… “I don’t think three games into the season I’m exponentially better than I was last year,” Goff said, as he wrapped up prep on the short week for tonight’s game against the Vikings. “I mean, I think I did a lot of good things last year. We were able to make the playoffs. Going into the offseason, learning more about defenses, getting more comfortable in our own offense and continuing to grow and get better.
“I expected myself to get better. I always strive for the extra one percent. Right now I don’t feel like I’m exponentially better.”
Maybe it just seems that way. He’s right, too. His numbers were damn good last year—Goff completed 62.1% of his passes for 3,804 yards, 28 touchdowns, seven picks and a 100.5 rating in 15 games. Through three games this year he’s connected on 70.3% of his throws, and has a 111.0 rating, with his yardage projecting to 4,705, and TD-INT differential to 30-10 over that 15-game sample size.
“For Australian kids, a lot of them aspire to play football or do different things, but there’s been a real shift over the last few years,” Melbourne United coach Dean Vickerman said Wednesday after a team practice at Temple. “I guess since Bogut became the No. 1 pick, I’m sure people were wondering if that’s a rare thing. Now it happens again with Ben and there’s a strong belief in our player development in Australia and how we’re going about raising athletes.”
The connections don’t stop there. Sixers coach Brett Brown has a long and storied relationship with Australian basketball, having served on the Melbourne Tigers coaching staff from 1988-1993 as well as other Australian stops later on, including coaching the Australian national team.
Veterans Sue Bird and Diana Taurasi each had one of their best WNBA seasons.
Both players credit changing the way they take care of their bodies off the court for their successes on it. Eating healthier, getting more rest and doing more stretching has helped. Also, the USA Basketball mainstays are only playing in the WNBA during the summer and not overseas in the offseason.
For nearly a decade, the duo played more than 100 games a year with little time for rest and recovery. WNBA players make most of their money playing in more lucrative leagues in Russia, China and Europe during the winter.
… Minnesota’s Moore, Sylvia Fowles, Lindsay Whalen and Seimone Augustus were all on the 2012 and 2016 Olympic teams, although Fowles hadn’t yet joined the Lynx in ’12. They’ve all played in the World Cup, as well. Participation on the senior national team by at least one of these four players started in 2006, when Augustus was on the World Cup team after her WNBA rookie season.
But retirement (Whalen), plus injury/fatigue (Moore, Augustus, Fowles) have kept them all off the 2018 World Cup roster. The same goes for players such as Dallas’ Skylar Diggins-Smith and Los Angeles’ Chelsea Gray. The Sparks’ Candace Parker wasn’t selected to the 2016 Olympic team, and that essentially ended her relationship with USA Basketball.
… “The only sustainable competitive advantage that you can maintain is to learn faster than the opposition,”says Scott Drawer, Head of Performance Hub, Team Sky. “So the speed with which we can adapt is something that we pride ourselves on.”
In order to adapt in the modern world, you need to be at the cutting edge, but doing that is harder than it looks.
During this year’s victorious Tour de France campaign, Sky worked with connectivity solutions company Dejero in one example of how Sky’s attention to detail coupled with their willingness to partner with other companies gives them a competitive advantage.
Nikki Huffman’s lifelong love of sports started at home in Connelly Springs, N.C. Duke and North Carolina basketball, along with college and NFL football, were staples on the family TV, and she often watched games with her dad, Russell, even as she developed into a talented athlete in her own right. Though somewhat unsure about the specifics, she knew from a young age that she eventually wanted to make a career for herself in the industry.
By the time Huffman was playing basketball at East Burke High School, she had already taken an interest in athletic training. One of her senior-year projects was a silent film that imagined what would happen to the school’s teams without a trainer. Then one day as she and her dad were watching a football game together and the training staff came on the field to tend to an injury, she turned to him and said, “You know what? I want to do that. I think I could do that, and maybe that’s how I can stay around sports my whole life.”
“My dad was like, ‘Really?’” she recalls now. “And I was like, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘OK, well go do it then.’”
The back-to-back NBA Champion Golden State Warriors have announced promotions and additions within the team’s basketball operations department, including a pair of promotions on the coaching staff, elevating Bruce Fraser to Assistant Coach and Chris DeMarco to Assistant Coach / Director of Player Development.
