Just before going to sleep at night and as soon as he woke up in the morning, Noah Dobson could cast his eyes on one of the more beautifully bizarre settings a teenaged hockey player can see. A few steps from his double bed with the bright-yellow frame, a glass sliding door revealed a view that reminded him he was far, far away from his home on Prince Edward Island. Mountains rose in the distance. The wintery landscape in front of them was interrupted by the stone walls and towers of an 11th-century castle, and beneath his third-floor dorm room were two heated soccer pitches. No, Dobson wasn’t in Canada anymore; he was half a world away.
Now a star prospect for the 2018 NHL Draft, Dobson took a calculated chance the year before he joined the QMJHL’s Acadie-Bathurst Titan. He left a country where hockey reigns supreme for a place where it’s much lower in the pecking order. Dobson lived in Salzburg, Austria for the 2015–16 season after being recruited to join Red Bull Akademie, a hockey and soccer development program then in its second year as a hothouse for promising 14-to-20-year-olds from around the world. It meant moving five time zones away from his family when he was just 15, but it helped get him to where he is today. “I take a lot of pride in where I’m from. It’s where I fell in love with the game,” Dobson says. “[But] as you get older, you have to make sacrifices to help your career and move away from home and get off the Island a bit.”
… “I really still don’t know who she is, but I thought that it was important for her to get the time,” Laimbeer said, sitting on the sideline prior to last Wednesday’s game. “Just to see what she can do. Especially with the starting unit. Now, [Aces backup point guard] Lindsay Allen did a great job for us. I told [Allen] that, but at the same time it’s still a situation [where] we have to build a team and understand who we have and what we are about our future, not so much [play for] this year. I don’t see a 1 percent chance of us winning the championship this year. So, I need to do player development and understand what we have going forward.”
What’s remarkable in Plum’s case is that such a chance wasn’t a given. There’s no real recent comparison in WNBA history for a top overall pick failing to get regular playing time, and no wonder: teams with the top overall pick are usually awful, with that pick serving as the brightest hope for the future.
Carson Wentz hits the offseason, pre-training camp break full of optimism about his rehab from his ACL tear. He is infusing the Eagles and their fan base with the same enthusiasm. Among his last words to reporters at their veteran minicamp last week: “My goal is still targeting Week 1.”
Ambitious goals like that from the franchise quarterback are great. Except when they’re not.
Navigating Wentz’s return was always going to be a minefield for the QB and the Eagles. Of course, that goes for every return from serious injury, every return from an ACL, and every return from an ACL by the biggest piece of the team’s foundation.
Granit Xhaka is a true marathon man, often running more than almost anyone else in soccer’s English Premier League for his London-based club, Arsenal. The 25-year-old midfielder covered 7.6 miles during one game last year. All that running up and down the field (not to mention headers, tackles, and kicks) means Xhaka’s body requires not only fitness but rest and recovery. And as Xhaka suits up to represent his home country of Switzerland in its World Cup opener Sunday against mighty Brazil, he’ll need all the rest he can get.
To do that, Xhaka has become a sleep science guinea pig of sorts. Under Armour, the US-based sporting apparel company that sponsors him, has probed and prodded Xhaka to find out what makes him tick when he’s not on the field.
There are the basics, of course: The company has analyzed his sleep habits and waking habits right before he goes to bed. UA trainers also gave Xhaka a new, more comfortable mattress and changed the lightbulbs in his London flat to ease his journey to slumber. He’s even got special glasses that allow him to post pictures to his fans on Instagram or read up on his opponents without succumbing to the stimulation of blue light.
But they’re also trying some fishy-sounding next-gen tech, like special sleepwear and sheets with ceramic woven into the fabric. The material is supposed to stimulate blood flow and keep sleepers warmer.
Power, as a testing and training metric to quantify effort, is well accepted in cycling, but is not commonly used in running to quantify effort or performance. This study sought to investigate a novel training tool, the Stryd Running Power Meter, and the applicability of running power (and its individually calculated run mechanics) to be a useful surrogate of metabolic demand (V[Combining Dot Above]O2), across different running surfaces, within different caliber runners. Recreational (n = 13) and elite (n = 11) runners completed a test assessing V[Combining Dot Above]O2 at 3 different paces, while wearing a Stryd Power Meter on both an indoor treadmill and an outdoor track, to investigate relationships between estimated running power and metabolic demand. A weak but significant relationship was found between running power and V[Combining Dot Above]O2 considering all participants as a homogenous group (r = 0.29); however, when assessing each population individually, no significant relationship was found. Examination of the individual mechanical components of power revealed that a correlative decrease in V[Combining Dot Above]O2 representing improved efficiency was associated with decreased ground contact time (r = 0.56), vertical oscillation (r = 0.46), and cadence (r = 0.37) on the treadmill in the recreational group only. Although metabolic demand differed significantly between surfaces at most speeds, run power did not accurately reflect differences in metabolic cost between the 2 surfaces. Running power, calculated via the Stryd Power Meter, is not sufficiently accurate as a surrogate of metabolic demand, particularly in the elite population. However, in a recreational population, this training tool could be useful for feedback on several running dynamics known to influence running economy.
