Xander Bogaerts remembers the first time he saw Mookie Betts. It was late summer 2011 in South Carolina, and Bogaerts was an 18-year-old shortstop for the Low-A Greenville Drive — a confident kid who’d signed as an amateur free agent in 2009 and was two years from a World Series title with the Boston Red Sox. Also on the field in Greenville that day was Betts, a recent high school graduate who’d been taken in the fifth round of the MLB draft that summer and was in town for a workout with other Red Sox prospects.
From a distance, Bogaerts studied Betts — all 5-foot-9, 165 pounds of him. “He was short,” Bogaerts says now. He watched Betts do some fielding drills, throw a little. “I didn’t think much of him. I was not impressed,” the Red Sox shortstop remembers. So thoroughly uninterested was Bogaerts that day that he can’t remember whether he stuck around to watch Betts take batting practice.
Seven years later, with his team rolling toward the American League East title, Bogaerts stands in the visiting clubhouse in Kansas City and sizes up his teammate from across the room. He admits he should have been more open-minded toward the pint-size player he saw in South Carolina.
… When I think of the most valuable coach, I definitely think of a coach like Geno Auriemma, and the things I learned from him that stick out in my mind are his passion for the game, competing at all the little things and doing it at a high level. He’d always take time at some point during practice to read us some type of life lesson there or to help us see the bigger picture of why we were doing what we were doing. He was an excellent vision caster. He would motivate us and show us that we could be better. He would inspire us to and tell us that it was our team and it was our experience. As a young person growing up and learning that lesson to focus not on the outcome but working toward, it was invaluable. It will help me when I start the coaching process for these top coaches, I’ll be a part of them, judging the final three.
… “The NBA feels a little bit foreign to me,” Lin said, “because last year I moved to Vancouver during the whole seasons to do my rehab, so I’m just very far removed from my everyday life.”
Lin returned to the NBA last night in the Hawks’ preseason opener, a 116-102 win over the New Orleans Pelicans. Lin came off the bench, made 2 of his 4 shot attempts and and finished with 4 points and 3 assists.
“I felt good,” Lin said afterward. “Obviously, there are some things that are going to take a little bit of time: my speed, my explosiveness, and things like that. But I played a game, I didn’t get hurt, and it was my first game experience in a long time. I’m just thankful.”
… The Golden State Warriors are putting a greater emphasis on player development this training camp with a younger roster.
An hour ahead of formal team workouts, Golden State’s young core shows up for individual skill work, to learn defensive concepts or to go over offensive schemes and terminology with assistant coach Chris DeMarco.
“We have a veteran team, so being able to get these young guys in and still be able to do drill work that maybe the veterans don’t need, that’s always going to be beneficial moving forward because it’s a long season,” DeMarco said after practice Tuesday. “So sometimes you get caught up and you’re not able to practice, there’s back-to-backs where the young guys aren’t out there developing those skills that we need them to develop. So coming in early, making sure they’re getting that individual work, making sure they’re getting that team defense concept, offensively what we’re trying to do, the actions and all that, that’s important.”
… In an interview we’ve edited for clarity and space, we asked [Michael] Joyner about the two-hour marathon, the mind-set of elite athletes, his advice to runners in the form of a haiku and his favorite nonhuman athletic performance.
In 1991 you said someone with the ideal physical attributes could run a sub two-hour marathon. What was the number you came up with as the potential time and how did you determine it?
1:57:58. I’d been thinking about lactate threshold, running efficiency and VO2 max. When I was in medical school in 1987, I got a programmable calculator. A motivated person with a programmable calculator and a yellow legal pad can do a lot of damage. Just running thought exercises with myself, I finished the calculation at a physiology seminar before I left for Mayo and I wrote it up and eventually it got published. But the thing people forget is, this was not a prediction. It was a model to help us understand what we didn’t understand at the time.
To gain insight into users’ expectations and mental models around the many types of individualized recommendations offered on sites, we ran a remote moderated usability study with 8 participants located across the United States. In each session, participants completed facilitator-assigned tasks on 2–3 websites on which they had accounts and also answered recommendation-related questions in an interview.
Our study participants were highly attuned to the fact that sites commonly track their browsing patterns, purchase histories, and other sources of data to present individually personalized suggestions. Overall, these recommendations were appreciated and seen as instrumental for narrowing down the options available on a site. To reap this benefit, users were willing to sacrifice some privacy; they expected many of their actions to be tracked and analyzed.
Rush Soccer has made Hudl their preferred video solution for all of its 85 clubs. With 32,000 athletes on 3,000 teams, this soccer club is one of the largest in the world.
Arian Hoxha, director of operations at Rush, sees Hudl as the perfect tool to develop and track top talent, with an ultimate goal of sending players to roster the professional-level team Penn FC. Rush Soccer was the first club to form a professional branch, reverse-engineering the path between the youth and elite levels. Hudl will help set this pathway in stone.
