… “Hopefully I can get back into training soon and when I do, I hope to be reasonable enough shape to do myself justice.
“It is always an interesting time when you are out, I find, because your focus is so much on football when you are playing and I schedule my life around it. When you haven’t got games, it’s not as necessary to go and recover from a training session or a match so it changes the structure of your life.
“But at the moment, the workload is big and I have got to recover from the sessions. My diet is always important but particularly when you are out injured and you can’t train you have to pay close attention to that.
… And so – if you are still reading this – we come about to my motives and my angles on why we decide to keep training fees low, and why the CEO and Founder of this company do not have the highest salaries on our staff. If you’ve read everything above, you already know why. It is through the mistakes as an entrepreneur and young man that I have realized that character and culture are the only things that stay with you in this life, and so we do our very best to screen training candidates here to ensure we get the best. Not the best in the form of those who throw 95 miles per hour, no, often times we tell them to hit the road (I told a minor leaguer with big league experience who threw 100+ MPH regularly to get lost; that was a tough call, but the right one based on his attitude).
I want to come to work every single day and know that the trainees inside our four walls want to go to war. Oftentimes, they have a story of strife and difficulty in their past, and from time to time I will share everything I’ve laid out above for them and form a connection. It is a hell of a lot more fun to watch those go to work who understand what the bottom is. I will never forget those athletes, and I root for their success on the field and outside the lines with all my heart.
So that is why we keep training fees down. We want the right people.
… I asked Crouse about Norwich, the challenges of raising kids who play competitive sports, and whether this New England parenting utopia holds lessons for parents everywhere. Her answers, provided via email, have been condensed and edited for clarity.
Isabel Fattal: What role do parents play in their kids’ Olympics experiences? Do parents usually come to the Olympics?
Karen Crouse: Few people know this, but parents of Olympians do not have ready access to their children during the Games. I’ve watched swimmers converse with their parents through a chain-link fence because … of tight security measures that are in place. And the athletes’ days during their competitions are so regimented they don’t have a lot of free time until they’re done competing to hang out with their parents. Sometimes the athletes would have a hard time spotting a familiar face in the stands. The parents are often relegated to the nosebleed seats because their children didn’t secure their Olympic spots until weeks before the start of the Games … or because they’re settling for the most inexpensive seats as that’s all they can afford.
Yes, self-confidence can make you try harder—but it can also work in more subtle ways. Telling runners they look relaxed makes them burn measurably less energy to sustain the same pace. Giving rugby players a postgame debriefing that focuses on what they did right rather than what they did wrong has effects that continue to linger a full week later, when the positive-feedback group will have higher testosterone levels and perform better in the next game. Even doing a good deed—or simply imagining yourself doing a good deed—can enhance your endurance by reinforcing your sense of agency.
… A number of training programs, perhaps most of them, are combining training with evaluation. The trainees are being assessed while they are trying to master the skills and the material — and that practice is counter-productive. If I am a trainee, and I know that supervisors are assessing my performance, I am going into a defensive mode.
I am trying not to make any mistakes. My primary goal is to make it through training without getting terminated. I am not trying to learn as much as possible. I am not trying to explore different strategies. I am not attempting to learn from my mistakes. None of these. If I can wash out during the training, it really isn’t training is it?
Now you see why training and evaluation do not mix, and why programs that do both are making a big mistake.
The competition window is tiny, but gets all the attention. Machines are bad, then strange but interesting toys and tools, then roughly equal, and then boom, superior forever. This evolution repeats with all our “smart” tech, not just in chess.
SB Nation, The Champaigne Room blog, Stephen Cohn from
Charlie Young had never been to a college baseball game. Now a sophomore at the University of Illinois, Young went to a few Illinois games toward the end of the 2017 season, hoping to talk to the coaching staff about an Android application he developed in his computer science class.
The app would help track advanced metrics, and it came to fruition, according to Young.
But, to Young’s surprise, the Illinois baseball program invested in a FlightScope Strike in August 2017, which essentially does what Young’s app did.
According to its website, FlightScope Strike is “the first multi-frequency 3D tracking radar for baseball and softball employing direct distance measurement to provide accurate positions, speeds, and angles of pitched and hit ball trajectories.”
For years, Larry Smarr has used a supercomputer to monitor his health and peer at his organs. Recently, he used his knowledge to help direct his own surgery.
Mobile devices help individuals monitor various aspects of their health and wellness, from heart rate to nutrition to sleep. Now researchers hope to find out if mobile sensor technology can also help individuals improve effectiveness at work.
Researchers at the University of Notre Dame are conducting an extensive $7.9 million, 21-month study focused on working professionals in cognitively demanding positions, such as engineers, programmers and managers in high-stress occupations. The Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA) is funding the study.
