To be sure, napping prior to a game is hardly a revolutionary practice among baseball players. That said, it’s more the exception than the norm, especially in visiting clubhouses. That doesn’t stop Cruz from crushing some shuteye just as routinely as he crushes baseballs.
“Nelly likes to get his sleep,” Mariners outfielder Ben Gamel said. “He knows his body really well. If that’s what it takes for him, then that’s what it takes.”
What it takes for Cruz is a regular siesta that comes after he hits the gym and after he takes swings in the cage, and ideally lasts for a full hour, although 30 or 40 minutes will suffice in a pinch. Because that Thursday game against the O’s was an early 3:05 start and there was no batting practice beforehand, the 37-year-old vet had no trouble carving out enough time for his precious Z’s. The challenge lay in creating the optimal conditions.
Unlike the home clubhouse at Safeco Field, where there’s a separate room that players can retreat to for some respite, road venues vary in their conduciveness. According to Cruz, the toughest places to catch a few winks are the visiting locker rooms in Boston and Oakland (too small), while the ones in Houston and Baltimore are the most inviting, thanks to space and couch comfort.
If you’re the average white-collar drone, the odds are it’s an astonishing amount. A 2015 survey by a UK firm asked 1,989 office workers how many hours they spent “productively working” each day. The average: A paltry two hours and 53 minutes. The rest of those eight-hour workdays consisted of kicking back: checking social media, reading news, or talking to friends.
Viewed one way, this is absolutely dismal. We’re supposed to live in the age of 24/7 “crushing it,” right? We’re the Adderall generation! Sleep is for the weak!
Ah, but maybe these employees subconsciously understand something about the nature of work. Science is increasingly finding that there’s enormous value in working much less each day—and relaxing far more. It might even be the secret to true productivity.
… Sporting Kansas City technical coach Michel Ribeiro worked with several players on Belgium’s roster during his 14-year run as technical coach at Belgian club Genk, helping develop stars Kevin De Bruyne, Thibault Courtois and Yannick Carrasco. He was one of the few constants in those players’ youth careers as they moved through the ranks and began their pro careers, working with every player at every level of the club – from the U-9s to the first-team – for the duration of his time at Genk.
A former pro player in Belgium and Holland, Ribeiro moved last July to Kansas City, where he’s enjoying watching his former charges do big things on the sport’s biggest stage.
Sitting on the gymnasium floor, 150 young Nigerian boys and girls in brightly colored yellow and blue T-shirts stare raptly at 6-foot-10 former NBA player Olumide Oyedeji as he dribbles a basketball and shares pointers on how best to shoot a basket. When Oyedeji instructs them to, the kids — some as young as 5 — scramble to their feet and divide into teams for practice. It’s a chance for them — and for basketball — to score.
The Lagos camp run by Oyedeji is one of several training programs in American sports for Nigerian youth that have emerged in recent years, underscoring a shifting relationship, one that’s no longer unidirectional, between the two nations. Yes, there are Nigerians traveling to America in search of better education and a livelihood. But now American sports organizations, nonprofits and players are also heading to Nigeria, eyeing a future in Africa’s largest economy.
As with Nigerians who have enriched America by making it their home, the benefits are mutual. Many of the academies taking root in Nigeria are teaching their pupils more than just sports — they’re helping them learn life skills and how to avoid violence. But there are definite gains for the sports in this deal too, from widening their market to tapping talent from a community that has already proved itself in multiple fields in the U.S.
It’s handshakes and cheek-kisses all round as a troop of young men come tearing into the building having returned from their run around the lake in Parc de la Pede. The Under-21 squad jaunt past a mural of a budding Romelu Lukaku and disappear into the gym.
“It was Romelu’s father who pushed us to start collaborations with schools,” says Jean Kindermans, the director of the Anderlecht academy. “At 15, Romelu was becoming famous and there was a lot of interest. His father told me: ‘Lille, Lens, Auxerre and Saint-Étienne are all interested in my son and all of those clubs can provide him with school, accommodation and football education. There’s everything.’ A few months later we started the Purple Talents Project. Now, more than 10 years later, it’s called the Purple Talent Programme – as it’s no longer a project.”
“Romelu spent an hour on finishing every morning before continuing with academic studies. We don’t like to swamp children’s minds with too much information. It’s better to work intensely for short periods of time than do the same things at a slower pace for longer. Socialising with people and having various hobbies and interests is key.”
Set on the outskirts of Brussels, the Anderlecht training centre is nestled among chalets, picturesque regional parks and educational institutes. This place has produced a list of household names, including eight of the 23 players representing Belgium at the World Cup in Russia. Lukaku, Vincent Kompany, Leander Dendoncker, Youri Tielemans, Dries Mertens, Adnan Januzaj, Michy Batshuayi and Marouane Fellaini were all developed up here. That’s more than a third of the squad and so far they have scored nine goals between them at the World Cup – two more than the Brazil squad they face in the quarter-finals.
… The Heat flew cross-country for their summer league training camp in Sacramento, doing so because playing in the second league ensures that the team will appear in at least eight summer games instead of the five that are guaranteed to teams who play only in Las Vegas.
And they saw players get better in the three Sacramento games, perhaps giving them — and the other seven clubs that played in the early leagues — a leg up on competition they’ll see in Vegas.
“I’m not interested in playing guys five minutes one game, five minutes the next game,” Heat summer league coach Eric Glass said. “I’d rather play a guy 15 minutes in one game and sit him in the next game so we can get a rhythm. And you can get better in the gym by yourself, but playing organized basketball is the best way to improve and these guys get three weeks of that.”
