… Getting adjusted wasn’t easy as he joined the club midseason and admits that he was behind with fitness. To get caught up, he spent time individually running before and after training. Off the field he came to enjoy Belgium and had an easier time adjusting to the culture than he did in Portugal where fewer people spoke English and he was frequently homesick.
But Kortrijk is a small club in Belgium and that was far different than what he is used to.
“It’s different,” Palmer-Brown explained. “In a way I’ve been sheltered with the luck I’ve had and the clubs I’ve been to. With everything, the facilities have been great, I’ve been blessed to be at Sporting Kansas City, Porto, and Manchester City for a short period. Coming to Kortrijk, I kind of woke up. Our facilities aren’t great and our pitches weren’t the best. After the spring season, the rain kind of beat up our pitches. Coming over here was a little tough to adapt at first… But I got used to it quick. I’m not a guy to harp on that. It was kind of just a shocking moment for me to realize how good I had it.”
… There are two things to know. The first is this: Between April 8, when after 10 games of the season, Baseball-Reference tallied up 2018 WAR for the first time, and Sunday, Trout played 30 games. In 25 of those games, he had a positive WAR. This isn’t normal in baseball — not even for superstars. Trout doesn’t homer every day; he doesn’t even get a hit every day. But almost every day, he finds a way to add value some way or another.
The second thing to know is this: There is no area of WAR’s calculations in which Trout isn’t sensational right now, which helps explain the first thing to know. WAR involves dozens of calculations, but it can be summed up simply like this: It’s a player’s hitting value (batting runs) added to his defensive value (defensive runs saved compared to others at the position, plus adjustments for the difficulty of his position) added to his baserunning value (baserunning runs) added to, as the final pinch of detail, his value added by not hitting into double plays.
This feature is the third in a three-part series looking at why English football struggles to produce and develop creative midfielders, how it can learn from Spanish football’s success over the past decade, and how it can change for the better. The series includes interviews with journalists Graham Hunter, Jonathan Northcroft, Euan McTear as well as various players and coaches from around Europe.
Part three looks at future of English football, what more needs to be done and how there have been a number of positive signs over the last 12 months.
Tampa Bay Buccaneers offensive coordinator Todd Monken isn’t holding back his feelings on the Bucs’ red zone struggles in 2017.
“We chose to suck. We chose not to do it as well as we can do it. I say that all the time, ever since I’ve been in coaching,” Monken said Thursday. “Everyone has to take a bite of it because I always say, ‘We sure as heck want the credit when we win.’ I do. I want some of the credit. And we’ve gotta own it when we don’t. When we don’t score and we don’t take care of the ball, when we don’t do the little things that allow [ourselves] to win, then [we’ve] gotta own it.”
Monken, now entering his third year with the team, added: “We made that decision as an offense, to play poorly — we did.”
Endocrine and Metabolic aspects of Sports and Exercise Medicine (SEM) are crucial determinants of health and human performance, from the reluctant exerciser through to the elite athlete and the professional dancer. This is what the recent BASEM spring conference set out to demonstrate. The audience comprised of doctors with interest in SEM, representatives from the dance world, research scientists, nutritionists, physiotherapists, coaches and trainers. In short, all were members of multi-disciplinary teams supporting aspiring athletes. The importance of the conference was reflected in CPD awarded from The Faculty of Sport and Exercise Medicine (FSEM), British Association of Sport and Exercise Sciences (BASES), Royal College of Physicians (RCP), Register of Exercise Professionals (REP-S) and endorsement for international education from BJSM and National Institute of Dance Medicine and Science (NIDMS).
Exercise is a crucial lifestyle factor in determining health and disease. Yet we see an increasing polarisation in the amount of exercise taken across the general population. At one end of the spectrum, the increasing training loads of elite athletes and professional dancers push the levels of human performance to greater heights. On the other side of the spectrum, rising levels of inactivity, in large swathes of the population, increase the risk of poor health and developing disease states. Which fundamental biological processes and systems link these groups with apparently dichotomous levels of exercise? What determines the outcome of the underlying Endocrine and metabolic network interactions? How can an understanding of these factors help prevent sports injuries and lead to more effective rehabilitation? How can we employ Endocrine markers to predict and provide guidance towards beneficial outcomes for health and human performance?
