this are more than only their record.
Coaches at all times are more than the effort police.
What did Hue Jackson do to help the Browns win this year? What did Jackson do to help the Browns avoid the second 0-16 season in NFL history?
… It is a brief, brutal profession, and especially so for newcomers: In England, from 60 percent to 70 percent of first-time managers never get another head job: One strike and, more often than not, you are out. Craig Shakespeare, who started the season as Leicester City manager but has now accepted a return to life as an assistant, can attest to that. So [Ian] Cathro was, on the surface, just a statistic, no different from dozens of others in his position in Britain and hundreds more across Europe.
… In the ACC such travel has for years become the norm, while the quaint days of geographically-contained eight- or nine-school membership have become more distant. The conference’s expansion from nine schools to 12 became complete in 2005. The addition of Pittsburgh, Syracuse and Notre Dame (in all sports except football) made the ACC a 15-school league in 2013. When Maryland departed for the Big Ten in 2014, Louisville, nearly 500 miles to the west, became its replacement.
The geographic expansion of the conference, as well as the expanded schedules that have come with the overall growth of college sports, has made it more challenging for athletes to accomplish the most basic of tasks for any college student: show up to class.
“There’s certainly ways to catch up and receive tutoring,” Berndt said of athletics-related absences, “but there is no substitute for being in the classroom, especially at a place like Duke, where the classes are really small, and you learn from a faculty member but also learn from your fellow students.”
I managed to wear a fitbit the entirety of 2017, this is exciting for a few reasons: one I have commitment problems, and two: it’s a lot of data that I have to play with. While fitbit’s app has some nice pretty graphs, they make it rather hard to actually dump all of your data into something nice like a csv.
Over the summer I worked on a project with Jeff Leek at the Johns Hopkins Data Science Lab to crack open this fitbit data resource and get out nice tidy csvs of your data. While we have yet to fully release what we worked on I figured this post would be a demonstration of what one can do with the data from their fitbit and perhaps inspire others to explore their own data.
For the most part, “it’s relatively simple data that these devices are collecting,” says Matthew Beitz, an assistant research scientist in the Department of Informatics at the University of California, Irvine. Most trackers rely on accelerometers and altimeters, limiting them to gathering info about movement (or, for many of us, the lack thereof).
When you use a device with GPS sensors, however, things get dicier. Suddenly your data shows not only when and how much you’re moving, but where. Beitz says that, at least in theory, companies could use these numbers to figure out exactly where to put that recovery protein shake billboard, or to figure out when most athletes tend to dock themselves in front of their TVs—and thus, when to run commercials. They could even extrapolate your socioeconomic status by figuring out whether you sit or move all day for work and what kind of hours you tend to log at your job.
While Beitz stresses that there’s no evidence that companies are currently selling personal fitness data to advertisers, Michelle De Mooy, director of the Privacy and Data Project at the Center for Democracy and Technology, is less confident. “Device companies rely on user data to make money, regardless of if they say they don’t directly sell or share user data—which some do, just depends on the device,” says De Mooy. For one thing, “they are using it for device optimization purposes and for new product development,” says De Mooy. In other words, your data is free R&D that’s building the next generation of devices.
… PlayerData EDGE combines a base layer garment with sensors together with a removable control module to tell athletes how they are doing at their sport. It provides data on biometrics, performance and technique for both individuals and teams.
It is the brainchild of Roy Hotrabhvanon and Hayden Ball, two computer science graduates from the University of Edinburgh, who set up the business in 2015. Supported to date by the Royal Society of Innovation and Edinburgh Innovation , the fresh funding will be used to get the product “market ready” by the end of 2018.
On a Tuesday in late October, Wayde van Niekerk headed into an operating room in Vail, Colo. The 25-year-old South African 400-metre runner, who shattered a 17-year-old world record en route to gold at the Rio Olympics in 2016, had torn his anterior cruciate ligament during a celebrity rugby match, putting his upcoming season – and perhaps his career – in jeopardy.
