At 15, Russell Canouse left for Germany to find his soccer future. The midfielder had already spent two years with the PA Classics near his childhood home of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, and another two with the New York Red Bulls academy before signing with TSG 1899 Hoffenheim. He played for the storied club’s youth sides between 2011 and 2013, then made 51 appearances for Hoffenheim II between 2013 and 2016. On March 12, 2016, Canouse came on as a sub in a match against VfL Wolfsburg, his first — and final — showing for Hoffenheim’s first team.
Canouse went on loan with VfL Bochum during the 2016-17 season, making 20 appearances for the club that finished ninth in Germany’s second division, but his progress stalled. He needed to make a decision about what came next and last August, he did. After six and a half years abroad, the former captain of the U.S. U20 team returned to Major League Soccer, signing with a D.C. United club that was desperate for talent and excited to secure his services.
“[Canouse] is a dominant holding midfielder with great talent and vision, especially as a young player,” said Dave Kasper, United’s general manager and VP of soccer operations, in a team release announcing the move.
For Canouse, the choice came down to one thing: playing time.
… “It was definitely exciting whenever he first came in, and we did some good things,” Johnson said. “Then we start getting rid of our best players. You’ve got DeSean Jackson, who can outrun everyone on the field. You’ve got Shady McCoy, who’s going to be one of the best running backs of all time. You just get rid of those guys just like that, and you set a tone. Players didn’t really like that.”
Johnson added, alluding to [Chip] Kelly’s obsession with sports science: “We major in sports science, which is good thing — we still do it here. But I think we kind of went overboard with that. I think a good way to put it is we majored in the minors instead of focusing on some of the main points that we needed to.”
Obviously, it’s not the first time Johnson has been critical of Kelly. After the head coach’s firing, Johnson called him “a dictator” and said it was likely that Kelly’s ego that got in the way of doing what was best for the team.
… And while some might expect Felix to be slowing down at 32, she believes she can take a leaf out of Roger Federer’s book by taking it easier this year in order to prepare herself for the buildup to Tokyo 2020, where she hopes not only to compete in her fifth Olympics but win more gold medals.
That would be some achievement. It was back in 2004 that Felix emerged on to the track and field scene by winning Olympic 200m silver in Athens, aged 19. Yet she keeps managing to hit the high notes across multiple events, including the 200m, 400m, 4x100m and 4x400m.
Greg Blood has written a blog post to share on Clyde Street.
Greg was a librarian at the National Sport Information Centre at the Australian Sports Commission from 1983 to 2011. He has been a voluntary, emeritus researcher at the Institute since 2012. He has an encyclopedic knowledge of Australian sport and is a highly regarded sport historian and commentator. He writes regularly for The Roar.
In this post, he takes a comprehensive look at the essence of the Australian Institute of Sport in its formative years.
I believe this a compelling account and one central to current discussions about a transforming Institute, its relevance and its impact on national and international sport.
Sam Fuld retired from the outfield last fall, leaving behind an eight-year playing career in the big leagues and joining the Phillies in a newly created role: major league player information coordinator.
Fuld is as well educated as any ballplayer. He has an economics degree from Stanford, interned at Stats, Inc., while in the minors, and was working towards a master’s degree in statistics before he got the call up to the majors. In his playing days, Fuld would study his opponents more deeply than just the mainstream metrics of a pitcher’s strikeouts and walks, checking key peripheral stats like the groundball/flyball ratio against that opponent’s heater. “That told me a lot about fastball characteristics,” he said.
That resumé made Fuld an ideal candidate for sharing complex data with players. But it didn’t quite prepare him for the day in spring training in Florida this year when he had to teach the Phillies players about advanced stats because, well, he had never needed to use PowerPoint before. “Hopefully I’m a lot better PowerPointer by the end of this year,” he said with a laugh.
Adam Beard: British rowing put it best: you do everything you can to make the boat go faster. It’s about getting all your experts together and saying, ‘look, this is what the head coach wants and we need to pull together and see how we’re going to do that.’ Everything has to effect the boat going faster.
You hit the performance gaps. With Wales, Warren Gatland wanted to play a certain style of rugby and it was up to us, as a performance team, to produce the fitness to do that.
The Performance Director bridges the gap with the Head Coach. You’re the main voice to him, which is healthy. It reduces that back and forth and avoids silos. Once you have silos, you have problems, because they work separately and complain about each other.
At the end of the day, the Head Coach is the captain of the ship. You’re either going to sink with him or reach your destination. We might disagree about a certain issue, but he’ll have the final say and I’ll go back to the team and tell them, ‘look, we didn’t agree with this but it is what it is. We have to be 100% behind him.’
