Since coming to the NFL undrafted out of a Division-III program, receiver Jake Kumerow has three times come up short trying to make a roster. In July, he was sitting behind three established veterans and three freshly drafted rookies. He played well enough to earn the respect of his Hall of Fame quarterback and become a fan favorite. On cut-down day, he was waiting for a call…
The New York Times; Joe Wared, Bedel Saget and Geoff MacDonald from
Novak Djokovic has one of the best return games in tennis.
He not only wins 85 percent of the games in which he serves, he also wins about a third of the games in which his opponent serves.
The way players now return the serve in tennis has evolved over the past decades, and few players have mastered the technique and strategy the way Djokovic has. Mark Kovacs, a sports scientist and coach at Kovacs Institute, helps break down the modern return and Djokovic’s mastery of it.
Aaron Long’s road to the United States men’s national team is a bit more circuitous than others. But once he was called into his first camp, getting there was a journey shorter than most.
Long was one of three New York Red Bulls players called into the USMNT camp for upcoming international friendly matches against Brazil and Mexico. And with the match against Brazil taking place at MetLife Stadium, the U.S. is setting up camp at the Red Bulls training facility.
“It’s definitely a lot easier, the transition is very easy for me,” Long told Pro Soccer USA Wednesday before training. “The hotel we’re staying at is two miles away from my house. We’re training at Red Bulls facility. In a lot of ways, keeping it familiar and seeing familiar faces around makes it a little easier for me, for sure.”
It was only two days ago that we lauded Roger Federer as a Jedi master for his flawless win over Nick Kyrgios. We marveled at Federer’s impossible forehands and how he float-dances from baseline to net. On Monday night, however, against world No. 55 John Millman, Federer racked up 76 unforced errors.
Federer struggled on serve and looked slow, sluggish and frustrated throughout a 3-6, 7-5, 7-6 (7), 7-6 (3) fourth-round loss, his earliest exit at the US Open since 2013. It was a stunning 180 by the 20-time Grand Slam champ, who had all in attendance wondering what had gone so wrong.
“For some reason, I just struggled in the conditions tonight,” Federer said in his postmatch media conference, which started at 2 a.m. ET. “It’s one of the first times it’s happened to me. I just thought it was very hot tonight. I felt I couldn’t get air. There was no circulation at all. It’s uncomfortable, sweating more and more and more and more as the match goes on. You lose energy as it goes by. When you feel like that, everything is off.”
9, Wide World of Sports (AU), Melanie Dinjaski from
… While many know about Jarryd Hayne’s NFL journey playing at running back with the 49ers, as well as the many punters who have made it in one of the most brutal sporting leagues in the world, few Aussies know about the role of the offensive lineman. Muir shared some insight into the position that Mailata will play at for the reigning Super Bowl champions – offensive tackle.
“It’s just about the most important position on the field,” Muir said.
“I’m probably a bit biased, but you don’t see too many quarterbacks making good throws without having some half-decent offensive lineman protecting them.”
… Ben Dinnery, founder of premierinjuries.com, records injury information for all top-flights sides, working with the medical departments at the 20 clubs in order to compile comprehensive data.
He has monitored a rapid improvement in Newcastle’s injury situation from 2015/16 through to 2017/18; although he does not have exact data for the 2016/17 Championship campaign, the long-term trend shows Benitez has addressed this issue which has afflicted United manager after United manager.
Last term, Newcastle suffered just 29 significant injuries – defined as a player being sidelined for 10 or more days – which is the joint-lowest United have had in their last five top-flight campaigns.
Exercise strength curves describe the way in which the difficulty of a movement changes over its range of motion.
Strength curves can be flat, in which case the exercise is similarly difficult over the whole range of motion, or varying, in which case the exercise is more difficult at one point than at others.
Although we tend to think of an exercise strength curve as being a single relationship, it is actually determined by two underlying relationships: (1) the way in which our *capacity* for producing force changes across the joint angles used in an exercise, and (2) the way that the *requirement* for force production changes over the exercise range of motion.
Ever wonder why flat earthers, birthers, climate change and Holocaust deniers stick to their beliefs in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary?
