… “One of the biggest keys has been stretching and foam-rolling,” Paul tells Men’s Fitness. “Every night before bed I’ll do a routine, and you can just feel such a huge difference when you get up. I sound like an old man, but there’s a lot less aches and pains. I’ve had knee surgery, so I just do this all year-round. Since I’ve gotten older, I’ve realized that maintaining your body is the most important thing, and stretching out and my nutrition are the biggest parts of that. It makes me feel like I’m much younger when I’m on the court. When you’re young, 21 years old, you can get out of shape and then you just get right back. When you get older, you have to work at it.”
Paul’s play has helped turn the Rockets into a legitimate threat to the Warriors—but he knows it won’t be easy to beat them after the success that Golden State’s had the last few years.
“We just need to keep building and trying to get better,” Paul says. “We need to make sure we peak at the right time this season. We went on a big winning streak, but it was early. We aren’t satisfied with where we are. We know we gotta be a lot better, and we can be.”
… After the race, many in the running community thought the 36-year-old Flanagan might retire on top, maybe focus on promoting her book, Run Fast, Eat Slow: Nourishing Recipes for Athletes. But she’s decided to throw herself back into the arena at the Boston Marathon this coming April against a stacked women’s field that includes Americans Jordan Hasay, Molly Huddle, and Desi Linden. I recently had the chance to catch up with Flanagan, who lives and trains in Portland, Oregon, to learn how she continues to improve as most athletes her age are hanging it up.
The tiny hometown of Brandon Ingram and other NBA stars has faced biblical floods, economic devastation, gang violence, even wayward nuclear bombs, yet has become the NBA capital of the world. This is the untold story of its survival.
Four coaches from our Football in America series say the December injury to the Steelers’ star linebacker reinforces what they’ve already been preaching: to take the head out of tackling. But, they say, that message needs to be more widely accepted
Recent research has demonstrated decreases in resting metabolic rate (RMR), body composition and performance following a period of intensified training in elite athletes, however the underlying mechanisms of change remain unclear. Therefore, the aim of the present study was to investigate how an intensified training period, designed to elicit overreaching, affects RMR, body composition, and performance in trained endurance athletes, and to elucidate underlying mechanisms. Method
Thirteen (n = 13) trained male cyclists completed a six-week training program consisting of a “Baseline” week (100% of regular training load), a “Build” week (~120% of Baseline load), two “Loading” weeks (~140, 150% of Baseline load, respectively) and two “Recovery” weeks (~80% of Baseline load). Training comprised of a combination of laboratory based interval sessions and on-road cycling. RMR, body composition, energy intake, appetite, heart rate variability (HRV), cycling performance, biochemical markers and mood responses were assessed at multiple time points throughout the six-week period. Data were analysed using a linear mixed modeling approach. Results
The intensified training period elicited significant decreases in RMR (F(5,123.36) = 12.0947, p = <0.001), body mass (F(2,19.242) = 4.3362, p = 0.03), fat mass (F(2,20.35) = 56.2494, p = <0.001) and HRV (F(2,22.608) = 6.5212, p = 0.005); all of which improved following a period of recovery. A state of overreaching was induced, as identified by a reduction in anaerobic performance (F(5,121.87) = 8.2622, p = <0.001), aerobic performance (F(5,118.26) = 2.766, p = 0.02) and increase in total mood disturbance (F(5, 110.61) = 8.1159, p = <0.001).
Conclusion
Intensified training periods elicit greater energy demands in trained cyclists, which, if not sufficiently compensated with increased dietary intake, appears to provoke a cascade of metabolic, hormonal and neural responses in an attempt to restore homeostasis and conserve energy. The proactive monitoring of energy intake, power output, mood state, body mass and HRV during intensified training periods may alleviate fatigue and attenuate the observed decrease in RMR, providing more optimal conditions for a positive training adaptation.
