… Bamba, who is 7 feet tall, clocked into the NBA combine last month with a 7-foot-10 wingspan — a combine record — and a standing reach of more than 9 feet, 7 inches, tops among this June’s draft class. He ran a sprint three-quarters the length of the floor in 3.04 seconds, beating times posted by Russell Westbrook and John Wall at previous combines. Out on the floor at St. Bernard, Bamba is the NBA scout’s platonic ideal of a big man — small boulders for shoulders resting atop a taut torso that narrows to a tiny waist, a perfect funnel of a body.
Bamba, contact lens in and iPhone stashed away, joins Drew Hanlen, his primary skills coach, for today’s big-man syllabus. As Bamba unleashes a set of “dream shakes,” finishing with a hook over his right shoulder, Hanlen implores him, “Don’t miss short!” Dream shakes give way to attacks from the midpost, requiring precise footwork and explosion. These are the basic food groups that have defined the big-man diet for decades. Ten minutes in, Bamba glistens with a coat of moisture — a one-on-zero workout at full speed is no picnic.
Portland Sea Dogs pitcher Trevor Kelley earns $1,800 a month, the standard salary for a player in his second season at the Double-A level of minor league baseball.
Based on a 40-hour week, that works out to $10.38 an hour – slighty above Maine’s hourly minimum wage of $10.
“It’s tough,” said Kelley, 24, who married in January. “It makes you wonder if it’s worth it.”
Of course, minor leaguers tend to be on the clock far more than 40 hours. Games are scheduled six or seven days a week, and “off days” often require lengthy travel from one city to the next via bus. Players receive a flat salary, regarless of the time they put in. Nor are they paid during spring training.
“You just have to grind through it,” Kelley said. “You’ll kill yourself thinking, ‘This is how much I’m making?’
Offensive line coach Paul Dunn couldn’t figure out what in the world Jordan Mailata was doing by the Gatorade cooler.
It was their first day of on-field training at IMG Academy and Dunn had just finished putting the monstrous former rugby leaguer and another international player through a basic agility drill. Normally the exercise would have taken two minutes, but because of the students’ lack of football experience, it dragged on for a half-hour under the Florida sun.
When the drill mercifully ended, the players — dressed in helmets and full pads for the first time — went to the sideline for what was supposed to be a quick drink break. Instead, they lingered by the hydration station, acting perplexed.
“They got their paper cup and they poured their Gatorade into the cup, and they both stood there for a good minute. I’m about a hundred yards away from them and I’m like, ‘What are these guys doing?’ After about a minute of standing there looking at one another, they both tried to drink the Gatorade through their helmet, and literally splashed it all over themselves,” Dunn said with a laugh.
Daily Herald (Arlington Heights, IL), Barry Rozner from
… “We had to sit him down toward the end of the year when he got some tendinitis in that knee,” Paxson said. “We didn’t want to push that envelope, but he’s got an entire summer to get himself stronger and get himself in great basketball condition.”
That’s the most underrated part of this equation. A world-class athlete generally can’t miss that much time with that kind of injury and play like he hasn’t missed that much time with that kind of injury.
“Anybody who’s had a significant injury and sits out, the conditioning component is a really hard piece in coming back, and that doesn’t just happen easily,” Paxson said. “We brought Zach back on a minutes limit just to get him playing again, and what we found was when he was playing shorter minutes, he was a much more effective basketball player.
“I think that speaks to the conditioning component of when you come back from an injury. As his minutes extended, he wasn’t as efficient a player.”
The Conversation, Louis-Etienne Dubois and Laurel Walzak from
… In less than a decade, the realm of professional sport has been taken by storm by the rise of eSports (short for electronic sports). These video game events now compete with — and in some cases outperform — traditional sports leagues for live viewership and advertising dollars.
For the top eSports players, this means sponsorship contracts, endorsements, prize money and yes, global stardom.
The memory remained etched in David Price’s mind: a ripple not just in the crowd but among players and coaches on the field and in the dugouts. When in 2010 he unleashed, for the first time in the big leagues, a fastball that registered 100 miles per hour, it qualified as an event for onlookers.
Now, the reaction inspired by triple-digit velocities is different. If a player hits 100 m.p.h., what is the first thought in dugouts?
“How far did it go?” Price said.
That’s a bit of an exaggeration, of course. Velocity remains a prized commodity for pitchers. But whereas huge radar gun readings once sufficed to establish prospect status, the relationship between those two elements has weakened in recent years, for a simple reason. At a time when virtually everyone in the big leagues (and in Triple A, for that matter) can throw hard, hitters are no longer awed by 95-98 — or even 100 m.p.h. — heaters.
… Saturday is also a showcase of some of the leading philosophies and methods by which rising domestic prospects will be identified, guided and groomed.
Most around MLS are familiar with these teams’ academies, two of the most ambitious and successful in the league in terms of overarching philosophies, team performances and player development. Dallas long ago decided to invest in the physical and human infrastructure to harvest North Texas’ rich youth soccer scene rather than sign big-name stars from abroad. After building a powerful youth program that went underutilized by previous technical staffs, the current RBNY brain trust have elevated their academy to the forefront of their plans and better integrated it within their global affiliate network.
