… When Doc heard that I had committed myself to the hospital, he flew up to Boston to see me, all the way from his summer house in Florida, at the drop of a hat. I can’t imagine what he must have thought, seeing me like that.
Doc asked me what was really going on. Just like he had asked me so many times before. Just like my wife had been asking me. Just like everybody close to me had been asking me.
He said, “Keyon, do you want to tell me something? What happened, son?”
Over the course of a 14-year N.H.L. career, even the most steady, levelheaded goaltender suffers the occasional slip-up.
In a preseason drill last fall, Vegas Golden Knights goalie Marc-Andre Fleury, who had joined the expansion team from the Pittsburgh Penguins, a perennial power, vented his anger after allowing a series of goals.
Fortunately, Fleury had David Prior on his side.
One part father figure, another part psychologist, Prior has made a career of helping the league’s top goaltenders channel their emotions in the right direction. So when Fleury slammed his stick to the ice in frustration, Prior took him aside to provide some reassurance.
… “It’s good to have some agency,” [Emmett] Cleary said. “It’s a tough league, and most guys don’t get to [walk away on their own] for whatever reason. But let’s not … I’m not Jason Witten here. I’ve been a fringe player for years and years and years. I’ve been cut plenty of times. Yeah, the league was going to be done with me at some point, so I’m not too hung up on the way it ended.
“I hope Joe Thomas got a little more press than me this offseason. That’s truly walking away on your own terms. I’m on the minimum.”
Had Cleary made the Lions this season, he would have been paid $705,000. In his career, a combination of Indianapolis, Cincinnati, the New York Giants, Dallas and Detroit paid him $1,370,788, according to Spotrac.
He could have kept going. It would have paid well. But medicine has always been on his mind, and the length of time he would need to become a doctor wouldn’t become shorter just because he played football longer.
Chances are, heading outside or hopping on the treadmill to log seven miles is already part of your routine. But NFL running back Adrian Peterson takes this distance to a whole new level.
He recently posted a video of his seven-mile treadmill routine on Twitter, and—as to be expected—it’s pretty intense.
PLOS One; Daniel Leyhr, Augustin Kelava, Johannes Raabe, Oliver Höner from
Several talent identification and development (TID) programs in soccer have implemented diagnostics to measure players’ motor performance. Yet, there is a lack of research investigating the relationship between motor development in adolescence and future, adult performance. This longitudinal study analyzed the three-year development of highly talented young soccer players’ speed abilities and technical skills and examined the relevance of this development to their adult success. The current research sample consisted of N = 1,134 players born between 1993 and 1995 who were selected for the German Soccer Association’s TID program and participated in nationwide motor diagnostics (sprinting, agility, dribbling, ball control, shooting) four times between the Under 12 (U12) and Under 15 (U15) age class. Relative age (RA) was assessed for all players, and a total motor score was calculated based on performances in the individual tests. In order to investigate players’ future success, participants were divided into two groups according to their adult performance level (APL) in the 2014/2015 season: Elite (1st-5th German division; N = 145, 12.8%) and non-elite players (lower divisions; N = 989, 87.2%). Using multilevel regression analyses each motor performance was predicted by Time, Time2 (level-1 predictors), APL, and RA (level-2 covariates) with simultaneous consideration for interaction effects between the respective variables. Time and Time2 were significant predictors for each test performance. A predictive value for RA was confirmed for sprinting and the total motor score. A significant relationship between APL and the motor score as well as between APL and agility, dribbling, ball control, and shooting emerged. Interaction effects distinctly failed to reach significance. The study found a non-linear improvement in players’ performance for all considered motor performance factors over a three-year period from early to middle adolescence. While their predictive value for future success was confirmed by a significant relationship between APL and most of the considered factors, there was no significant interaction between APL and Time. These findings indicate that future elite players had already been better at the beginning of the TID program and maintained this high level throughout their promotion from U12 to U15.
At most team practices, there is little time set aside for catchers to work on their skills outside of catching bullpens. While bullpens are great opportunities to improve, a routine is needed to make sure that adequate amounts of quality repetitions are being completed in all facets of the catching position. In this article, you will find drills from The Baseball Rebellion Catching Coaches Clinic that can help build your routine!
La Trobe Sport and Exercise Medicine Research Centre, Rich Willy from
Although research has shown resistance training has a multitude of health benefits and reduces risk of overuse injury in athletes by about 50%, many runners skip the weight room in favor of putting in more kilometres. Here are some of the most popular myths about strength training for runners. Are they keeping you out of the weight room or from gaining the most benefit from your current resistance training sessions?
