One might assume that Kara Goucher has always been a confident runner. After all, the just-turned-40-year-old is a two-time Olympian and world-champion medalist. She’s been on the covers of Women’s Running, Runner’s World and Competitor a number of times and is the face of Oiselle, Skechers and other big brands. She has 140,000 followers on Instagram and will host her fifth annual sold-out running retreat in September.
Turns out, however, that despite all her successes, Goucher has often struggled with a lack of confidence. “I’ve always had a lot of self doubt and negative self chatter as far back as high school,” she says. “I have worked with a sports psychologist since I was young.” Shortly after she graduated from college, Goucher connected with sports psychologist Stephen Walker, who encouraged her to document her positive thoughts and feelings. So she did. And still does.
“I keep a confidence journal alongside my training journal,” Goucher explains.
In sports, adults with high self-efficacy have been shown to select their first option as the final choice more often in a dynamic decision-making test. Addressing the link between self-efficacy and decision making early in age could benefit the developmental potential of athletes. In this study, we examined the link between developing players’ decision self-efficacy and their decision-making processes comprising option generation and selection. Further, we explored the effect of time pressure on developing athletes’ decision making. Design
Developing athletes (N = 97) of two different age groups were asked to report their self-efficacy and to perform a dynamic decision-making task, in which time pressure was experimentally manipulated. Method
48 younger (Mage = 8.76, SD = 1.15) and 49 older (Mage = 12.18, SD = 0.87) soccer players participated. Participants were randomly presented with video scenes of soccer match play. At the point of temporal occlusion, participants generated options about the next move. After generation, participants selected among the generated options their best option and indicated their decision and motor confidence. Results
The self-efficacy of developing players was neither related negatively to dynamic inconsistency nor positively to option or decision quality, but self-efficacy was positively related to motor confidence in the best option. Further, time pressure improved option and decision quality. Conclusion
Decision-making processes have been scrutinized by showing that developing players’ self-efficacy links to their motor skills rather than to their cognitive evaluation and by specifying the adaptation to time pressure. Thereby, results extend current theorizing on decision making.
Pete Youngman has been with the Kings for 25 years. Although he’s not leaving the team, his role is changing.
Youngman will no longer serve as the team’s director of sports medicine, the team announced Wednesday. He will remain with the Kings as a senior adviser.
A recruit’s résumé is like that of a job applicant. Multiple areas combine to create a package coaches can evaluate. These on-court candidates are judged mainly on performance, character and academics, two which can be judged accurately and consistently.
But that character part? That’s tricky. To delve into that, coaches must refer to the references section, and that’s where the difficulty comes.
Just like a job candidate, an athlete’s best references will most assuredly praise them when college coaches call. Everyone is “the best.” Everyone has a “terrific work ethic.” Everyone is “coachable.”
There’s a virtual reality room that allows quarterbacks to watch 3-D film on a screen large enough for drive-in movies. An outdoor lounge where players can nap to the sound of Lake Michigan’s crashing waves. A massive weight room that can accommodate all 110 players at once.
“Like going from the Bates Motel to the Ritz-Carlton,” said Jay Hooten, Northwestern’s director of sports performance for football.
WVU Director of Athletics Shane Lyons today on capital projects campaign “Climbing Higher” to upgrade many facilities for Mountaineer student-athletes.
South Carolina currently has their shiny new football operations facility under construction, and @GoGamecocks has been sharing pictures of both the construction progress, and renderings of what it will look like once finished.
The new facility is slated to have all the bells and whistles you’d come to expect in a modern facility like arcade, gaming area in the players lounge, barber shop, new position and team meeting rooms, and all that kind of stuff.
A 2017 report from the US Department of Agriculture tracks how food consumption patterns in the US have changed over the past 40 years by looking at how many fruits, vegetables, grains, proteins, dairy, added fats and oils, and added sugars and sweeteners per capita are available. (Food availability data, adjusted for food loss, is a pretty good proxy for consumption.)
The main finding is no surprise at all: Americans are eating more of all of the major food groups, too many fats, sugars, and grains, and too few fruits and vegetables.
But things get interesting when you start looking at changes in certain fruits and vegetables and our shifting nutrient consumption — which involves a lot more added fat.
It turns out the avocado supply has surged by 1,342 percent since 1970, while lime availability is up by 1,654 percent. In case you hadn’t noticed, Americans are loco for guacamole and chips, and margaritas.
Was it hard to concentrate during that long meeting? Does the crossword seem a little tougher? You could be mildly dehydrated.
A growing body of evidence finds that being just a little dehydrated is tied to a range of subtle effects — from mood changes to muddled thinking.
“We find that when people are mildly dehydrated they really don’t do as well on tasks that require complex processing or on tasks that require a lot of their attention,” says Mindy Millard-Stafford, director of the Exercise Physiology Laboratory at Georgia Institute of Technology. She published an analysis of the evidence this month, based on 33 studies. [audio, 7:02]
For a guy with an awful lot to brag about, Fran Taylor doesn’t like to say much. “Fran’s kinda cagey, isn’t he?” I said to Ryan Madden, the Colorado Rapids Director of Communications. “Yup. And it’s not just you. He’s like that with everybody.”
In my infinite quest to find the best and most advanced numbers to help find the best players that would craft winning football teams, I had come to Commerce City, Colorado to speak to Fran. I had hoped that in our conversations, Fran would divulge some trade secret or some new metric that would let me (and other sabermetric nerds that read American Soccer Analysis) understand the game on a deeper level. Spoiler alert: Fran did not share the ‘one number to rule them all.’ But he did tell me a lot of really cool stuff.
Fran’s ‘cagey-ness’ and humility go hand in hand with a backstory that makes him a candidate for ‘most interesting soccer analyst in the world.’ In terms of humility, he would describe his job as nothing more than “taking things off (Rapids General Manager) Padraig Smith’s plate”. In terms of his qualities as an ‘international man of mystery’, Fran is likely the only person on the planet who played in the Laotian Soccer League and has also worked for Arsenal Football Club.
Taylor, the 29-year-old Assistant General Manager for the Colorado Rapids, joined the team in January of this year to bolster the data-driven team of Padraig Smith in trying to use numbers to build a better soccer club.
The team whose work at the trade deadline most intrigued me was easily the Milwaukee Brewers, who made not one but two moves that led to a knee-jerk reaction of “Huh?” Believe it or not, that’s not a criticism.
The fact of the matter is that Brewers GM David Stearns, in lockstep with manager Craig Counsell, just doesn’t view the game the way most of us do. I’m not sure he sees it the way his executive brethren do, either. I’m not sure exactly how Stearns views the game, and no matter how many times I try to pry into his head, I’m pretty sure he’s not going to tell me. I am sure that his approach to roster building is a novel one.
… “It’s something we’ve been thinking about for quite a while and something we’ve had discussions about internally. I think there needs to be a collective responsibility around leadership within football.” Smith said, speaking on the club’s Youtube channel.
“I think I would have done exactly the same even if John Egan had stayed because it’s something that has been at the forefront of my mind. What better opportunity for us to try and develop leaders this year by not having a captain?
