Ellie Carpenter is barely 18, but she has already made some incredible sacrifices for her soccer career.
She left the comfort of family’s farm in Cowra, Australia at the age of just 12 and traveled 200 miles east to join the Westfield Sports High School soccer program in Sydney. She then made the decision to drop out of school two years before graduating to pursue her soccer career full-time.
And when the Portland Thorns offered the teenage phenom a chance to travel halfway across the globe to compete in the National Women’s Soccer League, Carpenter didn’t think twice.
“It’s exciting,” Carpenter said. “It’s a new challenge and a new chapter in my life. It’s nice to start a new journey over here in the NWSL.”
… The fog of scandal surrounding his longtime training group is ostensibly the reason so many people are reluctant to join the Galen Rupp fan club. At least since the 2015 ProPublica/BBC exposé, with its insinuations of illicit testosterone gels, questionable therapeutic use exemptions, and clandestinely packaged pills, the Oregon Project has been viewed with increasing skepticism. In 2017, the New York Times published a report alleging that the training group had administered illegal quantities of the nutritional supplement L-carnitine, which didn’t do much to improve the Oregon Project’s image.
… Still, to judge Contreras only on his hitting is to miss the continued growth he has made behind the plate and behind the scenes. Throughout the clubhouse, the catcher has earned a reputation as a devoted student, determined to sharpen his skills calling games and to become locked in with his pitchers.
In sessions with catching coach Mike Borzello, Contreras has become addicted to watching video and digesting the most minute details folded within scouting reports.
“I love that process,” he says. “It’s like our type of college. You have to learn each guy. You have to learn his pitches, his scouting report and then how you’re going to apply those pitches to each batter and how you want to sequence things.
… Vikings coach Mike Zimmer told NFL Network’s Tom Pelissero that Cook is making great progress in his rehab from the torn ACL that cut short a promising rookie season.
“He’s done really well,” Zimmer said while hosting a football camp in Minnesota for more than 700 kids on Saturday. “He’s ahead of schedule. We’re excited about where he’s at.”
Zimmer said Cook will have limited involvement in organized team activities this week. The Vikings plan to be cautious with Cook this summer but the goal remains for him to be full-go by training camp.
… “What you want to do is adjust as much as possible, as quickly as possible, to the destination time,” said Barrieu, the Galaxy’s director of sports performance and a co-author of volumes on soccer training, performance and travel. “So when you board the plane you’re thinking that it’s not noon, but it’s 3 p.m.
“We try to adjust our watches. We try to adjust our dinner time. As much as we can we try to adjust our bed time. But it’s very challenging.”
Managing the effects of travel, time changes and fatigue on athletes has become an area of increasing emphasis in U.S. professional sports, where transcontinental trips spanning multiple time zones are common. And it’s something the Galaxy will have to deal with this weekend after flying to Montreal for Monday afternoon’s game with the Impact.
Saturday’s flight of five hours, 31 minutes was the team’s longest of the season and a lengthy flight home will follow for a game in Southern California four days later. It’s the team’s tightest turnaround in the first half of the season, one in which the players will spend more than 11 hours traveling approximately 5,000 miles while changing time zones eight times.
I invested a lot in my fitness. My personal network [of therapists] cost me 10% of my net salary, several hundreds of thousands of euros. But it was absolutely the right decision and it paid off as after two seasons I extended my contract by a further three years. I wouldn’t have been able to play for a top club for seven years in the Premier League without these additional therapies.
My experience has taught me that you simply cannot do enough. For example, I was a big fan of yoga from the beginning because I had seen that it improved stability and flexibility.
Even at the age of 33 I was one of the most flexible at Arsenal when it came to my back muscles. Hardly anyone came to the yoga sessions that the club offered. Often there were only four of us: Héctor Bellerín, Nacho Monreal and Tomas Rosicky.
The youth players who were promoted to the first team smiled at these exercises. They thought we were meditating.
Artificial intelligence is now part of our daily lives, whether in voice recognition systems or route finding apps. But scientists are increasingly drawing on artificial intelligence to understand society, design new materials and even improve our health.