Have you ever watched Christian McCaffrey warm up for a football game?
It’s bizarrely systematic, a series of unfamiliar movements that don’t make sense to most onlookers. Even for those who played sports, including many who played at a high level, what McCaffrey is doing looks foreign. It’s not exactly the ol’ hurdler’s stretch followed by toe-touches followed by a light jog or jumping jacks. An “old school” warm up it is not.
It is, however, the science of speed.
Not everyone is fast. But everyone can get faster. At least that’s the belief at Landow Performance, the sport performance training center that seems to be the center of the universe in the months leading up to the NFL Combine. Loren Landow, who recently earned the coveted job of Denver Broncos Head Strength and Conditioning Coach, spent more than 20 years perfecting a replicable formula engineered to make just about any athlete faster. Essentially, Landow spent 20 years discovering the how and why – the science – of speed.
That’s why 37 NFL hopefuls, including Colorado’s Phillip Lindsay and Colorado State’s Michael Gallup, showed up for the Landow Performance combine prep sessions this winter. To call the facility a gym would be undermining exactly what the coaches at “L.P.” do on a daily basis. ‘Lab’ might be a more appropriate term.
When it comes to cell phones, there are few things more frustrating than a short battery life. As the battery bar of a phone dwindles down below 10 percent, there’s a mad rush to find a charger and an outlet, and then it can take up to an hour for the battery to fully charge. Twelve hours later, the process repeats when the battery drains itself once again.
But researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and Drexel University are working together on a novel technique that will allow batteries and supercapacitors to store more energy and last longer as well as drastically reduce the amount of time they take to fully charge. The technique could lead to better phones and electric cars, and even wearable chargers woven into the fabric of a shirt. Their most recent results, which focused on supercapacitors, have been published in Nature.
Cambridge, Massachusetts-based sensor maker MC10, known for its flexible and stretchable electronics, has received its first FDA 510(k) clearance for the BioStamp nPoint system. BioStamp nPoint is a more advanced version of the company’s non-FDA cleared BioStampRC.
“BiostampRC was primarily developed as an investigational tool, primarily used by academia, as well as by pharmaceutical companies, but they were doing internal development work,” Don Fuchs, MC10s’ senior vice president of marketing and strategy, told MobiHealthNews. “Generally speaking, for new drug applications and for phase 1 through 4 FDA filings, the biometric sensors that would be used to collect data for those filings, the pharma companies are looking for FDA-cleared products because they need to be able to point to a clinical validation.”
But BioStamp nPoint has also been approved in a number of other ways. The system consists of reusable adhesive sensor patches that can monitor users for 24 hours at a time. The sensors record vital signs like movement and heart rate and display them on an Android phone also provided by MC10. The system is designed to be used at home or in the clinic.
Scientists from the UK have developed a non-invasive wearable sensor that can replace blood tests for chronic diseases such as diabetes. The stretchable sensor can measure sweat, doing the same tests that would require blood.
The research was conducted by Bendable Electronics and Sensing Technologies (BEST) at the University of Glasgow, and the finding was published in the journal Biosensors and Bioelectronics.
Professor Ravinder Dahiya, head of the BEST group led the research.
The new wearable device uses a pH sensor composed of a graphite-polyurethane compound, printed circuit board (PCB) for data transmission, and a stretchable radio-frequency-identification (RFID) antenna. It measures around 1 square centimeter, but a pair of zig-zag interconnecting pieces allow it to be stretched up to 53 percent in length without impairing performance.
For people who have hypertension and certain other conditions, eating too much salt raises blood pressure and increases the likelihood of heart complications. To help monitor salt intake, researchers have developed a flexible and stretchable wireless sensing system designed to be comfortably worn in the mouth to measure the amount of sodium a person consumes.
Based on an ultrathin, breathable elastomeric membrane, the sensor integrates with a miniaturized flexible electronic system that uses Bluetooth technology to wirelessly report the sodium consumption to a smartphone or tablet. The researchers plan to further miniaturize the system – which now resembles a dental retainer – to the size of a tooth.
