… Kuzain does not fit the traditional mold of a blue-chip United States men’s national team youth prospect. He stands a modest 5-foot-10, 160 pounds, and isn’t remarkably strong, fast or physical. Born in Carbondale, Illinois, to Malaysian parents, Kuzain has since 12 years old been drawing attention from onlookers in both countries with YouTube videos of him bewitching opponents. He’s different; now, he aims to prove that those skills can translate in Major League Soccer.
“I think sometimes we have the wrong impression about physicality,” said Nagamura. “Kuzain is a very good example of a guy who is not very physical and strong, but is really quick on the ball, with quick feet. His technique and his quick feet overcome a lot of the stronger guys he plays against. For sure there’s a lot of players like that in the United States and we can never close the doors for those players, because I think we want to have guys who are good on the ball, guys who can make plays and guys that are technically efficient.”
SB Nation, Beyond the Boxscore blog, Dan Bernstein from
… Recently, Lowrie appeared on the verge of a steep aging decline. He turned 32 in 2016 and limped through the worst statistical year of his career as he battled foot pain. Given what we know about aging curves — players are expected to lose about 0.5 WAR per season once they turn 30, according to Neil Weinberg of FanGraphs — it looked like it could be the end of the line.
Then, almost inexplicably, Lowrie became one of the most valuable players in baseball. His 6.2 rWAR since the start of last season ranks 18th among position players, ahead of the likes of Manny Machado and George Springer. During that time, he’s slashing .292/.368/.478 with 57 doubles, 22 home runs, and an 85:128 BB:K ratio.
Associated Press, Pro32: Head to Head, Dennis Waszak Jr. from
Sam Darnold zipped pass after pass down the field, knowing each one of them counted.
Literally.
The New York Jets rookie quarterback was at his old stomping grounds of San Clemente High School in California last month, just a few weeks before being the No. 3 overall pick in the NFL draft , tossing “smart” footballs equipped with computer chips calculating his every throw.
The rookie manager who looks (and eats) like a bodybuilder has already become a meme, and after some early-season mishaps, he’s at least steadied the ship in Philadelphia. But can his constant adjustments work across a full season?
He has one of the most famous faces in football, despite the care he takes to keep it shadowed. It’s a fearsome face, both fatherly and somewhat fanatical, the face of a tender executioner. It shows everything and nothing, and hides everything and nothing. It is stoical, its primary expression a manifestation of will and its secondary expression an acceptance of fate. It distrusts elation as much as it distrusts despair and is particularly good at exhibiting, and then instantly recovering from, disappointment. Its primary features are those of a man going incognito—a beard, the hat pulled permanently down low over his eyes, which tell all his secrets. His eyes never stop moving until they settle, like spotlights, on the object of their outrage or affection. It is not the face of a relaxed man but of one who can’t wait and can’t bear to see what comes next. Sometimes he darts his tongue, or punctuates his sentences by tightening his lips, yet his face is as unlined as a baby’s, as though the act of self-preservation required of every professional football coach—even one who has become a fixture of American Sundays—extends, in his case, all the way to the skin.
Mike Tomlin’s face is the face of the Pittsburgh Steelers, and therefore of tradition; his face is also the face of African-American coaches in the NFL, and therefore of the most provisional and hard-won progress. He is an emblematic figure whose image is minted on both sides of a coin that never stops flipping, at least in part because he has never had to call heads or tails. Winning has not only been a Lombardi-esque everything during Tomlin’s 11 years as the Steelers’ head coach. It has also been enough to make questions of personal and racial identity seem at once beside the point and self-evident, which is how he likes them. He has had the luxury of being always himself and never himself; the caretaker of tradition is also the agent of change. But what happens when he loses games he should have won and people start looking for someone—a face—to blame?
Look at him now, in the dead of winter, enduring a practice on a mild, blue-sky day. He is instantly recognizable as soon as he steps onto the field, but the fans mark his arrival with a deep murmur rather than a greeting, and he acknowledges them with a gesture—a hurriedly raised hand—but not a glance.
Everyone knows that timing is everything. But we don’t know much about timing itself. Our lives are a never-ending stream of “when” decisions: when to start a business, schedule a class, get serious about a person. Yet we make those decisions based on intuition and guesswork. Timing, it’s often assumed, is an art. In “When: The Scientific Secrets of Perfect Timing,” Dan Pink shows that timing is really a science.
With PoseNet running on TensorFlow.js anyone with a decent webcam-equipped desktop or phone can experience this technology right from within a web browser. And since we’ve open sourced the model, Javascript developers can tinker and use this technology with just a few lines of code. What’s more, this can actually help preserve user privacy. Since PoseNet on TensorFlow.js runs in the browser, no pose data ever leaves a user’s computer.
While attempting to explain the intricacies of computer vision to my younger brother, he asked me about the easiest way to implement a live image classifier (not his exact words).