Despite having to endure a rigorous in-season training schedule, research evaluating daily physiological recovery status markers among American football players is limited. The purpose of this study was to determine if recovery of cardiac-autonomic activity to resting values occurs between consecutive-day, in-season training sessions among college football players. Subjects (n = 29) were divided into groups based on position: receivers and defensive backs (SKILL, n = 10); running backs, linebackers and tight-ends (MID-SKILL, n = 11) and linemen (LINEMEN, n = 8). Resting heart rate (RHR) and the natural logarithm of the root-mean square of successive differences multiplied by twenty (LnRMSSD) were acquired at rest in the seated position prior to Tuesday and Wednesday training sessions and repeated over three weeks during the first month of the competitive season. A position × time interaction was observed for LnRMSSD (p = 0.04), but not for RHR (p = 0.33). No differences in LnRMSSD between days was observed for SKILL (Tuesday = 82.8 ± 9.3, Wednesday = 81.9 ± 8.7, p > 0.05). Small reductions in LnRMSSD were observed for MID-SKILL (Tuesday = 79.2 ± 9.4, Wednesday = 76.2 ± 9.5, p < 0.05) and LINEMEN (Tuesday = 79.4 ± 10.5, Wednesday = 74.5 ± 11.5, p < 0.05). The individually averaged changes in LnRMSSD from Tuesday to Wednesday were related to PlayerLoad (r = 0.46, p = 0.02) and body mass (r = -0.39, p = 0.04). Cardiac-parasympathetic activity did not return to resting values for LINEMEN or MID-SKILL prior to the next training session. Larger reductions in LnRMSSD tended to occur in players with greater body mass despite having performed lower workloads, though some individual variability was observed. These findings may have implications for how coaches and support staff address training and recovery interventions for players demonstrating inadequate cardiovascular recovery between sessions.
… Under Steve Bieser, Mizzou Baseball has rapidly developed a national reputation for innovation and technology. Throughout the off-season several members of the coaching staff have been included as instructors in various conferences, workshops, podcasts, and videos.
Why do we lack volleyball players with “feeling” on how to play the game? Why can’t modern players “read” the game? Now, I know this isn’t every volleyball player, but as years go by, we are noticing a decline in those kids that have a “nose for the ball.” Why?
Here is my theory. Remember, it’s MY theory. It doesn’t make it gospel and you are allowed to disagree (kinda 🙂 ).
Games!!! Kids don’t play games anymore. What happened to kickball & wiffleball with ghost runners???? Kids would have to use kicking motions, throwing motions, base running, problem solving, and imagination to play outside and in an UNORGANIZED setting. Awesome!
… New Tennessee strength coach Craig Fitzgerald — who left the top strength-coach position with the NFL’s Houston Texans to join Jeremy Pruitt in Knoxville — signed a three-year contract with a base salary of $625,000.
Fitzgerald’s salary would have been good enough for second nationally last season, behind only longtime Iowa strength coach Chris Doyle’s $675,000. Fitzgerald’s salary is more than Ohio State’s Mickey Marotti ($562,440), Alabama’s Scott Cochran ($535,000), Clemson’s Joey Batson ($450,000) and every other strength coach in college football made last season.
… While we are often in search of the latest gadget to quantify workload, the true answer is often staring us in the face.
How we move and look provides more insight than the latest GPS data, physiological parameters, or proprietary stress load algorithm can. We all have a weak point in our movement chain that provides clues to how hard we are working. Some are rooted in the subconscious, while other reactions are deliberate.
Our job as a coach is to sit back and develop an eye for understanding each individual’s fatigue signature. Do they develop tension in their shoulders, face, or arms? Are they stoic, attempting to stay relaxed for as long as possible, before a subtle hint arises, betraying their true effort? Or are they someone who throws on a pain face at the first sign of fatigue, almost as if they are trying to convince others, and themselves, that they are working hard enough.
