When the U.S. men’s national team faced Mexico in Nashville earlier this month, Jonathan Gonzalez–recuperating from a minor injury–was forced to sit out and watch the entire game from the bench. Given his background as a Mexican-American and the year he went through after making the complex decision to play for Mexico instead of his native U.S, it’s only natural to assume the California-born 19-year-old would have been disappointed at not being able to participate.
But Gonzalez, ever the pragmatist, was fine with not playing.
“To be honest, I was completely O.K. with not taking part in the game,” Gonzalez told SI.com this week. “The boss [interim manager Tuca Ferretti] talked to me before that I wasn’t going to play, and since I was dealing with a minor injury, which pretty much affected my involvement, I fully expected not to take part. So I was totally fine with it.”
… “I’m very lucky with my career,” he said after the Raptors’ second day of training camp in Burnaby, B.C. “I’ve been on winning teams most of my career and played with some great guys and for some great coaches. I learned a lot. I was a sponge my rookie year [in Cleveland] with LeBron and Shaq and from there on [in San Antonio with] Timmy, Tony, Manu and coach Pop and all the guys who have come through … I learned from everybody, the good and the bad in all organizations so I’ve been very blessed to be able to be a part of those situations.”
Such as?
“The biggest thing is just not getting too high, not getting too low, grinding it out, it’s a long season, it’s a long game. Not every game is gonna go great,” said Green. “Just staying really locked in and being disciplined, being professional. Fighting out certain game situations and sticking together — not complaining to referees, not criticizing each other. Positive criticism, constructive criticism is okay, but we’re fighting these battles together and not to worry about other things we can’t control.”
… It’s been a year of beginnings for Grimm, who was released by the Cubs — his club for the past five seasons — on March 15th, signed with the Royals three days later, put up a 13.50 ERA in 16 disastrous appearances for Kansas City, and was released for the second time in less than four months on July 7th. To cap it all off, Grimm and his wife Gina — an All-American gymnast at UGA, where the two met — welcomed a baby boy, their first, on May 25th.
“When I was released [by the Royals], I was on the disabled list,” Grimm said, “and the Mariners came in and were like, ‘Hey, come rehab in Seattle, we want to sign you.’ I saw it as an opportunity to go out and get better. I knew I was better than the numbers I was putting up. I knew they could help me get back to where I was.”
The question that all runners are eventually asked is the subject of serious research, and Noel Brick, Ph.D., is one of the world’s leading experts on the topic. (Brick is also behind the smiling-makes-you-faster technique that marathon world record holder Eliud Kipchoge reportedly practices.) A lecturer in sport and exercise psychology at the University of Ulster in Northern Ireland, Brick has just published his latest work on what are known as runners’ cognitive strategies. In interviews with new runners, Brick found that they lacked many of the cognitive strategies that more experienced runners use to make running more enjoyable and to stay on task during demanding workouts.
In the interview below, Brick describes how beginners can think more like veteran runners, and thereby run faster, farther, and more frequently.
The skating acceleration to maximal speed transition (sprint) is an essential skill that involves substantial lower body strength and effective propulsion technique. Coaches and athletes strive to understand this optimal combination to improve performance and reduce injury risk. Hence, the purpose of this study was to compare body centre of mass and lower body kinematic profiles from static start to maximal speed of high calibre male and female ice hockey players on the ice surface. Overall, male and female skaters showed similar centre of mass trajectories, though magnitudes differed. The key performance difference was the male’s greater peak forward skating speed (8.96 ± 0.44 m/s vs the females’ 8.02 ± 0.36 m/s, p < 0.001), which was strongly correlated to peak leg strength (R2 = 0.81). Males generated greater forward acceleration during the initial accelerative steps, but thereafter, both sexes had similar stride-by-stride accelerations up to maximal speed. In terms of technique, males demonstrated greater hip abduction (p = 0.006) and knee flexion (p = 0.026) from ice contact to push off throughout the trials. For coaches and athletes, these findings underscore the importance of leg strength and widely planted running steps during the initial skating technique to achieve maximal skating speed over a 30 m distance. [full text]
Teenagers are wired to learn — but this same wiring also makes them more vulnerable to addiction. Neuroscientist Frances Jensen discusses how the biology of the teen brain presents a double-edged sword.