The Conversation, Lewis Macgregor and Angus Hunter from
… Most people understand that stretching before exercise is important; it loosens you up and improves your flexibility. But too much stretching – meaning upwards of 60 seconds – will weaken your muscles and could hamper your workout. One of foam rolling’s big selling points is that it can improve flexibility to a similar extent as stretching, but with an important added bonus – it doesn’t impair strength. Foam rolling can also improve performance if combined with stretching. This may be better than doing one or the other, but as yet the research evidence is inconclusive.
Meanwhile, we can now say with confidence that foam rolling is better than doing nothing. Recent work from our lab at the University of Stirling, carried out along with Malcolm Fairweather of SportScotland, tested the effect of foam rolling on a group of volunteers doing leg extension exercises.
We found that it required less effort for them to complete the exercise after two minutes of foam rolling than after two minutes of rest. Thanks to this reduction in effort, volunteers who repeated this for three days were able to perform better leg extensions than those who did not foam roll each day.
The Orlando Magic on Monday announced several important hires.
The team named Ernest Eugene its new head athletic trainer, Luke Storey its new head strength and conditioning coach, Sameer Mehta its new physical therapist and Nathan Spencer its new performance and rehabilitation coach.
Eugene spent the last four seasons as Virginia Tech’s assistant athletic director for sports medicine. Before that, Eugene worked as the athletic trainer for Marquette’s men’s basketball team and completed his six-year tenure at the school as its director of sports medicine. From 2003 through 2008, he worked as an assistant athletic trainer for the Washington Wizards.
The man who gave Great Britain’s women team the physique to send them to Olympic gold will see the fruits of his labour with England’s football team tested at the Fifa World Cup in Russia.
Doctor Ben Rosenblatt was a strength and conditioning coach at the English Institute of Sport, with his lead role combined with initiating the training programme at Bisham Abbey for the women’s hockey team.
During the 2016 Olympic campaign he was a man in demand after being recruited by the Football Association as lead physical performance coach for the men’s team under coach Gareth Southgate.
… The Economist: You say that groups can make better decisions than smart individuals acting alone—and groups with women often do better. Why is this the case, and what does it mean for gender equality (and I stress “equality”)?
Mr Malone: Groups don’t always make better decisions than individuals, but they often do when they combine the different perspectives, skills and knowledge of their members. In our research, we found that groups in which the members were more socially perceptive were more collectively intelligent, presumably because they were able to work together more effectively.
Women—on average—are slightly higher on the measure of social perceptiveness we used than men, and this may be why groups with more women were more collectively intelligent. But many men have this skill, too, and what appears to matter is whether the individual group members have this skill, not what their gender is. That sounds like gender equality to me.
Swimming requires massive amounts of energy, whether it’s an elite-level practice or an age group practice. Because of this high energy expenditure, swimmers need to take the right steps to replenish the nutrients lost.
According to wellness coordinator Brigette Peterson‘s research in sports nutrition, competitive swimmers can burn up to 5,000 calories in four hours, depending on the intensity of the workout. Thus, swimmers can burn approximately 40 percent of their daily energy during this time. Because of this incredible energy expenditure, proper nutrition is essential to rebuilding and recovering.
Peterson says, “Nutrition is cornerstone of every athlete’s performance, but especially a swimmer’s.”
When it comes to draft strategy, there are two basic schools of thought: You either target team need or aim for the best player on the board.
According to Toronto Maple Leafs general manager Kyle Dubas, however, there’s really only one draft philosophy that makes sense.
“Drafting for need when players aren’t going to be on the roster for two or three or four years, I think your needs are going to change in the meantime,” he said during a conversation on Prime Time Sports Monday night. “I look at our goal is to add the best possible players that we can, and if we end up having a surplus at one position or another then that would fall on me as the manager — not the scouting staff or the rest of our staff — to fix it.”
Dubas’s talent for building a successful club can be seen in this year’s edition of the Toronto Marlies, who just last week won the Calder Trophy as the AHL’s best team.
Yet only one member of the national team competing in the 2018 FIFA World Cup, midfielder Toni Kroos, hails from East Germany.
For a period of over 40 years in the 20th century, Germany was divided into two separate countries, East and West. But it’s been almost 30 years since reunification took place, and you would think most regional disparities would have diminished.
So why, today, is German soccer so dominated by players and clubs from the West? And what does this imbalance say about the state of the German reunification?
AJC.com, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Chris Viviamore from
… The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, in a series of off-the-record interviews to ensure complete candor, has constructed an anatomy of the 2013 draft to illustrate the uncertainty of the process. The 2018 draft is Thursday, and the Hawks have four selections in the top 34 picks, including the third overall, as they search for the next franchise-altering player.
It started with a grainy video. The Hawks saw an 18-year-old Antetokounmpo playing in a second-division league in his native Greece. Then-general manager Danny Ferry went to see him play live. Assistant general manager Wes Wilcox made several trips overseas to continue the scouting process. Antetokounmpo was raw, but there was potential. The Hawks were not the only team to scout the 6-foot-11 (7-foot wingspan) youngster.