International Journal of Sports Physiology and Performance from
PURPOSE:
Determine the relationship between drill type and accelerometer-derived loads during various team sport activities, and examine the influence of unit fitting on these loads. METHODS:
Sixteen rugby league players were fitted with microtechnology devices in either manufacturer vests or playing jerseys before completing standardised running, agility and tackling drills. Two-dimensional (2D) and three-dimensional (3D) accelerometer loads (BodyLoadTM) per km were compared across drills and fittings (i.e. vest and jersey). RESULTS:
When fitted in a vest, 2D BodyLoadTM was higher during tackling (21.5±14.8 AU/km) compared with running (9.5±2.5 AU/km) and agility (10.3±2.7 AU/km). Jersey fitting resulted in more than two-fold higher BodyLoadTM during running (2D 9.5±2.7 vs 29.3±14.8 AU/km; 3D 48.5±14.8 vs 111.5±45.4) and agility (2D 10.3±2.7 vs 21.0±8.1 AU/km; 3D 40.4±13.6 vs 77.7±26.8 AU/km), compared with a vest fitting. Jersey fitting also produced higher BodyLoadTM during tackling drills (2D = 21.5±14.8 vs 27.8±18.6 AU/km; 3D = 42.0±21.4 vs 63.2±33.1 AU/km). CONCLUSIONS:
This study provides evidence supporting the construct validity of 2D BodyLoadTM for assessing collision/tackling load in rugby league training drills. Conversely, the large values obtained from 3D BodyLoadTM (which includes the vertical load vector) appear to mask small increases in load during tackling drills, rendering 3D BodyLoadTM insensitive to changes in contact load. Unit fitting has a large influence on accumulated accelerometer loads during all drills, which is likely related to greater incidental unit movement when units are fitted in jerseys. Therefore, it is recommended that athletes wear microtechnology units in manufacturer provided vests to provide valid and reliable information.
After six years with the team, Broncos strength and conditioning coach Luke Richesson is headed to the Houston Texans, likely to oversee their strength program, an NFL source confirmed. Richesson had one year remaining on his contract with the team but was granted permission to accept the job in Houston.
In his time in Denver, Richesson helped to revamp the team’s conditioning program and instilled a reliance on new technologies to monitor players’ exertion and recovery.
As Fitbits and other wearable activity monitors change how regular people exercise and track their activity, they’re having similar effects on how Olympians train and recover between workouts.
It’s long been common for coaches to use video cameras to show athletes what their form and movements look like, to track progress, and to fine-tune exactly the right technique for, say, taking off for a jump or landing after a particular trick. But those only show what’s going on from the outside.
Now, wearables, biometrics and apps analyzing their data are becoming much more common for athletes at all levels, giving indications of what’s going on inside an athlete’s body. I have worked as a sport physiologist with elite athletes for two decades, including with USA Swimming and U.S. Figure Skating; there’s not yet much research about the results in figure skating, but wearables have helped coaches, athletes and sport scientists in other sports like swimming, cycling, soccer and volleyball.
NextFlex®, America’s Flexible Hybrid Electronics (FHE) Manufacturing Institute, today announced it has successfully proven the robustness of the FHE manufacturing process, producing multiple functional samples of a flexible Arduino® system. As part of the Flexible Arduino Microcontroller Project, NextFlex redesigned a device typically built on a rigid printed circuit board (PCB)—by printing and attaching thin bare die on a flexible substrate while maintaining the performance associated with traditional packaged ICs. This achievement ultimately helps realize FHE’s enormous potential for creating ubiquitous IoT and sensor products for consumer, commercial and military applications.
… People are working out more than ever—and at the high end, they want an exclusive experience. So companies are turning to tech. “Technology is a route to making people even more engaged in fitness,” explains Sarah Robb O’Hagan, CEO of cycling studio chain Flywheel and Equinox’s president from 2012 to 2016. Engagement of existing customers, of course, is key. According to IHRSA, club operators spend a median of $118.65 in sales and marketing costs for each new membership account. But existing members generate a median $793.40 in annual revenue.
One way to keep customers coming back is keeping them accountable. Several fitness companies have introduced systems that gather detailed data about their customers. In the case of cycling studios, that means tracking things like speed and calories, while clients at Orangetheory, a boutique gym that offers a high-intensity workout, receive monitors to track their heart rates. People “get hooked on” results, says Orangetheory CEO Dave Long.
Technology is also helping fitness companies get into customers’ heads—sometimes literally. Flywheelers can “follow” each other’s performance in a Twitter-like fashion. And Equinox saw users of its “digital coach”—a bot embedded in its mobile app that “learns” from a customer’s activities and goals—check in 40% more than nonusers during a six-month pilot program.