“Adding Hudl to all our other assets will enhance the current scouting and player identification system we currently use,” Hoxha said. “Hudl will help advance our vision of producing as many homegrown players for the professional level as possible.”
The more you use your phone, the faster it runs out of battery. Our bodies work the same way. The more stressful and active your life is, the faster your reserves are depleted.
Garmin’s new Body Battery™, powered by Firstbeat analytics, helps you keep tabs on how much you have left in your tank. It offers an easy way to connect the dots between stress, recovery, sleep and physical activity. The higher the number (0-100), the greater your ability at that moment to focus, cope, and bounce back from challenges.
Sleep and recovering moments replenish your Body Battery™, whereas physical activity and stress, be it negative or positive, drain your inner reserves and diminish resiliency.
The science behind Body Battery™ comes from Firstbeat’s ability to interpret beat-to-beat changes in your heart to reveal interplay between the sympathetic (fight-or-flight) and parasympathetic (rest-and-digest) branches of your autonomic nervous system.
International Journal of Sports Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism from
From the breakthrough studies of dietary carbohydrate and exercise capacity in the 1960s through to the more recent studies of cellular signaling and the adaptive response to exercise in muscle, it has become apparent that manipulations of dietary fat and carbohydrate within training phases, or in the immediate preparation for competition, can profoundly alter the availability and utilization of these major fuels and, subsequently, the performance of endurance sport (events >30 min up to ∼24 hr). A variety of terms have emerged to describe new or nuanced versions of such exercise-diet strategies (e.g., train low, train high, low-carbohydrate high-fat diet, periodized carbohydrate diet). However, the nonuniform meanings of these terms have caused confusion and miscommunication, both in the popular press and among the scientific community. Sports scientists will continue to hold different views on optimal protocols of fuel support for training and competition in different endurance events. However, to promote collaboration and shared discussions, a commonly accepted and consistent terminology will help to strengthen hypotheses and experimental/experiential data around various strategies. We propose a series of definitions and explanations as a starting point for a more unified dialogue around acute and chronic manipulations of fat and carbohydrate in the athlete’s diet, noting philosophies of approaches rather than a single/definitive macronutrient prescription. We also summarize some of the key questions that need to be tackled to help produce greater insight into this exciting area of sports nutrition research and practice.
… While there was a study supporting the idea that free food might increase the amount of time employees spend in the office, the theory that it increases innovation is based on scant empirical evidence. In fact, a similar theory lied behind the movement for open offices—and mounting evidence suggests that idea has turned out to be a disaster. It’s little wonder why Google’s competitors at Apple, Amazon, and Microsoft rejected the policy of abundant free food (and they all seem to be doing just fine).
If companies want to find ways for workers to socialize or exchange ideas, regular lunches or dinners together can surely provide that opportunity. But there’s no coherent reason why unlimited candy and chips in the break room is necessary to accomplish that. In fact, evidence suggests that junk food negatively affects cognitive performance, which might ultimately hinder idea generation.
Moreover, as basic economic theory and ample evidence shows, making junk food artificially cheaper and easily accessible increases consumption.
An evolution is playing out before our eyes in 2018: NFL pass rushers are being neutered in the name of quarterback preservation and the bottom line—to everyone’s confusion. The game is being made safer and passing numbers are headed through the roof, all of which is great for business. Meanwhile, defensive players, and those who revel in the old ways, wonder, how far can it go? ,
Duke University, Duke Research Blog, Sarah Haurin from
Who makes riskier decisions, the young or the old? And what matters more in our decisions as we age — friends, health or money? The answers might surprise you.
Kendra Seaman works at the Center for the Study of Aging and Human Development and is interested in decision-making across the lifespan.
Duke postdoctoral fellow Kendra Seaman, Ph.D. uses mathematical models and brain imaging to understand how decision-making changes as we age. In a talk to a group of cognitive neuroscientists at Duke, Seamen explained that we have good reason to be concerned with how older people make decisions.
If you had flipped a coin once every day of the year so far, you would be more than 99% certain to have flipped 6 heads or 6 tails in a row by today, 30 September, the 273rd day of the year.
… Prodigies like Picasso, Galenson argues, rarely engage in that kind of open-ended exploration. They tend to be “conceptual,” Galenson says, in the sense that they start with a clear idea of where they want to go, and then they execute it. “I can hardly understand the importance given to the word ‘research,’ ” Picasso once said in an interview with the artist Marius de Zayas. “In my opinion, to search means nothing in painting. To find is the thing.” He continued, “The several manners I have used in my art must not be considered as an evolution or as steps toward an unknown ideal of painting. . . . I have never made trials or experiments.”
But late bloomers, Galenson says, tend to work the other way around. Their approach is experimental. “Their goals are imprecise, so their procedure is tentative and incremental,” Galenson writes in “Old Masters and Young Geniuses.”