I thought about it for some time and came up with a solution that he was almost able to understand. It leverages the openCV library and needs to be used in conjunction with a pre-existing model. However, it can be executed in under 20 lines of Python code (loading dependencies not a part of the count).
It’s always scary when a young athlete injures a knee. A torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), for instance, is painful and can bring an early end to your child’s sports season. But not all knee injuries are so severe. The lesser-known Sinding-Larsen-Johansson syndrome also causes knee pain, but it’s easy to treat.
Young athletes affected most
The main risk factor for Sinding-Larsen is simply being a physically active adolescent going through a growth spurt, says orthopedic surgeon Paul Saluan, MD, Director for Pediatric and Adolescent Sports Medicine at Cleveland Clinic.
During a growth spurt, your child’s bones may grow faster than the surrounding tendons. This can cause traction, tightness and, eventually, inflammation.
Accidents happen on the ice all the time that lead to injured hockey players. It’s a physically demanding sport where high impacts take a toll on a players’ bodies, even at the minor level. From collisions along the boards, getting hacked with a stick, hit by a puck or just falling, injuries on the ice are common in a contact sport.
But what about those times when your player feels a little tweak here and there for no particular reason? I’m talking about a groin pull or strain, knee pain, low back pain, and so on. These injuries seem to happen for no reason. Athletes miss a lot of important games if these seemingly minor issues aren’t dealt with properly. It’s not a matter of if but when little tweaks happen because hockey players’ bodies are always in a constant state of muscle imbalance. So let’s take care of injuries before they happen instead of dealing with the aftermath.
We all know the effect of diet on performance. Runners gorge on carbohydrate-rich pasta before a race, a bodybuilder opts for a protein-packed steak to enhance muscle growth and, let’s face it, there’s always going to be a time and place for a strategically gulped, caffeine-laced cup of coffee (I’m looking at you, school drop-off line!).
Not even our gut bacteria are immune to the effects of diet. These denizens of the dark (and presumably smelly) quarters that are our large intestines have evolved with us to enable us to digest all manner of foodstuffs. They thrive on the food we eat and in turn, they provide essential nutrients that keep us healthy, repel pathogens and even help calibrate our immune responses.
The particular composition of gut bacteria is important as well and researchers and clinicians are increasingly interested in manipulating that balance to give a boost to some bacteria and to edge out bad actors. New research led by Justin Sonnenburg, PhD, helps clarify how that might be possible — and it has to do with, not surprisingly, diet.
As the draft has evolved into a three-day event with multiple prime-time television slots, it has become arguably the second most anticipated date on the American sports calendar behind the Super Bowl. It provides a collision of America’s two biggest sporting obsessions – the NFL and college football – all shrouded with a veil of the unknown and the possible. It also holds a fascinating duality – one of the most scrutinized events is also one of the least understood, as the process to an NFL draft coming together is as unknown as the scouts themselves.
Starting in July, the Miami Dolphins granted Yahoo Sports unique access to their scouting staff for the 2017 season. In the build-up to the 2018 NFL draft, Yahoo Sports sat in on meetings, roamed the sideline with scouts during college practices, attended a college game with executives and spent all three days of the draft in the team facility. This included dinners from Los Angeles to Mobile, Alabama, and, of course, a Wednesday night in October stranded on Highway 71 deep in the heart of Texas.
The expression “no days off” is as synonymous with Bill Belichick as cut-off hoodies. So when the 2011 collective bargaining agreement (CBA) between the NFL and the NFL Players’ Association (NFLPA) restricted offseason and in-season practice days, the coach was not pleased. He and others grumbled that their players were no longer getting the reps they needed to perform well in the regular season.
But Belichick did not stop there. He also blamed the practice restrictions — which cut organized team activities (OTAs) from 14 weeks to nine; eliminated padded two-a-days during training camp; increased off days during training camp; and limited regular-season padded practices from whatever-the-coach-wants to 14 — for increasing injuries.
The practice restrictions were designed in part to improve player safety by decreasing stress on players and giving them more opportunities to rest and recover. Belichick’s dueling theory was that with fewer practices, players were physically unprepared for the rigors of an NFL season, leading to more injuries. He was not alone in his view, nor was his theory entirely without merit.
… To get the most out of this tutorial you should be familiar with programming, specifically Python and pandas specifically. That said, if you have experience with another language, the Python in this article shouldn’t be too cryptic and pandas should be interpretable. Jupyter Notebooks can also act as a flexible platform for getting to grips with pandas and even Python, as it will become apparent in this article.
We will:
Cover the basics of installing Jupyter and creating your first notebook
Delve deeper and learn all the important terminology
Explore how easily notebooks can be shared and published online. Indeed, this article is a Jupyter Notebook! Everything here was written in the Jupyter Notebook environment and you are viewing it in a read-only form.