University of California-Riverside, UCR Today from
Engineers at the University of California, Riverside, have demonstrated prototype devices made of an exotic material that can conduct a current density 50 times greater than conventional copper interconnect technology.
Current density is the amount of electrical current per cross-sectional area at a given point. As transistors in integrated circuits become smaller and smaller, they need higher and higher current densities to perform at the desired level. Most conventional electrical conductors, such as copper, tend to break due to overheating or other factors at high current densities, presenting a barrier to creating increasingly small components.
Scientists in Hong Kong and China have combined a semi-transparent arrangement of anodes and cathodes with a transparent electrolyte to make the first ever photoluminescent microbattery that can simultaneously act as a power supply and a full-colour display. For more information see the IDTechEx reports on flexible, printed and thin film batteries and quantum dots.
The microbattery, developed by Chunyi Zhi from the City University of Hong Kong and his colleagues, works just like a conventional alkaline battery – redox reactions happen at the positive and negative electrodes, and ions diffuse through an electrolyte to provide electrical energy. Zhi’s microbattery, however, is a flat, sandwich-like arrangement of positive and negative electrodes, deposited on a transparent polymer surface with a transparent electrolyte filling.
Ergogenic aids are a huge market in the sports performance and fitness community. Every product is the advertised to benefit performance. Nitric oxide (NO) is a labile lipid soluble gas synthesized in many body locations which are believed to improve athletic performance. NO is an important modulator of blood flow and mitochondrial respiration during physical exercise. Moreover, the increase in oxygen is in blood flow may speed recovery.
If the right sports drink is key to great marathon performances, a little-known Swedish product named Maurten is on a roll. The endurance beverage, recently launched in the U.S., has been used by Eliud Kipchoge in his last three (all victorious) marathons, including his epic 2:00:25 in the Nike Breaking2 event a year ago.
Kipchoge isn’t alone. Kenenisa Bekele drank Maurten while running the second-fastest record-eligible marathon in history, 2:03:03, at Berlin in 2016. Maurten was also used by Desiree Linden in her recent Boston Marathon victory, and by Galen Rupp when he ran 2:06:07 to win the Prague Marathon and become the second-fastest American ever earlier this month. Rupp likewise drank Maurten en route to his Chicago Marathon victory in 2:09:20 last October. There, he covered the last five miles at 1:59 marathon pace.
A Montreal-based sports analytics company has opened shop in downtown Kitchener and the company says it’s hoping to take advantage of the highly-skilled talent pool in the tech sector.
Sportlogiq, which currently works with 24 NHL teams as well as a host of minor hockey clubs, began operations last week.
The company focused on hockey from its home base in Montreal in the past, but the company is branching into soccer with its Kitchener lab.
“That office is an A.I. lab. It’s a research lab that’s specifically focused on the technology that’s backing our soccer data,” Cassandra Sera, Sportlogiq marketing manager, explained.
Last week’s NBA Combine brought to mind a recent tweet by ESPN analyst Fran Fraschilla. His tweet suggested that college basketball coaches should not take the ever-present lists of top prospects too seriously. The tweet implied that such lists were merely part of a cottage industry built around the insatiable interest some fans have in recruiting.
“If I were recruiting & evaluating potential college players, I would rely 95% on my eyes & my staff’s eyes, & 5% on recruiting lists,” the ESPN analyst tweeted. “No offense, but too much politics in the rankings. Plenty of under the radar guys out there.”
In a follow-up phone call, Fraschilla said college coaches sometimes depend on recruiting lists more than on the so-called eye test. They should follow the NBA’s example.
Krishna Yeshwant, a doctor and investor with GV, Alphabet’s venture firm, takes a lot of meetings with entrepreneurs that have lofty goals to fix health care.
But different patients have different needs.
So to help entrepreneurs empathize with their users, he came up with a simple, foursquare box that he’ll scrawl on a napkin, in meetings. He drew it for me at HLTH, a major health conference, that happened in Las Vegas earlier this month.
