… Solid, but never spectacular. Trustworthy, but never a star. Someone you desperately want on your team, but rarely ever your first pick. But every time you think you have gotten to know him, he shows you something new. He reveals a way he has improved. He leaves you a hint that there just might be a little more. And if you’re paying close enough attention, you just might figure out what’s coming next.
Eli Manning jogged onto the field for the first day of training camp practice with his trademark gallop. It was the same look the New York Giants have seen for the past 14 years. Shoulders slightly slumped, chin held high, short steps and an aw-shucks wobble supporting his stringy, 37-year-old frame.
SB Nation, Beyond the Boxscore blog, Patrick Brennan from
… One of the most interesting aspects of this are the few players that go against these trends. One of the more exciting call-ups of the season was when the Twins promoted Willians Astudillo, the anti-three-true-outcome player. But it may be time to bring up another one of these guys. Nick Madrigal, the recent number four overall pick by the White Sox in the 2018 MLB Draft, has taken contact to a new level. After having only seven strikeouts in 201 plate appearances for his junior season at Oregon State, Madrgial has struck out a grand total of…zero times in his first 71 professional plate appearances between the levels of Rookie, Low-A, and High-A. Zero. Zilch. Nothing. As it currently stands, he’s easily the only player in all of minor league baseball to achieve this feat, minimum 50 plate appearances.
Britain’s most successful Winter Olympian spent four months on medication due to an ongoing back condition but she is hopeful a spinal operation will enable her to finally enjoy her success
… It was only as recently as 2013 that Monaco plucked Mbappé from the ranks of his humble hometown club, AS Bondy. Mbappé had played for the non-league side, in the working class suburb of northeast Paris, since the age of six. Early though his introduction to the game was, with his father, at the time the club’s long-serving coach, a pint-sized Mbappé wasn’t so much discovered as simply untethered.
With a football coach for a father and a professional handball player for a mother, a lifetime congenitally guided by competitive sport seemed a mere formality for Mbappé. Perhaps, before he could yet walk, though, it played on his parents’ minds that their boy wouldn’t take to sports as they had; that he’d deny his athletic inheritance, that the freedom of playing and the addiction of achieving would not intoxicate him as it did them. If they were even given the time to have them at all, their fears wouldn’t live long.
“You could say that Kylian was born here at this club. He was here as a baby when his father was a player and a coach. He was always here and learning about football, even as a toddler,” the BBC were told by Atmane Airouche, president of AS Bondy.
… Following a 45 year-absence from England’s top-flight, the German catapulted the Terriers into the Premier League, and against all logic, he has kept them there.
Wagner’s glasses lift above his eyebrows at the enormity of that sentence. And in the city of his birth as he drinks in developments since his appointment on 5 November 2015, it muddles his senses like the local Apfelwein.
“If someone would’ve told me all this would happen – securing our Championship status, getting promoted and staying in the Premier League – I would’ve told them, ‘Please wake up from this silly dream. No chance.’ It still doesn’t feel real at times,” he admits to JOE.
“Everything that I’d known about Huddersfield before joining, the reality was honestly worse, which makes all this more unbelievable. I think my agent was very smart not to show me the training facilities before I signed.”
Soccer America, Arlo Moore-Bloom and Mike Woitalla from
… SA: What do think is most important to the USA’s approach going forward?
ANSON DORRANCE: I’ve always believed that one of the coolest things about the United States is we’re such a massive country. Maybe the way we develop our players is the way someone advises you on the assembly of your stock portfolio. You don’t pull all of your eggs in one basket and invest in bonds or just in foreign stocks or something, but you put a little bit into this and you put a little bit into that.
So why not give the reins to coaches across the country to have the freedom to experiment with what they feel the best thing for player development is, within their hamlets, or regions, or states, or leagues, and start to develop a sort of a national identity and personality. Let’s embrace all the different ideas. Let’s embrace our wonderful diversity and certainly try to correct it with discourse and with leadership. But let’s not put some have sort of a one dimensional look at what’s going on. And use that as a formula to protect ourselves against our own failure. Let’s allow all these different ideas to flourish and let’s keep coming back to the table with our best practices.
Purpose
The aim of the study was to verify the effect of mental fatigue on tactical actions quality and the intensity of covered distance in soccer players.
