Dustin Fowler didn’t know if he’d ever get back to the majors again after his gruesome knee injury in his debut last season. Eleven months later, he earned another start—against his former team, no less—and picked up a fitting first career hit.
… I get to the arena three to four hours early. It’s pretty empty. I do my routine, which gets my body together. I’m like an old-school ’64 Chevy. It’s maintaining more than anything—maintenance is my routine. That’s how I survive in this league. I stretch as much as possible. You want your muscles lean and long, especially basketball players, so you can get up and down the court. They’re typical stretches, nothing exotic. But for me, it’s about being consistent. I stretch in the morning, during practice, and at night before I go to sleep. Sometimes I watch these young guys who can’t touch their feet when they’re stretching. They have time to fix that. I don’t. After the game, I don’t hang out as much. Sometimes I’ll even get a lift in. Working out at night helps me sleep like a baby. My problem is I play Candy Crush. I love Candy Crush.
… The medical history of Jonny Venters reads like a children’s folktale.
The first time his elbow went pop, in 2005, they took tissue from his left wrist and inserted it where the torn ulnar collateral ligament was. The second time his elbow went pop, in 2013, they took tissue from his left hamstring and inserted it where the torn left wrist tissue was. The third time his elbow went pop, in 2014, they took tissue from his right hamstring and inserted it where the torn left hamstring tissue was. The fourth time his elbow went pop, in July 2016, they took a timeout.
“That was a tough one to swallow,” says Venters, who signed a minor league deal with the Rays in March 2015, six months after his third Tommy John. A nearly unprecedented number (former big leaguer Jason Isringhausen is the only other player to have had more than two Tommy John procedures), all three surgeries came standard with a notoriously grueling rehabilitation process that’s more accurately measured in years than in months. After the third one, he told himself that if it didn’t succeed, he would likely hang up his cleats. And now here he was, on the wrong side of 30 and four years removed from his last big league appearance, faced with the crushing reality that his left elbow had betrayed him yet again.
J.J. Watt stood at the podium during the first week of the Houston Texans’ organized team activities and said he is “doing really well” with his rehab and is “very pleased with the progress” he’s making. But as someone who has been dealt season-ending injuries for two straight years, Watt knows his health during the Texans’ offseason workouts or training camp doesn’t matter. It’s about whether he can be on the field for Week 1 and beyond.
Watt knows all this because of what he has been through on the football field and in the training room since the end of the 2015 season, when he needed two back surgeries in less than three months and played in only the first three games the following season.
When Watt needed that second back surgery, he said he went from disappointed and depressed to eventually determined and excited to work his way back.
… [David] Martin emphasised the AIS was about “so much more than winning medals” and said if they’re not careful Australia will no longer be recognised around the world for its innovation in sports science.
The respected scientist praised the and cutting edge technology developed at the AIS and said he’s put it into practice at the 76ers.
“The future, which is what the AIS has helped pioneer, is player support and team support at a very sophisticated level,” Martin said.
“When you start getting a team of experts working together, the sophistication you can working with a team of athletes is amazing … it’s really quite contagious.”
Whether they win, lose or draw in the first leg of their League Two play-off semi against Exeter this afternoon, you can expect Lincoln’s players to be sweeping the floor of their changing room at the end of the game.
Manager Danny Cowley and his team have followed a policy of ‘sweep the decks’ for the last three seasons.
“We always clean the dressing room wherever we go,” he has said. “We conceded at Braintree – a terrible goal in a pivotal game – but we still swept up.
“The All Blacks call it ‘sweep the decks’. If it’s good enough for them, it’s good enough for us. We always make sure we clean up and leave the changing room as we found it.”
Objective The aim of the study was to evaluate the reported measurement capabilities and predictive validity of the Functional Movement Screen (FMS) for injury.
Methods This was a prospective observational longitudinal study of 24 male footballers from a single team in England, alongside analysis of an existing database over one season (September 2015–May 2016). A preseason FMS was carried out with scores recorded by an experienced assessor and derived, retrospectively, from the three-dimensional movement data that were simultaneously captured. The assessor scores were compared with the photogrammetric system to determine measurement validity, and predictive validity was quantified by assessing sensitivity and specificity (cut-off score of 14).
Results The real-time assessor score matched the photogrammetric score awarded for one of the participants, was higher than the photogrammetric system for 22 participants and was lower than the photogrammetric system in 1 participant. There was no discernible relationship between FMS scores and the competencies required to be met as per the rules articulated for the allocation of a score. A higher number of total injuries were associated with higher FMS scores, whether determined through real-time assessment or codification of kinematic variables. Additionally, neither method of score determination was able to prospectively identify players at risk of serious injury.
Conclusion The FMS does not demonstrate the properties essential to be considered as a measurement scale and has neither measurement nor predictive validity. A possible reason for these observations could be the complexity in the instructions associated with the scale. Further work on eliminating redundancies and improving the measurement properties is recommended.
Daily Progress, Cavalier Insider, Jerry Ratcliffe from
… After meeting with [Bronco] Mendenhall, talking to staff members, and student-athletes, [Carla] Williams said it didn’t take long to realize that UVa had a structural problem in football.
“I knew that before any shovel went in the ground for a facility (a much-anticipated new football operations center), that we had serious deficiencies that we had to address NOW,” Williams said Friday afternoon.