Both organizations have learned that just having a strong academy isn’t enough, though. The Red Bulls have put their USL side to better use than perhaps any other MLS franchise, both blooding youngsters and working older newcomers into their style of play.
… “The Peach Jam is supposed to be held in August [in 2019] when the coaches can’t be out,” longtime New York-based recruiting expert Tom Konchalski said Saturday by phone. “It’s not official, but that’s what they’re thinking of.”
It’s possible Under Armour and Adidas could also shift their final summer events to August from July due to the Rice Commission proposals for changes in grassroots basketball looming for 2019.
“Too soon to tell,” one Under Armour source said.
The proposed changes — discussed briefly this week by Jeff Goodman on his Podcast — include sweeping reforms to the grassroots calendar. Here is additional information on the proposed calendar, according to industry sources.
Annie Duke has leveraged her expertise in the science of smart decision making to excel at pursuits as varied as championship poker to public speaking. Annie recently released her latest book “Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts.” In this book, Annie reveals to readers the lessons she regularly shares with her corporate audiences, which have been cultivated by combining her academic studies in cognitive psychology with real-life decision making experiences at the poker table.
Playing at the FIFA World Cup, the biggest international football tournament, is considered to be the pinnacle of a footballer’s career. Individual players are usually the first to be mentioned by pundits, commentators and fans when discussing teams at the event. But rather than individual brilliance it is often the collective dynamics that determines how a team performs on the world’s greatest stage.
Spain, one of the favourites to win the 2018 World Cup, sacked their manager just two days before their first match. The impact of this on Spain’s performance is yet to be fully determined – although they put in a great performance in their first game against Portugal.
The timing of the decision by the Spanish football federation is certainly questionable. The impact of poor team dynamics was seen at the 2010 World Cup with the French national team. The squad was in disarray, with a key player being sent home in the early stages of the tournament resulting in a bust-up and the team refusing to train. Despite high expectations and brilliant individual players, France were knocked out during the group stages.
How players and coaches collectively withstand pressure – the notion of team resilience – is a hallmark of great teams. We recently investigated the concept of team resilience in an elite sport context.
Mental fatigue reflects a change in psychobiological state, caused by prolonged periods of demanding cognitive activity. It has been well documented that mental fatigue impairs cognitive performance; however, more recently, it has been demonstrated that endurance performance is also impaired by mental fatigue. The mechanism behind the detrimental effect of mental fatigue on endurance performance is poorly understood. Variables traditionally believed to limit endurance performance, such as heart rate, lactate accumulation and neuromuscular function, are unaffected by mental fatigue. Rather, it has been suggested that the negative impact of mental fatigue on endurance performance is primarily mediated by the greater perception of effort experienced by mentally fatigued participants. Pageaux et al. (Eur J Appl Physiol 114(5):1095–1105, 2014) first proposed that prolonged performance of a demanding cognitive task increases cerebral adenosine accumulation and that this accumulation may lead to the higher perception of effort experienced during subsequent endurance performance. This theoretical review looks at evidence to support and extend this hypothesis.
New York Red Bulls II players, with the help of technology company Tobii Pro, have been using insight from the latest eye tracking technology to look at the rapid evaluation process through which players read their opponents, gauge distance, determine the position of the ball, and take aim at goal.
New York Red Bulls II, the New York Red Bulls reserve team, play in the United Soccer League, the second tier in the American soccer pyramid.
As part of the experiment, players wore wearable eye trackers that measured their precise eye positions and movements as they ran through a series of drills involving corner kicks, free kicks, penalty kicks, target shooting, and scrimmages. An adidas Smart Ball also extracted data on the strike point, speed, spin, and trajectory when the ball was kicked.
A new magnetic resonance imaging technology attached to clothing can provide high-quality images of bones, tendons and ligaments as they move, opening the door to advances in the understanding and care of soft tissue.
The study, led by the NYU School of Medicine, specifically looked at capturing images of the hand by creating a specially designed prototype MRI “glove,” according to a new study in Nature Biomedical Engineering.
Current MRI technology only takes still images. MRI works by putting tissue in a magnetic field, which creates magnetic force. The key to extracting information is by deliberately disturbing the hydrogen atoms in the tissue by using radio waves to make them spin and emit radio signals, which reveals their positions—this information is then rebuilt into images. MRI scanners measure the signals, which create electrical currents in radiofrequency receiver coils/detectors.
When Jon Gruden returned to the NFL, he wanted Paul Guenther to build his defense. How the long-time Bengals DC is putting togther the Oakland D nearly from scratch, from uprooting his family, to finding coaches and teaching them how to teach players, to calling upon years of scouting to get the roster right
Two new books raise interesting questions about the ethics and effectiveness of the sport’s selection system, with its early and intense winnowing process for aspiring players.