New findings from researchers at UC Berkeley suggest that feedback, rather than hard evidence, boosts people’s sense of certainty when learning new things or trying to tell right from wrong.
Modern smartwatches and fitness bands can track your pulse continuously, day and night, for months. Imagine what you could learn if you collected all that data from tens of millions of people!
That’s exactly what Fitbit (FIT) has done. It has now logged 150 billion hours’ worth of heart-rate data. From tens of millions of people, all over the world. The result: the biggest set of heart-rate data ever collected.
Fitbit also knows these people’s ages, sexes, locations, heights, weights, activity levels, and sleep patterns. In combination with the heart data, the result is a gold mine of revelations about human health.
Following a lengthy consultation process with key stakeholders in football, FIFA commissioned a large-scale study – the largest of its kind to date – to assess the validity of Electronic Performance and Tracking Systems.
Victoria University’s Prof. Robert Aughey whose team carried out the research on behalf of FIFA explains the challenges of validating such tracking systems and how he sees athlete tracking evolving in the future.
Swelling, blisters and wounds on the feet make things difficult for ultra runners and endurance athletes. The Irish startup Qilta promises the perfect recovery for the feet with its innovative recovery socks and calf sleeves. The ISPO Open Innovation community can exclusively convince itself of this in a free test long before the market launch.
… here’s no single number for normal. It’s slightly higher for women than men. It’s higher for children than adults. And it is lowest in the morning.
“A temperature of 99 at six o’clock in the morning is very abnormal, whereas that same temperature at four o’clock in the afternoon can be totally normal,” says Jonathan Hausmann, a rheumatologist at Boston Children’s Hospital and Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, who gathered 11,458 temperatures in crowdsourced research using an iPhone app called Feverprints.
The study, published online this month in the Journal of General Internal Medicine, refutes the age-old benchmark of 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Instead, Hausmann and his colleagues found an average normal temperature in adults of 97.7 degrees, as measured with an oral thermometer. (The published study uses results from 329 healthy adults.) As for fever, Hausmann found that it begins at 99.5 degrees, on average.
The player tries to cut sideways and his leg dips at the knee. It’s a slight and incidental move, it always is. Innocuous is the word normally used. The leg’s not broken, but it needs fixing.
The player collapses to the ground and grabs at the leg. They wrap their hands across the front of the leg just below the knee and pull backwards as though to hold the leg together.
That is the sign, the tell, that the player has torn their anterior cruciate ligament.
It is not scientifically proven but Julian Feller reckons it is the most consistent sign in sports medicine. It is the player reacting to the sensation that their tibia is falling away from them and they reflexively grab the leg, even briefly, to hold it together.
It was the top of the third inning of the MLB All-Star Game, with all eyes on Mike Trout’s at-bat against Jacob deGrom, but Michael Schwimer was still working the phones, trying to identify and invest in the next generation of Trouts and deGroms.
The 32-year-old former Phillies reliever runs Big League Advance, a two-year-old company that has raised over $150 million from private investors to fund its novel business model: the company offers baseball players lump-sum payments now in exchange for an agreed-upon share of any future MLB salary. Players pick the percentage of their MLB paychecks to sign away—the model spits out only a nonnegotiable price per percentage point. To date the company has signed 123 players with an average payment in the neighborhood of $350,000, and it plans to sign hundreds more.
BLA’s predictive model, which Schwimer built on his own before adding some heavyweights from the sports-statistics world, uses a number of data points to forecast minor leaguers’ big-league careers and salaries. At its best, the model spots prospects before the prospect pundits do; 75% of BLA’s signees were not ranked within baseball’s top 300 when they signed.
Statistics are currently a frequently used concept in the world of sports which has sparked interest in different professionals such as managers, analysts, video analysts, data journalists, physicians, physical trainers, physiotherapists, psychologists, nutritionists, coaches and even in the players themselves. Despite this increased interest, we should keep in mind that, statistics is primarily a young science based on data, and its objective is to measure, control and communicate data.
Statisticians are not only known as those who describe variability or fit statistical models to help in decision-making but they are also involved in study designs and in assuring the accurate use of “c-speak”, a language shared by statisticians and professionals or executives in the field, which is sports in this case. Today, sports statistics is often referred to with the term Sports Analytics.