Understaffed and under budgeted, she immediately went to work with Virginia Athletics Foundation executive director Dirk Katstra to correct some issues for the short term. With help from Katstra and Mendenhall, Williams set up a fund to help UVa football with its operating budget.
Call it an emergency fund if you will, with an immediate goal of adding an additional $500,000 to the football budget annually over the next five years. Once she and her cohorts explained to donors why Virginia needed the funding to address football shortages, within just a few weeks, more than $1 million had been gifted.
“We will have what we need for the short term,” Williams said.
Few companies in the sports industry have evolved in such intriguing ways as Sportradar. Once a supplier of solutions to the betting industry, it has grown through the widespread offer of integrity services to become the forward-looking data partner of major leagues like the National Basketball Association (NBA) and National Football League (NFL) and a coming force in the ever more important world of OTT broadcasting.
Between its in-house development and its acquisition of companies with the intellectual assets to provide an additive effect, Sportradar has found a range of ways to drive its work forward in recent years. Now, the company is also seeking to stimulate fresh ideas from newcomers and outliers in software and hardware development.
As well as promoting its own profile as an innovator through activities such as guest lectures on university courses, Sportradar is supporting promising talent and concepts. It is a partner of the Hype Foundation, a UK and Israel-based incubator and investment accelerator for sports startups.
So far in early May it has already operated its own Innovation Week for tech talent, working with Hype Foundation on events in Vienna and London. Next month, back in the Austrian capital of Vienna, it will again be running its own Sportradar Innovation Challenge for young software developers, user experience designers and business students, after a successful event in Ljubljana, Slovenia last September.
Sean O’Connor, co-founder and chief commercial officer at STATSports, discusses the sports technology firm’s ground-breaking player monitoring partnership with US Soccer, and explains how the company became a market leader.
The Life Signal Product platform, the world’s first family of semiconductor chips optimized for mobile and wearable applications in medical and health monitoring for life-critical applications, was introduced today by LifeSignals Inc. here. The product family was developed and industrialized in conjunction with STMicroelectronics (NYSE: STM) and 3M (NYSE: MMM) to meet the stringent needs of the medical market.
“The medical world is in desperate need of clinical-grade disposable and reusable wearables for a variety of markets ranging from human monitoring applications such as in-hospital patient monitoring, remote health monitoring, wellness, fitness, worker safety, and senior care, to veterinary healthcare such as pet, equine and livestock monitoring,” said Surendar Magar, LifeSignals CEO and Founder. “We are answering that need. We believe the Life Signal Processor Product family will become a cornerstone of an emerging ‘Internet of Lives’ – serving billions and billions of bodies generating billions and billions of bits of life-changing valuable information every second of every day.”
One of video gaming’s most popular titles, Fortnite is a big game and a big business — sort of like baseball, the sport that’s officially known as “America’s pastime.” They’re both free to play (as long as you have the right gear), if you’re good you could land a college scholarship, and if you’re great you could earn a ton of money and become a massive celebrity.
Already well-paid stars themselves, Major League Baseball players have flocked to Fortnite because with plenty of downtime between games and travel, it’s easy for them to unwind with a few rounds of the online, multi-player, and mobile-compatible battle royale, whether they’re in the clubhouse, their hotel room, or on the bus.
But the shoot-em-up title may have just taken its first big league casualty. Boston Red Sox pitcher David Price, missed his Wednesday start against the team’s hated rival New York Yankees because of mild case of carpal tunnel syndrome.
Behind a crop of über-prospects that were supposed to be years away, Atlanta is here ahead of schedule. Can it make a run to the postseason? Trick question: The answer doesn’t matter.
… Undrafted free agency is where teams net additional players (the Arizona Cardinals added 24 this year) in hopes of finding the next Kurt Warner, Victor Cruz or Jason Peters. It begins before the draft is finished, and goes crazy immediately after the final selection.
It happens every year. There are significantly more NFL hopefuls than draft picks. This year, 336 players attended the NFL scouting combine alone. Hundreds more worked out across the country in hopes of an opportunity to make a roster. The leftovers from the draft sign as undrafted free agents, receive rookie-minicamp tryouts or are stuck banging on doors for a chance to prove they can play.
Wide receiver Jawill Davis is one of the 11 or so players who will officially sign with the New York Giants as an undrafted free agent when he reports for rookie minicamp Thursday. He will be joined by dozens of rookies, with some veterans sprinkled in on tryouts.
Davis is one of several hundred prospects who waited to hear his name called in Rounds 6 or 7 before finally finding a team as an undrafted free agent around 7 p.m. on Saturday night after Day 3 of the draft, almost 48 hours after the Giants selected Penn State running back Saquon Barkley with their first of six picks.
It wasn’t until the Los Angeles Clippers’ 74th game of the season, on one of their final home dates, that the excitable owner Steve Ballmer and Jerry West, his hypercritical special consultant, agreed to watch a game together in Ballmer’s baseline seats at Staples Center.
“He told me early on, ‘You don’t always want me sitting with you,’” Ballmer said.
West prefers to watch games alone, or as isolated as he can manage when he takes one in live; that allows him to fume at will, nitpick unreservedly and, most of all, curse freely.
Ballmer, though, didn’t offer a reported $4 million-to-$5 million per year and lure West away from the Golden State Warriors to then ask The Logo to muzzle himself. West is encouraged to be as outspoken as he wants with his new team, rants and all.
“We have long conversations — that is true,” Ballmer said. “We talk a lot.”