Methods
Six U-15 male soccer players participated in this study (14.7 ± 0.59 years of age). For data collection, the FUTSAT and GPSports® (SPI-HPU) systems were applied. To induce mental fatigue, the Stroop task was used for 20 minutes. The individuals were evaluated in 2 conditions: mental fatigue and control (with and without the Stroop task). Statistical analysis was performed with the Kolmogorov-Smirnov test, t-test, and Wilcoxon test.
Results
The results displayed significant differences in actions related to principles of balance (p = 0.02), defensive unity (p < 0.01), and total defensive actions (p = 0.02), as well as in the covered distance in intensity related to zones 3 (p = 0.03) and 6 (p < 0.01). In mental fatigue, the players revealed a decrease in tactical action quality referring to movements that aimed at numerical stability in relations of opposition and at defending in unity and in block, and covered greater distances in zones 3 and 6.
Conclusions
Mental fatigue modified the players’ movement dynamics on the pitch with reference to the quality of tactical actions and covered distance intensity.
… Fast Company has learned that Amazon, Apple, and Google each have high-priority projects to pick up where Doppler left off. All three are working on products that combine the utility of the hearing aid with the entertainment value of a pair of high-end headphones, and potentially much more, say sources. Since all three have announced plans to get into healthcare, they could easily add fitness and health monitoring sensors for everything from counting steps to measuring oxygen saturation. And while it may take years to happen, none want to be left behind should it become possible to create a general purpose, in-ear computer that allows consumers to leave their phone in the desk drawer.
“Ultimately, the idea is to steal time from the smartphone,” says Gints Klimanis, Doppler’s former head of audio engineering. “The smartphone will probably never go away completely, but the combination of voice commands and hearing could become the primary interface for anything spontaneous.”
Rutgers University–New Brunswick engineers have created a smart wristband with a wireless connection to smartphones that will enable a new wave of personal health and environmental monitoring devices.
Their technology, which could be added to watches and other wearable devices that monitor heart rates and physical activity, is detailed in a study published online in Microsystems & Nanoengineering.
“It’s like a Fitbit but has a biosensor that can count particles, so that includes blood cells, bacteria and organic or inorganic particles in the air,” said Mehdi Javanmard, senior author of the study and assistant professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering in the School of Engineering.
… Palmer had just eight months to heal from his devastating injury back in 2006 before that year’s opener. The good news for Wentz is that his injury happened a month earlier, so it’ll be nine months from the date of the injury to the season opener.
Still, in order for Wentz to be on the field Week 1, absolutely everything needs to go right. There’s no time for any setbacks.
“It’s a crapshoot,” Palmer said. “Coming back and playing in Week 1, there’s a number of factors that need to happen.”
Up until Chris Paul moved to Los Angeles in 2011 to join the Clippers , the NBA star didn’t consider himself particularly health-conscious; his beverage of choice tended to be sugary, chemical-filled sports drinks that he picked off the shelves because of how they were marketed.
“I didn’t know any better,” Paul said. “As much as I trained and wanted to recover, I wasn’t thinking about natural sweeteners. As I got older, I started to realize just how much sugar is in a lot of those drinks.”
Sports drinks, says Paul, are a mainstay of both professional and amateur athletes, used to hydrate and revive during and after workouts. But many are either loaded with sugar or contain potentially harmful artificial sugars to bring their calorie content down.
A look at what’s happening around the New York Jets:
1. Number crunchers: After some initial reluctance, the Jets are embracing the increased role of analytics in the NFL. No, they’re not becoming a “moneyball” team, but they recently expanded their analytics department.
Former West Coast scout Brian Shields, who was involved in the scouting of quarterback Sam Darnold, was hired as the senior manager of football research and analytics, a new position in the organization. He’s a Princeton graduate with a business background, but he’s not just a numbers guy, as he spent five years on the scouting trail with the Jets and Los Angeles Rams. Jason Mulholland, a graduate of The Wharton School at Penn, is the manager of football analytics.
In Game 1 of the 2017 ALCS, José Altuve stepped to the plate against Masahiro Tanaka. It had been an incredible year for Altuve up to that point, with his .346 batting average the best in the majors, and his 24 home runs tying a career high. One of Altuve’s most dangerous weapons is his ability to get on base via ground balls (0.354) as he ranked sixth among all qualified hitters in batting average on ground balls in 2017 (min. 100 ground balls).