Additional promotions include: Nick U’Ren as Director of Basketball Operations, Jonnie West as Director of Basketball Operations, James Laughlin as Director of Video Operations, Khalid Robinson as Special Assistant to the Head Coach, David Fatoki as Assistant Manager of Basketball Operations, Chloe Walkup as Assistant Manager of Basketball Operations, and Jacob Rubin as Basketball Operations Assistant. The Warriors have also hired Mike Dunleavy Jr. as Pro Scout and Nick Kerr as Assistant Video Coordinator.
Along with the previously announced hiring of Rick Celebrini as Director of Sports Medicine and Performance, additions to the training staff include: Carl Bergstrom as Performance Coach, Gerry Ramogida as Performance Therapist and Brett Ballesteros as Assistant Athletic Trainer & Assistant Performance Coach. Additionally, Kyle Barbour has been promoted to Assistant Performance Coach while Drew Yoder (Head Athletic Trainer) and Roger Sancho (Assistant Athletic Trainer) return to the training staff.
Princeton University, Department of Computer Science from
… “Humans — and computers — have limited computational resources and limited time — something that is not taken into account in classical theories of rationality, which tend to stipulate that you should always take the very best action regardless of how hard it might be to compute what that action is,” [Tom] Griffiths said. “Real agents have to trade off the computational cost of selecting an action with the benefits of taking that action. As a consequence, taking shortcuts and doing things that are fast but less accurate — two of the things that are often held up as illustrations of human irrationality — make perfect sense.”
The next generation of wearable activity sensors will not be strap-on devices that can be lost or forgotten, say researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, instead they may be threads or fabric patches sewn into shirts and pants to offer light, care-free, continuous monitoring of movement that could help doctors, therapists and coaches respond to changes that warrant concern or improve performance.
Computer scientist Deepak Ganesan, materials scientist Trisha Andrew and computer engineer Jeremy Gummeson, all part of UMass Amherst’s Institute of Applied Life Sciences’ Center for Personalized Health Monitoring, recently received a three-year, $1.1 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Computer Systems Research program to advance so-called “smart textiles.”
As Ganesan explains, “Textiles with computing elements are coming, and we are building some of the expertise that will lead to practical advances. This is early days, and we don’t even know some of the problems we’ll run into, but we’re building little things and trying to understand the interaction of hardware, electronics, software, computing and analysis that will all go into their success.”
Myant, a leader in the design, development, and production of ‘textile computing’ products, has announced the launch of a strategic collaboration with Mayo Clinic to bring Mayo’s patented algorithms for heart monitoring and arrhythmia detection to Myant’s SKIIN Textile Computing platform.
The agreement gives Myant an exclusive licence to Mayo Clinic’s proprietary heart monitoring and arrhythmia detection technology for use in smart clothing projects. Myant’s SKIIN smart underwear will be released in early 2019 pending FDA clearance and Health Canada approval.
The collaboration aims to bring comfort and confidence to people who are at risk of developing Atrial Fibrillation (AFib). Early detection and lifestyle management can prevent AFib from leading to stroke or heart failure. The partnership aims to give patients and doctors the ability to proactively monitor heart activity 24/7 using clothing to help detect the presence of AFib and normal or abnormal heart rhythm.
In less than two years, Kinexon has gone from NBA outsider to the league’s No. 1 provider of wearable technology. The Philadelphia 76ers became the first client back in January 2017, but now 14 of the league’s 30 franchises use Kinexon, according to the company. Kinexon also believes one or two more might sign on before the start of the 2018-19 season.
Kinexon uses ultra-wideband (UWB) radio frequencies to collect data from non-invasive, matchbook-sized transmitters that weigh less than an ounce and fit into a pouch in a player’s shorts. The Munich-based company said its technology can render an athlete’s 3D location with an accuracy of one centimeter. An accelerometer, gyroscope, and magnetometer provide numerous motion and training load metrics.
“Kinexon has the only reliable technology out there to get indoor positional tracking so far,” said Mehdi Bentanfous, Kinexon’s managing director of U.S. operations. “That’s the main reason why several teams are switching from the classical provider to us.”
Artificial intelligence in sports has largely been used for fan interfaces, such as video highlights curated using crowd noises and player reactions.
