Harry Giles III has waited a long time to play meaningful minutes in a basketball game, but the wait is almost over.
Giles was considered the nation’s top high school prospect before knee injuries nearly crippled a promising career. He sat out most of the past three seasons while recovering from surgical procedures on both knees, but his highly lauded skills will finally be unleashed against the NBA next month.
“It’s time,” Giles said. “This is my time to play. And it’s for real this time.
… Now 30 years old and likely to make her 110th appearance for the United States on Wednesday (7:30 p.m. ET) in its final group game against Trinidad and Tobago in the CONCACAF Women’s Championship, O’Hara remains a reservoir of energy and enthusiasm. That is why she was on the field to score a goal as an attacking substitute in the 2015 World Cup semifinal against Germany, with Ellis won over by how hard O’Hara played in otherwise monotonous reserve training throughout that event.
And that is why, despite her own injury purgatory this year and the national team’s casting call over the past two years, O’Hara remains the first-choice starter at right back entering the World Cup.
“I just know she’s a player that brings a consistency in her energy and her focus and her intensity,” Ellis said. “She kind of embodies a lot of the qualities that are this program, in terms of competitiveness — even if I sometimes used to grimace a little bit in training when she’s hammering the s— out of her own teammates. …
“I’ve always found her to be somebody who put the team first. That’s who she is.”
When Olympic cross-country skiing gold medalist Jessie Diggins visited the Vikings’ practice facility Friday, she gave a speech to the team that centered on the theme Vikings coaches had been preaching to players all week: the importance of finishing.
Third-year defensive end Stephen Weatherly was paying rapt attention, knowing he was set for a busy day of work Sunday as one of the Vikings’ only two healthy defensive ends heading to Philadelphia. Weatherly and Danielle Hunter had been working on their conditioning all week in preparation for the game, but Diggins’ message drove the point home.
“She said she doesn’t know much about football; she definitely doesn’t know what it’s like to go out there and try to maul someone,” Weatherly said. “But one thing she does know is the preparation, and what it’s like when you’re in your moment, for your sport, and there’s that crucial time, and you’ve given everything you have up to that point — but you need more. Everyone has felt that, at every position, when we feel like we’ve given it all, but now that crucial point is coming up. What will you do?”
If you’re like me, August is the most exciting month of the entire year. Football, soccer, volleyball, and cross country athletes are returning to campus for the pre-season camp. There’s always the mix of freshmen who are overwhelmed and walking around wide-eyed. The seniors, grizzled with their years of experience, are anxiously waiting to begin the countdown of their precious few remaining competitions. As all of these athletes come back to campus with their range of goals and hopes and dreams, their sport and strength coaches immediately have to wrestle with a tough question.
Harvard Business Review; Adam Pah, Brian Uzzi and Rebecca Hinds from
… we uncovered five best practices for virtual collaboration. That is, teams at the highest-performing organizations by our measures tended to engage in them more than those at lower-performing institutions did.
Pacing is the manner in which effort is distributed over the duration of an exercise bout, and is an important determinant of the extent to which individual potential is realized during athletic races. Observed pacing behaviors are thought to result from complex decision-making processes, and several models have been proposed that may explain the manner in which these decisions are made. In this article we argue that examination of individual factors implicated in the regulation of pacing is unlikely to allow full understanding of the events leading to pacing and performance. Rather than utilizing such a reductionist approach, it is suggested that athletic races be viewed as complex systems, and that pacing behavior is an emergent phenomenon that cannot be fully understood through study of components of the system in isolation. We describe and discuss known and potential interactions between determinants of pacing during races, and conclude with a call for the development of novel research methodologies that may further understanding of the manner in which observed behaviors emerge. [full text]
During a race, competing cyclists often cooperate by alternating between leading and drafting positions. This approach allows them to maximize velocity by using the energy saved while drafting, a technique to reduce the overall drag by exploiting the leader’s slipstream. We have argued that a similar cooperative drafting approach could benefit elite marathon runners in their quest for the sub-2-hour marathon. Objective
Our aim was to model the effects of various cooperative drafting scenarios on marathon performance by applying the critical velocity concept for intermittent high-intensity running. Methods
We used the physiological characteristics of the world’s most elite long-distance runners and mathematically simulated the depletion and recovery of their distance capacity when running above and below their critical velocity throughout a marathon. Results
Our simulations showed that with four of the most elite runners in the world, a 2:00:48 (h:min:s) marathon is possible, a whopping 2 min faster than the current world record. We also explored the possibility of a sub-2-hour marathon using multiple runners with the physiological characteristics of Eliud Kipchoge, arguably the best marathon runner of our time. We found that a team of eight Kipchoge-like runners could break the sub-2-hour marathon barrier. Conclusion
In the context of cooperative drafting, we show that the best team strategy for improving marathon performance time can be optimized using a mathematical model that is based on the physiological characteristics of each athlete.