Two days later, he sent out an optimistic tweet: “Successful op done and dusted! Rehab already started. Ready for the hard work ahead.”
Van Niekerk’s vanishingly small post-injury rest period is typical of the aggressive return-to-play strategies practiced by professional athletes and sports teams. When every day on the sidelines represents lost dollars, there’s strong incentive to hurry back from injury by starting rehab as soon as possible – despite the fact, says Monika Bayer, a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Sports Medicine Copenhagen in Denmark, that “there has been very little scientific evidence obtained through human clinical trials to support this approach.”
She searched for bananas with such fervor that one shopkeeper wondered if she was looking for something illicit.
For the past six years, the Detroit Red Wings have been nourished, counseled and encouraged by Lisa McDowell, the team’s dietitian. Players rarely consume anything without her approval.
McDowell’s on high alert this time of year, when players are tempted to feast during the holidays.As forward Martin Frk put it, “I just want to eat all the baking.”
Wings players are vigilant in their healthy eating, knowing they need to recover fast and stay energized to accomplish their goals on the ice.
Newswise, Collegiate and Professional Sports Dietitians Association (CPSDA) from
… In an unprecedented occurrence, each of the four football programs participating in the College Football Playoff will feature a sports dietitian (Sports RD) who spent time professionally or scholastically at the University of Alabama. Amy Bragg, Alabama’s Director of Performance Nutrition, has been with the Crimson Tide for eight seasons and has built one of the leading sports nutrition programs in the country. A founding member and past president of the Collegiate and Professional Sports Dietitians Association, Bragg was a key player in supporting the 2014 initiative to deregulate NCAA feeding restrictions. Deregulation has allowed athletic departments to more completely fuel student-athlete health, wellness, and performance. This increased focus on fueling athletes led to a dramatic growth in the number of full-time sports dietitians at both the FBS and FCS levels. With a focus on providing nutrition education and guidance to all student-athletes, Alabama has grown their sports nutrition staff to support its more than 600 athletes. Bragg, explains her role as Director of Performance Nutrition, “I am fortunate to be a part of the Alabama program, functioning within a very cohesive football support staff. Our primary objective is to facilitate optimal fueling and hydration practices while educating players about the role of nutrition in performance.”
The impact of the sports dietitian’s role in supporting health, wellness, and performance has caught the eye of head coaches, university administrators, and sports medicine professionals over the last decade. As these individuals from schools with established sports nutrition programs move on to new opportunities, establishing a strong nutrition role at their next institution has become a high priority.
… Of the 31 head coaches to win at least one Super Bowl, 27 of them won their first championship within the first five seasons with that team. Only Chuck Noll (six years in Pittsburgh), John Madden (eight years in Oakland), Tom Landry (12 years in Dallas) and Bill Cowher (14 years in Pittsburgh) needed more than five years to capture that elusive first ring.
It could be argued that Lewis has lacked something most of those coaches enjoyed: a future Hall of Fame quarterback. Lewis never had an Aaron Rodgers or a Tom Brady. Instead, he’s had Carson Palmer and Andy Dalton, the current Bengals’ quarterback. Oddly enough, the closest Lewis ever came to winning a playoff game was in 2015, when Dalton was sidelined with an injury. AJ McCarron helped the Bengals to a late lead over the Steelers in the wild-card round, but Pittsburgh still won 18-16. That was the fifth season for the duo of Lewis and Dalton, and the Bengals haven’t made the playoffs in the two years since. Based on NFL history, there’s reason to believe that Lewis should have parted ways with the Bengals — or vice versa — after that season and not waited until now.
Call it The Five-Year Rule: No team has ever started the same quarterback under the same head coach for more than five years and seen that duo win its first championship. As you can see in the table, some really great duos just got their title together in the fifth year, but all 35 duos required no more than five years together.
David Moss has been a player, an academy manager, overseen Celtic’s scouting division and been head of football operations at Huddersfield. Here he gives an insight into what awaits as the January window opens