After the New Orleans Saints became the first NFL team to use Zebra Technology’s radio-based tracking system during practices, the players became “very aware that they’re being tracked,” said former wide receiver Marques Colston.
“We all knew we had an RFID tag in our shoulder pads,” he said on a panel during SportTechie’s State of the Industry event. “Some of us would make little jokes around, even when you’re not on the field, just kind of staying active and moving around to make sure that load stays up.”
Colston last played in 2015, capping a 10-year career with the Saints, and has since become an adviser to and investor in sports technologies. He’s gained an understanding of just how much more advanced the wearable landscape has gotten in the time.
Central Penn Business Journal, Gillian Branstetter from
A Lancaster-based health care technology startup has disclosed its first major deal with a professional sports team.
The Sacramento Kings of the National Basketball Association will use full body scanners produced and sold by Connexion Health, a company piloted by venture capital firm Aspire Ventures.
The scanners resemble full-body scanners used at airport security checkpoints. But instead of scanning people for weapons or explosives, the scanners will be used by the Kings to analyze players’ posture, balance, and other measures of musculoskeletal health, according to a press release announcing the deal.
According to the company, physical therapists and their patients can review and analyze the results from the scan using Fusionetics+, an app designed by Connexion in partnership with Georgia-based technology company Fusionetics. The outside of the kiosks are designed by Lititz-based live event company Tait Towers.
Many health tracking devices have focused on measuring activity or sleep, but creating a true picture of daily health factors demands capturing more inputs.
When a midfielder is dribbling down the sidelines on a breakaway with a defender approaching from behind and up to four defenders in their vision, they have three options of forwards making runs in different directions to pass the ball to. But only one makes for the correct pass. Such a scenario is extremely common in a soccer game.
Faculty and students are conducting studies in the Sport and Exercise Psychology Laboratory on cognitive training, with a focus on collegiate athletics. By using NeuroTracker, a cognitive training software, and standardized video sequences, the goal of the study is to test if attentional training has an impact on decision-making skills in soccer players.
Sebastian Harenberg, assistant professor in the Department of Exercise and Sport Sciences, became interested in cognitive training roughly three years ago. Harenberg had the idea for the study at a conference in October with his colleague Dr. Oliver Höner at the University of Tübingen in Germany.
Elite runners will soon make their way to Boston for Marathon Monday, but many have already made a stop at one local hospital to ensure they are ready for race day.
“It’s what will get them to the start line, and hopefully get them to the finish line,” said Irene Davis, Director of the Spaulding National Running Center.
At Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, the center is a place for research and diagnosis. Using cutting edge technology, they conduct a physical analysis of a runner, recording their form on a treadmill from various angles. A sports medicine team then reviews the footage and figures out what each person needs to change to improve form and avoid injury.
… I couldn’t help but notice fitness and sports threaded through R/GA’s projects past and present. Is that by accident or design? They seem to lend themselves to data.
There has always been data connected to baseball in such a significant way, and we’re working with the LA Dodgers on an accelerator for sports technology companies. There’s also data used with running, and we saw that as we created the concept for Fuel, which is a measurement of athletic performance. At Nike they say that you can’t really affect performance if you don’t understand the data. It’s not just coaching anymore; it’s personal and it ties into the whole lifestyle. So it’s using data to help create innovation, particularly in products, services, and e-commerce with our clients around the world.
University of Connecticut, Korey Stringer Institute from
Last week, Dr. Casa and I were fortunate to attend the 2018 Collaborative Solutions for Safety in Sport (CSSS) meeting for the state of Florida. Stemming from the national CSSS meeting, the goal for this meeting was to implement the best practice policies at a state level for high school athletes. This same meeting occurred in 2017, and while the program was educational and facilitated some changes, the ultimate goal of the current meeting was to bring well thought-out policies to the sports medicine advisory committee and board of directors to pass. While this program was meant educational, it was not meant to be continuing education; rather a workshop with the goal to create and fully vet the wording of policy to be implemented by the Florida High School Athletics Association.