… In the poll of 2,000 parents from various ethnic groups and backgrounds that Clark and her team published this month, 1 in 6 parents say their teen experiences frequent sleep problems — “having trouble falling asleep or staying asleep 3 or more nights per week.”
More than half the parents say it’s because their teens won’t get off their electronic devices, and 43 percent blame irregular schedules with homework and activities.
A significant percentage of parents say their kids worry about school (31 percent), and 23 percent say their teens stay up worrying about their social lives.
It’s likely that the numbers of teens who have trouble sleeping is even higher than the poll of parents suggests, Clark says, because kids can hide their nighttime electronics use and parents may not frequently check in on older children.
Sports and social issues are inextricably linked, and now Arizona State University is looking for innovative ways that people can harness sports to actually drive social change.
The Global Sport Institute at ASU has launched a new $10,000 competition for ideas that improve communities through sports. The Global Sport Social Impact Challenge will reward people who come up with inventive concepts, such as bringing a sport to an area that doesn’t have it or repurposing a facility to offer sports.
“It’s a broad category,” said Jeffrey Kunowski, associate director of innovation programs for the institute. “It can be a youth mentorship program, or an educational platform, or starting a new league, or possibly an idea based on diversity in sports.
… [Craig Buntin] came across the work of then-Ph.D. student Mehrsan Javan, who was applying computer vision to security. If someone dropped a bag, jumped a fence, or did anything else out of the ordinary, the computer system would flag the aberration.
Buntin thought there were broader applications. He and Javan began collaborating on projects, using whatever video they could scrounge up. One test clip was an NFL game. Football was a perfect case study: players wore uniforms, had numbers on their backs, and ran on a field already delineated by yardage. That experiment made clear the potential in sports, where a lot of early tracking information was done manually. Thousands of workers would review footage and tag video clips, a process that was slow and rife with inaccuracies.
The mission Buntin, now CEO, relayed to TandemLaunch was this: “We’re going to build a technology that can see and understand and describe the game the same way that a human would.”
Getafe CF has one of the lowest operating budgets in Spain’s top soccer circuit, La Liga. That puts a premium on the club keeping its starting players healthy. Depth is hard to afford.
The team used to endure about three notable injuries per month, but something curious happened last year: that rate fell to one per month. The club had a 65-percent reduction in days missed due to injury. Some 80 percent of the injuries that still occurred also came with identifiable warnings, indicating that there is room for improvement and that benching an important player can be a difficult decision.
Those metrics—and the underlying injury prediction system—were produced by Zone7, a new artificial intelligence platform that inputs data from wearables devices, fitness assessments, and medical profiles, then uses that information to determine which players might be at risk of injury.
“We felt that, counterintuitive to a lot of the industry’s mainstream thinking, injury prediction is something that you can actually predict,” said Zone7 cofounder and CEO Tal Brown. “But you need to be very focused on what you’re trying to predict. It’s not a case of ‘at 4 o’clock a month from now, you’re going to tear a hamstring.’ You need to apply some product thinking and make this usable by a coach.”
Binghamton University is now the center of flexible hybrid electronics for a national company.
NextFlex chose BU to design, develop, and manufacture new technology that will help improve our area and get Binghamton on the map.
“It recognizes that Binghamton has been a center of activities in New York and getting a lot of different organizations to work with them,” said NextFlex Executive Director Malcolm Thompson.
… Manipulating 2D materials lets researchers design ever smaller devices like sensors or light-driven circuits. But first it helps to know how sensitive a material is to a particular wavelength of light, from infrared to visible colors to ultraviolet.
“Generally, the common wisdom is that 2D materials are so thin that they should appear to be essentially transparent, with negligible reflection and absorption,” Yakobson said. “Surprisingly, we found that each material has an expressive optical signature, with a large portion of light of a particular color (wavelength) being absorbed or reflected.”