Now the U.S. Tennis Association is using AI to assist in identifying and aiding top players. Using IBM’s Watson program, the USTA’s high-performance coaching division since the late summer has been digesting thousands of hours of video footage to create customized training reports for top pros and junior players.
AI, or machine learning, can quickly digest metadata and learn how to process and analyze it. Now, video is added to the mix of content for AI to examine.
“We are treating video really like a rich data source,” said Elizabeth O’Brien, program director, IBM Sports & Entertainment Partnerships. “How can we actually see all the things that are hidden in video and turn that into data.”
In a radio interview on Wednesday, the Los Angeles Clippers’ newest front-office hire described his qualifications as follows: “You have the analytical side, which I know absolutely nothing about. There’s the collective-bargaining agreement, which I know nothing about. As far as evaluating players and their talent level, I know nothing about that, either, O.K.? If I went into a gym, I couldn’t tell you who’s good, who’s bad—anything.” The speaker was Lee Jenkins, a longtime basketball writer for Sports Illustrated, who never played the sport as a child and who is known for writing observant features about the lives of star players like Jimmy Butler (“His favorite time of year is ‘grimy season,’ an unspecified stretch of summer and fall when he braids his hair, grows his beard and works out twice a day, hot yoga in between”) and Kawhi Leonard (“He is 24 but looks significantly older, like a man with a mortgage heading to the graveyard shift”). Jenkins is a profile artist, possessing an eye for detail and a facility for winning the trust of people who have little in common with him. When LeBron James decided to return to Cleveland, in 2014, he gave the scoop to Jenkins, who wrote an as-told-to that read, at times, like a Nike commercial. The Clippers surprised many people in both the basketball and journalism communities this week by making Jenkins their executive director of research and identity, a job title without precedent, to say nothing of comprehensibility.
The research part, at least, isn’t hard to imagine. Lawrence Frank, the Clippers’ president of basketball operations, told the Los Angeles Times that he envisions Jenkins meeting with prospects in advance of the draft, for instance, and, essentially, interviewing them. Call it reportorial scouting, or, as Jenkins told me on Thursday, focussing “on the ‘who,’ instead of on the ‘what.’ ”
More than two months after Germany’s embarrassingly brief World Cup title defense, Joachim Loew offered a reason for the failure to his coaching compatriots on Sunday: The squad lacked motivation.
“After such a long time at the top,” Loew said, “we were missing the last percent, the fire, the passion, and this greed to win a title no matter what.”
Loew had been summoned from the floor to address FIFA’s World Cup coaches’ debrief by Cameroon coach Clarence Seedorf. He was asked to explain what had been done to try to “maintain the proper spirit” in a squad featuring nine champions from Brazil in 2014.
A couple of hours later, under the chandeliers of a London hotel ballroom, the tables were turned. In a session dedicated to France’s triumph in Russia, coach Didier Deschamps reflected on the challenge of preventing his newly crowned champions becoming complacent in Qatar in 2022.
Objectives: This study aims to develop generic velocity thresholds for the analysis of external load data collected in international women’s football matches.
Methods: Doppler-derived recordings of instantaneous velocity and acceleration were collected (10 Hz GPS) from 27 international female football players during 52 international matches between 2012 and 2015. Data were examined with k-means, Gaussian mixture model (GMM), and Spectral Clustering methods to identify four velocity zones, in each completed half of match-play (277 observations). Spectral Clustering was also performed with 4 different smoothing parameters ( values of 0, 0.001, 0.01, and 0.1). Linear-mixed modelling was used to determine generic squad thresholds, accounting for the within-subject variation.
Results: k-means and GMM generated low transition velocities, which had limited logical validity and deemed not fit for purpose. Spectral Clustering with a value of 0.1 derived thresholds that differed from the various methods adopted in existing literature and industry practice, yet providing a rigorous, acceptable, and feasible determination of velocity thresholds.
Conclusion: Velocities of 3.46 (12.5 km h−1), 5.29 (19.0 km h−1), and 6.26 m s−1 (22.5 km h−1) are recommended as entry criteria into high, very-high velocity, and sprinting locomotor categories, respectively, for the purpose of external load assessments in elite women’s football.