Exercise is an emerging cause of atrial fibrillation (AF) in young individuals without coexisting cardiovascular risk factors. The causes of exercise-induced atrial fibrillation remain largely unknown, and conclusions are jeopardised by apparently conflicting data. Some components of the athlete’s heart are known to be arrhythmogenic in other settings. Bradycardia, atrial dilatation and, possibly, atrial premature beats are therefore biologically plausible contributors to exercise-induced AF. Challenging findings in an animal model suggest that exercise might also prompt the development of atrial fibrosis, possibly due to cumulative minor structural damage after each exercise bout. However, there is very limited, indirect data supporting this hypothesis in athletes. Age, sex, the presence of comorbidities and cardiovascular risk factors, and genetic individual variability might serve to flag those athletes who are at the higher risk of exercise-induced AF. In this review, we will critically address current knowledge on the mechanisms of exercise-induced AF. [full text]
… “Imagine going to the doctor’s office and getting on the table in the lobby, in front of 30 or 40 people,” said Jeff Allen, director of sports medicine at UA told Bleacher Report. “Now imagine 100,000 people watching you.”
Now, thanks to an invention patented by the University of Alabama, more players are getting medical help shielded from the noise and bustle of the stadium.
It’s called the SidelinER, a collapsible tent that sits on the side of the field and can be quickly erected to serve as a kind if temporary, rudimentary doctor’s office where medical staff can treat injured players.
Injuries to a critical ligament in the knee are becoming more common in children and teens, researchers warn.
Injuries to the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) “are a significant public health issue” that put youngsters at risk for developing future health problems, said Dr. Louise Shaw of the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Victoria, Australia, coauthor of an infographic published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
Over the course of a decade, the annual rate increase of ACL injuries in children and teens in the state of Victoria was nearly 148 percent, Shaw and colleagues report.
The relationship between environment, beverage temperature and performance has almost exclusively been examined from the perspective of whether cold drinks can enhance performance in hot conditions (the general consensus seems to be that they do help a very small amount compared to room temperature fluids), not the other way around.
This is unsurprising as there has been far more attention given to how to improve exercise capacity in the heat. That’s despite the cold arguably being more challenging in many respects. So, if the peer-reviewed science is a bit thin on the ground, it comes down to drawing a bit more heavily on experience and common sense.
English Premier League club West Ham United are facing a Football Association charge alleging they broke rules on anti-doping procedures.
The FA have launched disciplinary proceedings against the club claiming it failed to ensure its ‘Club Whereabouts’ information was correct on three occasions in the past year. West Ham have been given a week to respond to the charges.
NA testing won’t guide dieters to the weight-loss regimen most likely to work for them, scientists reported on Tuesday. Despite some earlier studies claiming that genetic variants predict whether someone has a better chance of shedding pounds on a low-carbohydrate or a low-fat diet, and despite a growing industry premised on that notion, the most rigorous study so far found no difference in weight loss between overweight people on diets that “matched” their genotype and those on diets that didn’t.
The findings make it less likely that genetics might explain why only some people manage to lose weight on a low-carb diet like Atkins and why others succeed with a low-fat one (even though the vast majority of dieters don’t keep off whatever pounds they lose). Unlike cancer treatments, diets can’t be matched to genotype, the new study shows.
The results underline “how, for most people, knowing genetic risk information doesn’t have a big impact,” said Timothy Caulfield, of the University of Alberta, a critic of quackery. “We know weight loss is tough and sustained weight loss is even tougher. Genetics are relevant … [but] it seems highly unlikely that providing genetic risk information is going to be the magical formula that is going to fix this complex problem.”
In the world of disaster response, teams engage in something called a “hot wash” after each deployment. If something went wrong, we ask ourselves: How could this have been prevented? It’s a question that helps us mitigate crises rather than simply respond to them. Sometimes, if a responder is about to do something particularly ill-advised, say in a social context, another responder will ask them, “How could this accident have been prevented?” as they walk towards potential harm or embarrassment.