Compare the sprinting Shetland sheepdog with the sluggish St. Bernard, and it’s clear a dog’s genes play a large role in how athletic it is. Now, at the Biology of Genomes meeting here, scientists report identifying 59 genes linked to canine athletics, which apparently affect everything from heart rate to muscle strength. Early results suggest some may eventually help us understand human superstars.
Over the last ten years innovation and technical development has changed the cycling industry irrevocably. Composite materials, gear set innovation, ‘aerofication’, onboard computing, wearable trackers – it’s all going on. But what about tuning the rider up? Muhdo CEO Nathan Berkley introduces us to DNA profiling…
As the potential to improve the equipment saturates, where will shop owners generate interest and differentiate their offering?
Muhdo believes the next frontier of customer value is in tuning and optimising the rider. After all, for the vast majority of customers coming into your shops they themselves will represent the weakest ‘component’ in the setup. If customers spend a little time and money on their own components they would get far more enjoyment out of their biking experience.
… categorization of depression subtypes is incredibly important, and is an area of active research for the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH). Therapy and medication can be helpful, but the process to find the right treatment often involves “trial and error.” Not all people respond to treatments in the same way, which can be burdensome to people struggling with this illness. Through understanding of the underlying biology of different types of depression, we hope this will help doctors to choose the “right” medication earlier, which will certainly result in improved patient outcomes.
In this review we used the NIMH recommended categorization scheme, called the Research Domain Criteria for psychological constructs (RDoC), to explore the way chronic stress—or, in RDoC terms, sustained threat—can lead to one subtype of depression called anxious depression.
The MLS Players’ Association released its annual salary guide a few days ago and so it is interesting to review this in the light of the trends in attendance and TV viewership that I posted in the last few days.
The main headline is that aggregate salaries have risen to $250 million, with an average per team just shy of $11 million per team. Still a long way behind the $150 million per team for the Premier League two seasons ago, but getting closer to Belgium, where the figure was $14 million per team and more or less in line with Ukraine.
Football is the global game par excellence. It is practiced and viewed in the vast majority of countries worldwide. Year after year, professional leagues establish themselves in a growing number of territories. The labour market of footballers has been strongly internationalised over the last decades. This Monthly Report analyses the presence of expatriate footballers in the world.
The notion of expatriates defines players having grown up outside the national association of their employer club and having moved abroad for sporting reasons. This definition allows us to isolate migrations directly linked to the practice of football. Indeed, players of foreign origin who grew up in the association of their team of employment are not considered as expatriates.
On the 1st of May 2018, 12,425 expatriate footballers were recorded in the 2,235 teams from the 142 leagues of 93 national associations surveyed. This figure includes first team squad members having been fielded in domestic league matches during the ongoing season. In the 120 competitions where the list of substitutes was available, presence on the bench also constituted a criterion for inclusion.
… If we want to understand team chemistry – the je ne sais quoi that allegedly accounts for a team’s overall performance beyond that which we would expect from the baseball talents of its individual players- we need to start small. The expression “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” can apply whether we are looking at 25 parts or two, and it stands to reason that understanding how the parts interact with one another will give us insight into the potential of the whole. Instead of looking at the interpersonal dynamics of 25 players, and the way each player interacts with the 24 other players in the clubhouse, perhaps we should begin by looking at the interpersonal dynamics of just two players. We may or may not be privy to tales of buddies in the locker room, or off-season friendships. But we have plenty of data for measuring performance, and we can look at the performance of two players who interact with one another on the field.
arXiv, Statistics > Applications, Rodolfo Metulini from
In the domain of Sport Analytics, Global Positioning Systems devices are intensively used as they permit to retrieve players’ movements. Team sports’ managers and coaches are interested on the relation between players’ patterns of movements and team performance, in order to better manage their team. In this paper we propose a Cluster Analysis and Multidimensional Scaling approach to find and describe separate patterns of players movements. Using real data of multiple professional basketball teams, we find, consistently over different case studies, that in the defensive clusters players are close one to another while the transition cluster are characterized by a large space among them. Moreover, we find the pattern of players’ positioning that produce the best shooting performance.
Sport Performance & Science Reports, Jace A. Delaney et al. from
This study aimed to present the underlying mechanical determinants of sprint acceleration exhibited by AF athletes attempt to achieve selection in the NFL draft. The primary
finding of this study was that players who were selected early
in the draft (i.e. first 100 picks) exhibited well-developed me-
chanical properties when compared to players who were undrafted, and to a lesser extent players who were drafted late
(i.e. after first 100 picks). However, these associations do not
necessarily infer cause-and-effect, and therefore it is difficult to
ascertain whether players are drafted early because they performed better in the 40-yard dash, or whether highly skilled
players are also mechanically efficient sprinters.