“We can unobtrusively and wirelessly measure the amount of sodium that people are taking in over time,” explained Woon-Hong Yeo, an assistant professor in the Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. “By monitoring sodium in real-time, the device could one day help people who need to restrict sodium intake and learn to change their eating habits and diet.”
… “I think that’s the biggest burden on American sport culture,” says Brent Walker, an executive board member with the Association for Applied Sport Psychology. “I’ve heard repeatedly from professional and elite athletes how they don’t want to admit having to having a weakness—mental [illness] being one of those.”
While it obviously isn’t only a burden in America, other countries seem to be doing more about it. Late last year, the Canadian Centre for Mental Health and Sport was founded at the University of Ottawa, with the hope of “designing, implementing, and evaluating a novel mental health care model for Canadian competitive and high-performance athletes and coaches.” Meanwhile, in March, the British government’s Department for Digital, Culture, Media, and Sport (DCMS) announced via press release that it would be implementing a Mental Health and Elite Sport Action Plan to “break down the stigma around mental health.” The move was partially inspired by a number of prominent British athletes, including former Team Sky cyclist Josh Edmondson, opening up about their struggles with depression. At its core, the initiative is a push to provide better resources for athletes by educating coaches and national governing body officials about the telltale signs of mental illness and by making psychological support more widely available.
… “There’s not enough funding in high-performance sport the moment … we cannot compete internationally at the moment unless we are really, really focused on doing what counts.
“We need to perform internationally. It’s about putting the resources in the right spot … if you think about all those people years ago who were excited about creating something new and exploring new frontiers, that’s where we see it.
“We’re not discarding people. There is a place in the industry. Some will transfer, we hope, into sports. We see that as an important step.”
The 12-month delay of the National Sport Plan has been the source of frustration for administrators, who are keen to detail a vision for the future to employees, athletes, coaches and the public.
… Having led analytics projects of all shapes and sizes, I’ve found that the most underestimated and overlooked challenge for data professionals is aligning leaders on answering the question, “What does success look like?” There is no perfect solution, but here are some things I’ve learned from establishing and managing KPIs.
1. People are smart, but don’t assume they get it.
I once joined a company where “Active Users” was the top KPI, but when I polled key stakeholders, there were different interpretations of what that actually meant. One definition was that someone opened up the app. Another was that someone received a push notification. Still, another was that the app was running in the phone’s background. Each definition had their rationale, but yielded different results that had material impacts on decision-making. This KPI was the primary metric being used to drive company strategy, and there was a clear issue of misalignment.
… While the James Harden and Chris Paul-led Rockets are the experts of isolation, the Warriors have long since decided that passing is the key to unleashing their offense. Ever since Kerr made the move from TNT analyst to the Warriors bench, when he saw the glaring lack of ball movement in that final season under former coach Mark Jackson and told the team’s ownership how he would fix it, this has been their ethos. So much so, in fact, that it all started with a magic number: 300.
Pass the ball at least that many times during the course of a game, he told them, and the offense will hum. For Kerr, who won five titles while playing for San Antonio’s Gregg Popovich and then-Chicago coach Phil Jackson, these were the lessons learned that he had to pass on.
“If you have shooting — if you have great shooting — then the more ball movement the better, because you have guys coming off screens and … you want to make the defense have to defend for long stretches rather than just one pass and a shot,” Kerr explained to USA TODAY Sports recently. “So we looked at the passing totals, and … (300) was a really key number for us.
… We are unaware of any public validation of these claims, or any quantification of the actual net benefits offered by xBA and xwOBA. As we are now going on three years of public Statcast data, it is fair to put them to the test, not only to measure them, but to see whether they offer meaningful improvement over what we already had.
Unfortunately, the results are disappointing. After review, we find little evidence that metrics like xBA or xwOBA provide a uniquely better measurement of probable pitcher skill. In fact, these Statcast metrics are little better—and in some cases worse—at isolating skills than metrics like FIP and DRA which don’t incorporate exit velocity or launch angle at all.