As someone who has done crisis response for the past eight years, the pre-mortem we held on my third day at Truss made me feel right at home. It was the last day of an intensive kickoff event for our DOD project (more about how we won that here). Our engineering architect Nick Twyman led the assembled team in a session to brainstorm issues which might be severe enough to tank the project. He opened with the prompt, “Imagine you’re presenting to the entire company 12 months from now and must explain why this project completely failed.”
… over the years, other researchers have questioned both the pervasiveness of scale-freeness and the extent to which the paradigm illuminates the structure of specific networks. Now, the new paper reports that few real-world networks show convincing evidence of scale-freeness.
In a statistical analysis of nearly 1,000 networks drawn from biology, the social sciences, technology and other domains, researchers found that only about 4 percent of the networks (such as certain metabolic networks in cells) passed the paper’s strongest tests. And for 67 percent of the networks, including Facebook friendship networks, food webs and water distribution networks, the statistical tests rejected a power law as a plausible description of the network’s structure.
“These results undermine the universality of scale-free networks and reveal that real-world networks exhibit a rich structural diversity that will likely require new ideas and mechanisms to explain,” wrote the study’s authors, Anna Broido and Aaron Clauset of the University of Colorado, Boulder.
In basketball games, whenever players successfully shoot in streaks, they are expected to demonstrate heightened performance for a stretch of time. Streak shooting in basketball has been debated for more than three decades, but most studies have provided little significant statistical evidence and have labeled random subjective judgments the “hot hand fallacy.” To obtain a broader perspective of the hot hand phenomenon and its accompanying influences on the court, this study uses field goal records and optical tracking data from the official NBA database for the entire 2015–2016 season to analyze top-scoring leaders’ shooting performances. We first reflect on the meaning of “hot hand” and the “Matthew effect” in actual basketball competition. Second, this study employs statistical models to integrate three different shooting perspectives (field goal percentage, points scored, and attempts). This study’s findings shed new light not only on the existence or nonexistence of streaks, but on the roles of capability and opportunity in NBA hot shooting. Furthermore, we show how hot shooting performances resulting from capability and opportunity lead to actual differences for teams.
The conversation has well and truly moved on. No longer is there even a debate around whether analytics can inform decision-making and influence performance in professional football. Questions now surround how it can best be applied in a particular environment.
Football clubs differ in how they set-up. There is not a ‘one size fits all’ approach. A club with only one full-time analyst cannot be expected to implement the same analytical processes as a club with an entire team of analysts and data scientists.
The next step concerns how analytics is perceived within football. The implementation of analytics should be simply considered an additional stream of information.
In a digital age, many complex things can be done easily through a mobile app with the swipe of a finger. One could only imagine an NBA trade-deadline Tinder app where deals could get done quickly.
Pistons general manager Jeff Bower is not one of those people. He’s an old-school executive who relies on instinct and relationships to get through trades. Such was the case a couple of weeks ago, when he pulled off one of the biggest deals of the trade season, bringing Blake Griffin to the Pistons in a deal with the Los Angeles Clippers.
The complexities of the deal made it take almost two weeks to complete and through more than a dozen iterations of trade scenarios, Bower and team president Stan Van Gundy finally came to a deal with Clippers president Lawrence Frank for another franchise centerpiece to pair with Andre Drummond.
OptaPro is to partner with the University of Liverpool Management School Centre for Sports Business to support their MSc Sports Business & Management programme.
The leading programme offers students a master’s level understanding of the global business of sport; its organisations, stakeholders and the disciplines which make it operate successfully, with a business focus on the challenges and opportunities within the global sports business.
Within this module, students have a unique opportunity to work with detailed Opta data via OptaPro’s ProVision tool, an analytical resource developed in partnership with TruMedia Networks.
… The subtle trick is to keep the game modern and attractive in a marketplace with more entertainment choices and diversions than ever. Other sports do this routinely with nary a word of complaint. Did you know the NBA this season adopted rules changes (timeouts, free throw procedures, halftime) specifically to improve pace of play? Their passage was no big deal. The league’s goal? “Fewer stoppages and less time without action, especially at the end of a game.” It’s a guiding principle in entertainment, be it movies, television programs, e-sports, games, and, yes, baseball.