Eric Renaghan was named the head of Strength and Conditioning for the St. Louis Blues (NHL) in 2016. Prior to his position with the Blues, he held the title of assistant S&C coach for the Vancouver Canucks. Eric is currently completing his graduate studies in biomechanics at Lindenwood University. His main interest is in neuromechanics and movement expression as it relates to sport performance.
Freelap USA: Force analysis with jump training has a lot of coaches wondering how valuable the information is for prescribing training. Could you take a few metrics you collect from your system and share how they help tailor your strength training? Also, could you get into workflows of how you are able to run so many tests without interfering with the training when faced with little time?
Eric Renaghan: The real value in measuring force output through jump performance, as I see it, is being able to bridge the gap between the objective quantification of force production and affecting the quality of an athlete’s force application.
There are lots of running-related techniques and methods that are widely known to be effective but that achieve their effects in different ways than most runners believe or assume. For example, drinking water and consuming carbohydrate during endurance exercise are known to enhance performance and are believed to achieve this effect by limiting dehydration and supplying energy to the muscles, respectively, but in fact drinking water enhances endurance performance by reducing the sensation of thirst and consuming carbohydrate does so by acting directly on the brain in a manner that reduces perceived effort. Actually, I lied: these two measures enhance endurance performance in all of the above ways, water by limiting dehydration and reducing thirst and carbohydrate by supplying energy and reducing perceived effort, but you get my point.
Here are three more interesting examples of techniques and methods that don’t work entirely the way most runners think they do.
Many people mistakenly believe that the ability to learn is a matter of intelligence. For them, learning is an immutable trait like eye color, simply luck of the genetic draw. People are born learners, or they’re not, the thinking goes. So why bother getting better at it?
And that’s why many people tend to approach the topic of learning without much focus. They don’t think much about how they will develop an area of mastery. They use phrases like “practice makes perfect” without really considering the learning strategy at play. It’s a remarkably ill-defined expression, after all. Does practice mean repeating the same skill over and over again? Does practice require feedback? Should practice be hard? Or should it be fun?
A growing body of research is making it clear that learners are made, not born. Through the deliberate use of practice and dedicated strategies to improve our ability to learn, we can all develop expertise faster and more effectively. In short, we can all get better at getting better.
A comprehensive monitoring of fitness, fatigue, and performance is crucial for understanding an athlete’s individual responses to training to optimize the scheduling of training and recovery strategies. Resting and exercise-related heart rate measures have received growing interest in recent decades and are considered potentially useful within multivariate response monitoring, as they provide non-invasive and time-efficient insights into the status of the autonomic nervous system and aerobic fitness. In team sports, the practical implementation of athlete monitoring systems poses a particular challenge due to the complex and multidimensional structure of game demands and player and team performance, as well as logistic reasons, such as the typically large number of players and busy training and competition schedules. In this regard, exercise-related heart rate measures are likely the most applicable markers, as they can be routinely assessed during warm-ups using short (3-5 min) submaximal exercise protocols for an entire squad with common chest strap-based team monitoring devices. However, a comprehensive and meaningful monitoring of the training process requires the accurate separation of various types of responses, such as strain, recovery, and adaptation, which may all affect heart rate measures. Therefore, additional information on the training context (such as the training phase, training load, and intensity distribution) combined with multivariate analysis, which considers markers of (perceived) wellness and fatigue, should be considered when interpreting changes in heart rate indices. The aim of this article is to outline current limitations of heart rate monitoring, discuss methodological considerations of univariate and multivariate approaches, illustrate the influence of different analytical concepts on assessing meaningful changes in heart rate responses, and provide case examples for contextualizing heart rate measures using simple heuristics. To overcome current knowledge deficits and methodological inconsistencies, future investigations should systematically evaluate the validity and usefulness of the various approaches available to guide and improve the implementation of decision-support systems in (team) sports practice.
… Encouraging free thinking from his players wasn’t all Wenger did. According to his interpreter, Go Murakami, Wenger paid special attention to the basic technical skills of his players. He had his team go through the simplest of drills to improve their passing and ball work, a move that the players likened to going back to school, but one that bore fruit.
In addition, Wenger controlled the players’ diets. Nutritional balance was a cornerstone of his philosophy, and ensured his players were fitter and stronger than the opposition. It’s these methods that would eventually earn Arsenal huge success in the late 90s and early 2000s, but long before stories about the Arsenal players chanting for their Mars bars back, they were being put to good use in humble Japan.
A new strength and conditioning staff. A new weight room. More organic foods.
The Texans made changes this offseason under new Senior Director of Sports Performance Luke Richesson, and the players definitely noticed.