… While the focus has been on the rise in major league pitchers undergoing Tommy John surgery — about 25 percent of all active MLB players have — the eye-opener came with the 2015 study published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine showing the greatest number of procedures in the age 15-19 group — and the rate is increasing at an average of 6 percent a year.
To John, the revelation is a reflection of a larger problem of injuries skyrocketing in youth sports throughout the country during the past 20 years.
Notably, another study showed the number of soccer-related injuries treated in emergency rooms increased 78 percent from 1990 to 2014 in ages 7 to 17.
… “The way the conversation began,’’ recalled Beaver gymnast Taylor Ricci, “was that we wanted Oregon State to have a full-time sports counselor. But then we started asking: ‘What can we do? What’s in our power?’
“Well, we can help end the stigma. We can help them get through the door. We’re not trying to solve mental health. We’re trying to get people to talk about it, to hammer home that they’re worth it.”
By the time they wrapped up that October day, Ricci and Nathan Braaten, an OSU soccer player, had formulated a plan to bring mental health out of the shadows — to provide education, resources, awareness and comfort for student-athletes in quiet, private struggles.
The Conversation, Seema Lakdawala and Linsey Marr from
Influenza, or flu, viruses cause about 200,000 hospitalizations every year in the U.S. Annual seasonal vaccination is our best line of defense, but in recent years, it has become clear that mismatches in the vaccine can limit its effectiveness.
We study how the flu virus spreads between people. While we strongly encourage everyone to get the flu vaccine, the findings from our recent study on the stability of flu viruses in the air can provide useful information for parents, teachers and health care officials to limit the spread of flu in the community.
By employing simple strategies to reduce the amount of flu virus in our environment, we can decrease the number of infections every year.
This week we take a look at some of the statistics which have caught our attention at the World Cup. There has been much debate in both the press and social media about the large distances which Russian football players have run in their first two games. We look at how they compare to other teams and what it might signify. Also –is it just bad luck that Germany has crashed out of the competition? [audio, 11:00]
James G. Martin Center for Academic Renewal, Jody Lipford and Jerry Slice from
… Our first finding is that the transfer of institutional resources to the athletic budget each year, on a per-student basis, falls dramatically as the number of undergraduates increases. Large flagship state universities are home to athletic departments that in many cases are successful on the field and court— and at the cash register. Teams from these schools often play in bowl games and receive bids to the NCAA basketball tournament. They typically draw heavily at the gate and earn millions more from lucrative television contracts. Athletic departments at six large schools in our sample of 203 earned revenues that exceeded their costs and did not receive any transfer of institutional funds. Even if athletic programs at large schools run a deficit, it tends to be small and is spread over a large population of students, making the subsidy per student trivial.
The story is quite different for small state schools. With fewer bowl and tournament appearances, a smaller, less enthusiastic fan base, and fewer media dollars, the athletic departments at these schools generate far less revenue and fund a larger share of their budget from institutional resources. Given that these schools have fewer students, the yearly subsidy tends to be much larger per student.
Our second finding, when we examine what kind of students attend which schools, illuminates how the conventional wisdom breaks down. We found that students who are less prepared academically and who have fewer financial resources are more likely to attend smaller institutions, where the subsidy to athletics is much larger.
It’s only a few days before Chris Froome, Mark Cavendish, Andre Greipel and their hundreds of teammates and rivals set off on the world’s most famous bicycle race, the Tour de France – three weeks of zipping through the French countryside, up and down mountains and through cities and towns, accompanied by a huge publicity circus and, no doubt, much depressing controversy about cheating. It’s an event which is famously difficult for newcomers to follow. Why do the cyclists tend to ride in a huge bunch, known as a peloton? Why does the peloton so often catch up with cyclists who try to break away from the group?
The answer is the wind. Travelling at high speeds, cyclists experience wind resistance even in the still air, and with three weeks of riding and exertion, they will do anything they can to reduce their exertion. Riding in a bunch means that only the riders at the very front “break” the wind, as the unfortunate expression goes, and everybody behind them is sheltered.
It’s always been known that this is an advantage, and cycling strategy depends on it. According to etiquette, cycling teams take it in turns to ride at the front of the peloton and then drop back into the group for a rest. But it is not well understood how much of an advantage that is. Researchers at the Eindhoven University of Technology (TU/E) have now researched the phenomenon and come up with a surprising answer.
… The Royals, who were indeed baseball royalty in 2015, are now neck and neck with the Orioles for the worst record in baseball. They’ve traded off their star closer, their best players are struggling and the prospects that might one day raise them from the abyss are years away from joining the club.
“The record is what it is. The hitting is what it is. The pitching is what it is,” said Royals manager Ned Yost, who presided over the rebuild that led to back-to-back World Series appearances. “I have to continue to lead. We have to make sure this year has not been a waste.”
Utilising data isn’t new for clubs. Performance analysis has been around for many years now, where teams film matches and analyse footage through live or post-match ‘tagging’; marking a variety of key activities that are occurring in a match. Alongside this, it is common place for teams to use GPS-based systems to analyse players’ movements around the pitch, often termed physical data. However, these two sources are often looked at separately to performance data and by different individuals in the club.
Is this different to the two sources of data referred to earlier in the paragraph? If so probably need to make this clear/explain what ‘performance data’ is.
The issue for many clubs is that they are not able to pull together data from all these sources and silos to get a ‘whole club’ picture of the player. This means that they cannot fully take advantage of all the information available to make links between departments and sections, and maximise value – the players’ time on the pitch. This is where analytics comes in, and particularly the use of an analytics platform to unify the data in one place.