With evolution, not revolution, in mind, here are 10 ways to make baseball even better. Think of these as software updates. Better to bring the game up to date, rather than waiting until there is a crash.
There was a time when Corsi was a trailblazing statistic in the world of hockey analytics. With the NHL lacking in robust data sets found in other leagues like Major League Baseball and the NBA, Corsi could provide a rough sketch of how well a team was playing beyond its goal differential. And with goal differential highly influenced by luck over the course of a season of such a high-paced sport filled with good and bad bounces of the puck, the metric was something of a godsend.
But it’s time to realize Corsi has run its course. It’s now time to turn to more telling stats, such as scoring chances, a metric that factors in shot quality into its analysis.
Game-calling once got Jim Leyritz exiled from the New York Yankees.
The story, as Jon Pessah tells it in his book “The Game,” goes something like this: In the 1996 World Series opener, Leyritz instructed his pitchers to throw fastballs to Atlanta Braves teenage outfielder Andruw Jones — that despite the Yankees scouts warning their battery to approach Jones with breaking and offspeed pitches. Jones homered twice as part of a blowout victory, with Leyritz confessing afterward he had hoped to trick Jones. Yes, both times.
Predictably, mercurial Yankees owner George Steinbrenner did not appreciate the explanation. “I spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on scouting, and your dumbass players don’t follow instructions!” he’s reported to have said. Steinbrenner wanted flesh for the folly, and pressured general manager Bob Watson to trade Leyritz that night. Watson did not budge, however, and Leyritz redeemed himself later in the Series with a clutch home run en route to a Yankees title. Watson did relent six weeks after Steinbrenner’s initial demand, sending Leyritz to the Los Angeles Angels for a pair of A-ball pitchers, neither of whom ever donned the pinstripes.
It reasons that if poor game-calling is grounds for banishment, as it was with Leyritz in 1996, then good game-calling should merit a distinction approaching sainthood. Baseball’s recent history suggests teams do believe in the hidden value of game-calling. Witness Jeff Mathis.
The Chronicle of Higher Education, Jack Stripling from
The new batch of data was unambiguous. Half of the students in one major were athletes. One in three black players on Auburn’s football team was enrolled in the program.
Rather than question how this might have happened, the university’s provost instead offered a plan: Create more programs like it.
“The following report points to the need for more majors that have enough elective courses etc.,” Timothy R. Boosinger, the provost at the time, wrote in the late winter of 2015 to G. Jay Gogue, who was then the president. So many athletes concentrated in one major — public administration — can attract controversy, and it did. Offering more programs with similarly flexible requirements would, Boosinger implied, solve the problem.
The provost assured the president that those other programs were in the works, and that he had met with Jay Jacobs, who was then the athletic director, “to discuss the new offerings that are in the pipeline.”
The National Basketball Association (NBA) Draft Combine is an annual event where prospective players are evaluated in terms of their athletic abilities and basketball skills. Data collected at the Combine should help NBA teams select right the players for the upcoming NBA draft; however, its value for predicting future performance of players has not been examined. This study investigated predictive validity of the NBA Draft Combine on future performance of basketball players. We performed a principal component analysis (PCA) on the 2010–2015 Combine data to reduce correlated variables (N = 234), a correlation analysis on the Combine data and future on-court performance to examine relationships (maximum pairwise N = 217), and a robust principal component regression (PCR) analysis to predict first-year and 3-year on-court performance from the Combine measures (N = 148 and 127, respectively). Three components were identified within the Combine data through PCA (= Combine subscales): length-size, power-quickness, and upper-body strength. As per the correlation analysis, the individual Combine items for anthropometrics, including height without shoes, standing reach, weight, wingspan, and hand length, as well as the Combine subscale of length-size, had positive, medium-to-large–sized correlations (r = 0.313–0.545) with defensive performance quantified by Defensive Box Plus/Minus. The robust PCR analysis showed that the Combine subscale of length-size was a predictor most significantly associated with future on-court performance (p ≤ 0.05), including Win Shares, Box Plus/Minus, and Value Over Replacement Player, followed by upper-body strength. In conclusion, the NBA Draft Combine has value for predicting future performance of players.