A KAIST research team led by Professor Keon Jae Lee from the Department of Material Science and Engineering has developed a machine learning-based acoustic sensor for speaker recognition.
Acoustic sensors were spotlighted as one of the most intuitive bilateral communication devices between humans and machines. However, conventional acoustic sensors use a condenser-type device for measuring capacitance between two conducting layers, resulting in low sensitivity, short recognition distance, and low speaker recognition rates.
… Recently, researchers have been learning more about how poor sleep influences our dietary choices, as well as how diet influences sleep quality. Not sleeping for long enough or poor quality sleep are associated with increased food intake, a less healthy diet and weight gain. Lack of sleep also leads to increased snacking and overeating. And it causes us to want to eat foods high in fat and carbohydrates – with increased chemical rewards to the brain when we do eat these foods.
Essentially, poor sleep drives your body to find high energy foods to keep you awake which makes fighting the cravings for unhealthy foods very difficult to resist. But, on the other hand, when we have slept well our appetite hormones are at a normal level. We don’t crave unhealthy food so much – and we can make better choices about what to eat.
As the sports nutrition landscape shifts toward online sales and a wider consumer base, sports brands need to ditch the old ways and adopt new approaches to selling.
Americans love a quick health fix in pill form: something to protect against illness, with minimal effort. For years, one of the go-to supplements has been vitamin D, thought to do everything from preventing cancer to strengthening bones.
Some bad news: Yet another big meta-study adds to the pile of evidence that it’s useless for most people.
The new research, published in Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology, looked at 81 randomized trials on whether vitamin D prevents fractures and falls, and improves bone mineral density in adults.
ESPN Analytics is pleased to present a revolutionary new way of measuring the pass-block and pass-rush performance of individual NFL players. Read the abbreviated explanation on how they work, or skip to the full details on why they matter and what they can tell us.
OK, what is this exactly?
Our new Pass Block Win Rate metric tells us the rate at which linemen can sustain their blocks for 2.5 seconds or longer. Likewise, our Pass Rush Win Rate metric tells us how often a pass-rusher is able to beat his block within 2.5 seconds. Our model of pass blocking harnesses player tracking data from NFL Next Gen Stats.
… As of late, we’ve begun to see a number of notable names jump to MLS. Rémi Garde joined the Montreal Impact earlier this year, having managed a surprisingly good Lyon side in France, followed by a disastrously bad Aston Villa side in England, in years previous. Domènec Torrent, the coach for NYCFC after Patrick Viera left to join Nice in Ligue 1, was the assistant for Pep Guardiola for the entirety of that historic spell at Barcelona (including Pep’s time with Barcelona B), up until this year. We’ve seen a pair of Americans return to the league after mixed success abroad in Gregg Berhalter and Bob Bradley. But, of course, the big name is Tata Martino. After leaving Barcelona and then the Argentine national team, Martino, originally made famous for his time with the Paraguayan national team and a slew of Argentine and Paraguayan clubs, joined Atlanta United as their first ever manager.
Historically, MLS has been a very insular league, at least as coaching goes. The common refrain used to be that you had to have played or been an assistant with either a club or the national team in order to succeed as a manager in MLS. However, the disastrous days of the likes of Ruud Gullit and Juan Carlos Osorio are clearly long gone. MLS is now attracting a higher calibre of manager, pulling from both Europe and the Americas.
In explaining why the 2017 American League Manager of the Year is no longer managing the Twins, Chief Baseball Officer Derek Falvey spun a few memorable phrases Tuesday that provided insight.
Falvey said the decision to move on from Paul Molitor as manager was a “complex decision,” adding that “a lot has transpired” in the past 12 months since Molitor won the award while also putting an emphasis on “growth and development” that fell flat in 2018.
Truth is, it’s hard to know the specific reasons without crawling into the minds of Falvey and General Manager Thad Levine — spaces that some Twins fans have increasingly become convinced are filled with something other than baseball knowledge.
To optimize its performance, a competitive team, such as a soccer team, must maintain a delicate balance between organization and disorganization. On the one hand, the team should maintain organized patterns of behavior to maximize the cooperation between its members. On the other hand, the team’s behavior should be disordered enough to mislead its opponent and to maintain enough degrees of freedom. In this paper, we have analyzed this dynamic in the context of soccer games and examined whether it is correlated with the team’s performance. We measured the organization associated with the behavior of a soccer team through the Tsallis entropy of ball passes between the players. Analyzing data taken from the English Premier League (2015/2016), we show that the team’s position at the end of the season is correlated with the team’s entropy as measured with a super-additive entropy index. Moreover, the entropy score of a team significantly contributes to the prediction of the team’s position at the end of the season beyond the prediction gained by the team’s position at the end of the previous season.