“They’ve been great,” J.J. Watt said Tuesday. ‘We have an entirely new weight room. The weight room has been redone. We have an entire new sports performance staff in there. Luke and his guys, I’ve been working with them for the last two months at least. We have a new nutrition staff and they are doing great work as well. We made a lot of changes for the better and we’re going to see a lot of improvements and success because of it. I’ve really enjoyed it and I think a lot of the guys are enjoying it as well.”
College sports is big business, but it’s spawning some smaller ones that could make teams run more smoothly and someday find uses on a bigger stage.
The Triangle is one of the centers of the sports start-up scene, thanks in part to the work of former Duke football player Zach Maurides. His company, Teamworks, continues to refine software that teams at Duke, N.C. State and other universities — as well as some in the pro ranks — use each day to help players manage their jam-packed schedules.
That’s just a sign of what’s to come, Maurides says.
Along with the Pirates and Steelers, Tuckahoe’s clients include the Baltimore Orioles, Boston Red Sox, Chicago Bears, Cleveland Browns, Green Bay Packers, New York Mets and Philadelphia Eagles, whose stadium is about 40 minutes away.
“I think we’ll be the only ones that won’t get a ring,” Tuckahoe’s manager, Allen Carter, said of the recent Super Bowl champions, “but that’s all right.”
The 750-acre farm has a rule, Carter explained: Anything that makes noise gets the right of way. On a misty April morning, the farm was humming. Harvesting machines cut into the sandy loam soil, and with help from humans and tractors, wrapped carpet-like rolls of sod around PVC pipes. Nearby, massive sprinkler systems watered the fields. A tapestry of green and brown — sod and soil — extended as far as the eye could see. During peak growing season — summer — the entire farm is mowed every other day with two 62-foot-wide mowers.
Laptops and tablets will appear on the bench for the first time at this summer’s World Cup as tactical analysts are allowed into the open.
IFAB, which decides the rules of the game, has announced that “small, hand-held electronic or communication devices” will be allowed in the technical area “if used for coaching/ tactics or player welfare”. This can include items as large as laptops.
Devices are only allowed on the bench currently if they relate “directly to player welfare or safety”. The rule change, which was announced on April 20th and will come into force on June 1st, came about because IFAB believed it was “impossible to prevent communication to/ from the technical area”.
It means that Sam Allardyce should be able to jettison his trademark bluetooth earpiece next season. The Everton boss has used the earpiece for the last few seasons to communicate with analysts in the stand who relay tactical information to him.
… For $30 per month with a six-month mandatory commitment, anyone can become a member of what chief executive Will Ahmed is calling the WHOOP community.
Indeed, along with the hardware and analytics, which will report on and suggest recovery periods, ideal workouts and the optimal amount of sleep a body needs culled from the five variables WHOOP’s wearable collects 100 times per second, WHOOP is creating a social network where users can create teams and participate in challenges to encourage activity and use.
“We’ve now taken many learnings from the top performers and applied them to a consumer facing membership,” said Ahmed in a statement. “This is for a wider set of consumers — those that take performance seriously, whether that means securing a [personal record] on their next marathon, or improving their personal habits as a business executive on the road for work.”
As part of the NFL’s Play Smart. Play Safe. initiative, the NFL pledged $60 million toward the creation and funding of a five-year project called the Engineering Roadmap, funded by the NFL and managed by Football Research, Inc. (FRI). The project, executed in collaboration with Biocore, aims to improve the understanding of the biomechanics of head injuries in professional football and to create incentives for helmet manufacturers, small businesses, entrepreneurs, universities and others to develop and commercialize new and improved protective equipment, including helmets. Biocore provides engineering services and biomechanics expertise to help better understand why injuries happen and how to reduce their potential impact.
ShotTracker recently received an influx of capital, which means the spatial tracking and analytics system could gain even more of a foothold in college basketball.
On Wednesday, May 16, ShotTracker announced a new round of funding aimed at solidifying partnerships and increasing installations in courts. For sports fans, that means their favorite college basketball teams might soon be taking advantage of the technology and making part of it available to them as well.
ShotTracker TEAM is a spatial tracking system which maps basketball courts in 3D using sensors placed in the rafters of gymnasiums. Players on the court also wear sensors and basketballs have sensors placed inside them as well. Using the sensors, data about every movement of each ball and player on the court is collected and organized in real time.
The system is already in use by major-conference collegiate basketball programs like Baylor, Kansas, Oklahoma and TCU. The new $10.4 million funding round led by former NBA Commissioner David Stern will give ShotTracker the resources it needs to push its program beyond the Big 12.