The co-authors anticipate photodetecting and modulating devices and polarizing filters are possible applications for 2D materials that have directionally dependent optical properties. “Multilayer coatings could provide good protection from radiation or light, like from lasers,” Shirodkar said. “In the latter case, heterostructured (multilayered) films — coatings of complementary materials — may be needed. Greater intensities of light could produce nonlinear effects, and accounting for those will certainly require further research.”
With the recent closure of the 2018 summer transfer window, familiar topics of discussion, such as the level of spending among certain clubs, and the value of signings inevitably come to the fore. While recent activity is in line with long-term transfer market trends, other interesting insights emerge from digging a little deeper.
In this article, the KPMG Football Benchmark team provides a high level analysis of the 2018 summer transfer window for the European “big five” leagues (English Premier League, French Ligue 1, German Bundesliga, Italian Serie A, Spanish La Liga) and explains how a better approach for player valuation can benefit all industry stakeholders.
During this year’s World Cup of Soccer, I found a sabermetric soccer book discounted at a Toronto bookstore. It’s called “The Numbers Game,” and subtitled “Why Everything You Know About Soccer Is Wrong.”
Actually, I don’t know that much about soccer, but much of the book fails to convince me — for instance, when the authors argue that defense is more important than offense:
As we enter another season in which the amount of players that are on loan from Chelsea (40) completely dwarfs the number of players in their named 2018/19 squad (28), various questions are beginning to get thrown around.
Firstly, is it worth stockpiling all this talent if it never actually materialises into quality on the pitch? Because as it turns out, for every Thibaut Courtois there are five Matej Delacs. Nevertheless, Chelsea continue to make big profits from holding on to a player’s potential for several years. Surely it cannot be ethical to see talent solely as turnover? Lastly, if we flashback to last season there were nightmarish scenes as Lukaku, De Bruyne and Salah all scored against Chelsea in pivotal games. But why were they allowed to leave in the first place?
To dissect such a huge topic we need to back-track to 2003, when Roman Abramovich had just bought Chelsea FC for a fee of around £140m from the long-standing owner Ken Bates. Within a year Claudio Ranieri’s total of 5 players on loan had doubled. Within a couple years, Roman Abramovich appointed his own associates into the club. For instance the ‘associate’ Eugene Tenenbaum was a business partner of the Russian from former their Soviet Union days and was soon appointed as director at the club.
Penn State monitors the heart rates and sleeping patterns of its football players, so of course, the program knows how many “explosive plays” it wants to produce per game.
Coach James Franklin wants 16 percent of his offensive snaps to produce explosive plays. That number comes, in part, from Franklin’s affection for analytics.
The Penn State coach adheres to a data-driven development model, which he has made an undercurrent of the program. From studying fourth-down conversion rates to knowing which players run the farthest at practice, Franklin keys on numbers to generate edges.
If Daniel Poncedeleon is nervous as he takes the mound, he’s doing a hell of a job hiding it. His St. Louis Cardinals are visiting the Reds in Cincinnati on a cloudy July day, and the pitcher is making his Major League Baseball debut. Unbelievably, he throws a no-hitter through seven innings.
A host of factors converged to make this start possible for Poncedeleon. For one, he can credit his remarkable recovery from a brain surgery only 14 months prior, after he took a line drive to the head. There’s also the fact that the day before this game, Poncedeleon wasn’t even on the Cardinals roster. The morning before his start, team manager Mike Shildt called Poncedeleon up from the minors — something experts say Shildt’s predecessor, Mike Matheny, never would have done. Then again, since Matheny was let go by the organization a week before this game, the Cardinals have been doing a lot of things differently. The Cardinals currently control the second wild-card spot in the National League. On the day Shildt took over Matheny’s skipper duties, however, St. Louis was barely a .500 team. But the Cardinals have pulled off a dramatic turnaround — and their tactics are now set to reverberate throughout MLB.
It would be easy to attribute the transformation in the Cardinals’ fortunes to Shildt’s influence, but experts say it’s a combination of factors that spawned this success: a youth movement in the bullpen, a reshuffled outfield and an overall deeper embrace of analytics.