“Survey assessments and qualitative observations made by researchers and supervisors have long been the way to address the question of what factors underlie outstanding performance in the workplace,” said Aaron Striegel, associate professor at Notre Dame’s Wireless Institute and leader of the study. “Using mobile sensor technology in conjunction with environmental sensors, we can now uncover in a more objective fashion basic differences that may have gone unnoticed in the way people approach their day-to-day activities in the workplace.”
… his is exactly why I lay my cards on the table, by providing my full approach to a hamstring rehabilitation program and opened it up to critique and appraisal with a specific call for action, for others to share too! While the feedback and praise from the blog and my courage to share all without hiding anything was clear, no one came back and really critiqued and certainly no one shared any of their own work (to my knowledge). With the exception of peers such as Jurdan Mendiguchia (Spain) and Aspetar’s Nicol van Dyk, Rod Whiteley et al who were already among the minority of those actually sharing what they do (even before my blog), most people seem to still be holding onto their poker face.
I appreciate, and know first-hand that working as a clinician in a high performance sports team, that we are all very busy, but I sincerely believe we can spare some time to share our experiences and try to learn from each other. Imagine if even two or three clinicians had shared their programs over the past 12 months; it could only have benefited our outlook on hamstring rehabilitation (or any rehabilitation for that matter).
So, almost a year on I am putting out another call for action to share what we are doing so we can enhance our evidence led approach to rehab, by improving the ‘practical experience’ component of such a strategy. As added motivation, I have collated a video summary of my original hamstring program (with the expert help of Sophie Curthoys). And watch out in the coming month/s for another example from my practice! Here’s hoping we get some sharing this time round and don’t look back another year on, still asking myself ‘why is no one sharing’?
Background Information on the prevalence of mental health problems of elite athletes is inconclusive, most probably due to methodological limitations, such as low response rates, heterogeneous samples.
Aims To evaluate the prevalence and risk factors of depression and anxiety symptoms in high-level female football players.
Methods Female football players of 10 German first league (Bundesliga) and 7 lower league teams were asked to answer a questionnaire on players’ characteristics, the Center of Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D) and the Generalised Anxiety Disorder (GAD-7) scale.
Results A total of 290 players (184 first and 106 lower league players) took part in the study. The CES-D score indicated mild to moderate symptoms of depression in 48 (16.6%) and severe symptoms in 41 (14.1%) players. The GAD-7 score indicated an at least moderate generalised anxiety disorder in 24 (8.3%) players. The prevalence of depression symptoms and generalised anxiety disorders was similar to the female general population of similar age. However, significantly more second league players reported symptoms of depression than first league players, and thus the prevalence of depression symptoms in second league players was higher than in the general population. Only a third of the 45 (15.7%) players who stated that they currently wanted or needed psychotherapeutic support received it.
Conclusion The prevalence of depression and generalised anxiety symptoms in elite football players is influenced by personal and sport-specific variables. It is important to raise awareness of athletes’ mental health problems in coaches and team physicians, to reduce stigma and to provide low-threshold treatment.
It’s hard to watch the game of basketball without bias, emotion, judgment or opinion, and it’s impossible to see everything anyway.
So the Milwaukee Bucks rely on their director of basketball research, Seth Partnow, to simply provide the facts.
And those analytics – the gathering and interpretation of situational statistics – have in turn changed the way the Bucks look at the game.
The Bucks use this data – some of it available to the public, some proprietary to the team – to evaluate talent, scout opponents, devise game strategies and self-scout. General manager Jon Horst embraces analytics so much, in fact, that he expanded his staff of math geniuses in the hopes that the Bucks can find the next stat that changes the game.
… The hitter we’re going to imagine is not just the best at three disparate skills — like asking one pitcher to have the best fastball, the best changeup and the best breaking ball — but he has somehow broken the resistance bands that prevent one person from excelling at all three simultaneously. That’s how unlikely this hitter is.
But we can do whatever we want for this hypothetical, and we’re declaring he exists. We’re willing him into existence. Contact like Simmons, power like Davis, BABIP like LeMahieu. We can run these numbers easily enough: What would that guy hit?
… Across Europe, more and more leagues are starting to resemble Greece. Though no team can quite match the length of Olympiacos’s hegemony, an increasing number of domestic competitions are starting to turn into the playgrounds and playthings of one all-powerful club.
In the Belarusian Premier League, BATE Borisov has won 12 titles in a row. In Switzerland, Basel has swept the last eight. In Bulgaria and Scotland, Ludogorets Razgrad and Celtic have been untouchable for six. In Croatia, Rijeka won the championship last year. But the previous 11 had all gone to Dinamo Zagreb.
These are no longer title races. They are now simply processions, their result almost preordained, entire seasons stripped of drama and intrigue.
“It is not good for any league in the world if one team always wins,” said Kostas Katsouranis.