… At last count, the Brain Bank had collected 560 brains of deceased athletes and military veterans, including 177 former NFL players and nine former NHL players, roughly one new submission every day and a half. (On top of that, McKee estimates that her office gets around five calls from families of potential donors each day.) “It’s hard to keep up,” she says. “We’ve finally gotten to the point where people recognize that we can’t just ignore this and it’ll go away. Which was basically the first nine years of my work, just trying to convince people this is actually a problem.”
No such study has been conducted among hockey players; the sample of available brains just isn’t large enough yet. And even then McKee is quick to point out that much more comprehensive trials—in which patients are tracked across multiple years, containing control groups and such—are needed before any sort of true consensus can be reached. But she is leading the scientific charge at a critical time for the sport. With head hits taking center stage during these 2018 Stanley Cup playoffs—see: Washington’s Tom Wilson on Pittsburgh’s Zach Aston-Reese—the calls are growing louder for the NHL to adopt a zero-tolerance policy, rather than issue discipline based on ambiguous terms such as “intent” and “main point of contact.”
The league meanwhile remains ensnared in a class-action lawsuit filed by more than 100 former players, who allege that teams failed to properly warn them about the consequences of head trauma, to say nothing of how commissioner Gary Bettman has approached the topic. As he wrote to U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal (D-Conn.) in July 2016, “The science, including on the asserted ‘link’ to concussions that you reference, remains nascent, particularly with respect to what causes CTE and whether it can be diagnosed by specific clinical symptoms.”
Florida, which sees heatstroke kill more high school athletes than any other state, soon will have stronger heat safety education requirements for coaches and students.
The Florida High School Athletic Association on Monday also postponed deciding whether to require schools to have cold water tubs in cases of heatstroke after being warned about potential liability by its lawyer.
The items were deemed progress by heat safety advocates, who had brought unwanted scrutiny to the state agency for potentially falling short of common safety protocols.
… That’s when he felt it: The ulnar collateral ligament had torn off the bone.
Two months later, he flew to Pensacola, Fla., where Dr. James Andrews performed Tommy John surgery to repair his elbow.
That was two years ago. After missing two seasons, he’s back on the mound now, throwing harder than ever. It took [Casey] Green just one inning to reestablish himself as a Division I recruit.
But his story isn’t the typical one of overuse. Many pitchers who injure their elbows can trace their injury back to a time when they threw too many pitches. That never happened with Green. He wasn’t even a full-time pitcher until high school. His injury came on the 18th pitch of preseason training.
The injury may have been unpreventable.
“The first thing about Tommy John injury is that nobody knows,” said Casey’s father, Robin Green, who is a former college baseball coach. “Just when you think you’ve got a model figured out, some kid comes along that doesn’t fit the model.”
An independent study released by Penn State University centered on football related head injuries. The three year study indicates that ProTech, the exclusive soft shell helmet technology developed by DYH, was a primary factor in reducing traumatic head impacts by over 70% to the Nittany Lion players tested.
… The first concussion for Craft came during his junior year at William Fleming High School in Roanoke. He was hit hard after a catch and was out for two weeks. It wasn’t a bone-crushing, helmet-to-helmet hit, but his head hurt and he knew something was wrong.
The second concussion occurred during his senior year of high school. It came from a hit in practice. He was out two weeks again, but this time, Craft became more sensitive to light and noise.
The third concussion came during his freshman year at the University of Virginia. Unlike the first two, this one didn’t occur after a hit. Craft started to feel symptomatic, and was diagnosed with a concussion. It came from a trigger he didn’t even notice.
The fourth concussion was the biggest. It resulted from a helmet-to-helmet hit against Pittsburgh. Craft turned around, caught the ball and got hit by a safety. He immediately told the coaches he wasn’t feeling right, and missed the rest of the season while suffering severe symptoms.
The fifth concussion was much like the third. It came during practice — Virginia had been careful to keep him out of many hitting drills, so it was unclear what triggered it. Craft asked coaches to go back and look at practice tape to see if anything could have been the cause, but it was, and still is, a mystery. He missed the rest of the season, his symptoms becoming worse than they’d ever been.
… On May 1, 2018, over 20 U.S. government agencies, including the National Science Foundation and several agencies within the Department of Agriculture, released a five-year strategic plan for microbiome research, underscoring the interest in and importance of this work. Beyond just health research, microbiome research has implications in nearly all areas of public policy, including homeland security (“biodefense and biosurveillance”), the environment and criminal justice (forensics).
Agencies like the National Institutes of Health are already funding comprehensive initiatives to document the microbes that inhabit our bodies and their health effects through the Human Microbiome Project, which began in 2007.
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This effort, and others, have produced a vast body of research. This explainer will highlight some of the key studies in the field and answer common questions about this buzzy topic.
… Gather enough tough players and it can have an exponential effect on a team’s collective toughness. They inspire each other to more intense fury. They hold everyone accountable; even brief moments of lethargy and weakness are unacceptable. Wyc Grousbeck, the team’s owner, compares them to a crew team rowing together: They feel when one guy is giving only 90 percent, and either push him harder or eventually replace him. “This is my favorite Celtics team ever, in terms of energy, camaraderie and underdog spirit,” Grousbeck said.
“This is a special team,” Ainge said. “This is as much fun as I’ve ever had.”
Ainge picks the players, but Stevens is the arbiter of playing time. The (deserved) fawning over his stoic demeanor and play-calling genius has obscured another fundamental truth: Stevens is something of an old-school hard-ass. “If guys aren’t doing their jobs,” Horford said, “they just won’t play.”
… “When we all came together in 2016 to start this new era of Eagles football, we understood [in ’16] that if we made the trade for the quarterback, we were going to lose some resources,” Roseman explains. “So we had to get creative in finding ways to improve our football team, and sometimes that means giving up picks, which you never want to do. The scouting staff, led by Joe Douglas, does an amazing job of spending all year of going over these draft prospects and being on the road and diving into it. So to ask them to sit out rounds of the draft is a hard thing to do, especially with the talent we have in our scouting department.
“At the same time, when you’ve seen a player in the NFL and you can see his value or his role for your team, it gives you added perspective where you don’t have to guess on the transition from one level to the next. That being said, if you keep doing it, you’re losing cost-effective draft picks that really are the bones of your team.”
… “Nobody’s bigger than the program,” Swinney said. “There were a lot of great coaches here before me. But I think we’re woven together in this era. There were a lot of great things to build a program on here, things I could reference and point to and things I’m thankful that I’ve had. But I don’t think there’s any question that we’ve grown up together in the modern era. I really believe God brought me here for a reason and opened this door and put us on this path together and put the right people in my path and gave me the right AD, the right president, the right SID and all of the right people to get where we needed to be. We’ve had success. We’ve had failure, but all things work together.
“The past nine years as the full-time head coach, myself and Clemson, we’ve been woven together.”
Swinney’s focus from the outset was to build Clemson’s program from the inside out. And, yes, the Tigers have had outstanding skill players under Swinney — Deshaun Watson, Tajh Boyd, Sammy Watkins, Mike Williams and DeAndre Hopkins, to name a few. But it’s even more telling that all four starting defensive linemen next season could be selected in the top two or three rounds of the NFL draft.
“That’s where the emphasis is always going to be here, the line of scrimmage,” Bryant said. “You better bring it every day on the practice field, or you’re going to get exposed. There’s no hiding here with all the freaky guys they bring in every year.”
As West Virginia football’s Director of Player Personnel, Ryan Dorchester has his hands in all aspects of building the Mountaineer roster.
The outlines of the position are simple, but underneath there are numerous tasks that keep the job humming – and never-ending.
The mandate is basic: Allocate WVU’s 85 scholarships so that the roster has balance on Dana Holgorsen’s “three sides of the ball” description. But with that comes a host of challenges.
Recruiting, which he still oversees with the help of two, and soon to be three assistants, is a major component.
But so too is the ever-growing transfer game, where the Mountaineers have a decided focus in adding new talent.
Bloomberg Business, Eben Novy-Williams and Scott Soshnick from
For years, college sports stats and records have existed in hundreds of different places, with individual schools and conferences doing their own collection, aggregation and distribution.
The National Collegiate Athletic Association is finally changing that. The NCAA has signed a 10-year partnership with U.K.-based Genius Sports to centralize the data, and ideally make some money off it.
“It was really just recently that we started to say to ourselves, ‘Wait a minute, all these statistics are big data, and that’s valuable in this era of analytics,’” said Oliver Luck, the NCAA’s executive vice president of regulatory affairs and strategic partnerships.
Manchester City’s Premier League title success has been so inevitable, and has been achieved so comfortably, that their revolutionary style has almost been overlooked. Pep Guardiola’s approach has been overwhelmingly technical, unashamedly possession-based and has featured positional nuances barely witnessed before in English football — all of it combined with some “throwback” tactical principles borrowed from yesteryear.
Here are six key features of City’s recipe for success:
This is the first in a series of posts that I plan on writing as I learn how to apply Bayesian methods to different topics/problems that I find interesting. In this post I go over how to use the Bayesian bootstrap to get measure of uncertainty for an NFL quarterback’s (QB) yards per pass attempt (YPA).