… If you’re a coach, he might refuse to return your messages for weeks, just to test you. If you’re a teammate, he might bait and debate you, just because. He might publicly question the spherical nature of our planet. And when that triggers a backlash, he might shrug and say, “I’m just asking questions.” He’ll confront, prod, provoke.
“He’s gonna challenge you mentally, psychologically, definitely,” Celtics teammate Marcus Smart says. “It comes off as sarcastic, it comes off as arrogant, but it’s just Kyrie. He’s different.”
It’s that boldness—the defiant, unorthodox thinking—that sent Irving to Boston a year ago, and that now fuels the confidence of this young, uber-talented Celtics team, which is poised to replace Irving’s old team as the new superpower of the Eastern Conference.
Six months before she was named MVP of the National Women’s Soccer League, and seven before she pushed the United States to the brink of a Women’s World Cup berth, Lindsey Horan received an important phone call from U.S. Coach Jill Ellis.
Horan, who grew up in Golden, was a fixture on the world’s top-ranked team, but with a new NWSL season underway and the global competition a little more than a year away, Ellis wanted to see more from her. She wanted to see Horan become more assertive in the attack and diversify her qualities. She needed her to take charge of the midfield and place her stamp on every match.
“I challenged Lindsey and said, ‘If you want to be this attacking midfielder for us, you have to be able to have a dangerous pass and a shot from distance,’” Ellis recounted last week.
Remember how much the Yankees struggled to fill the void left by Aaron Judge’s injury?
While it won’t make Yankees fans feel any better, Alex Bregman has found a way to replicate one of Judge’s most underrated and unappreciated skills:
Trolling.
Bless both the Yankees’ behemoth and the Astros’ charismatic third baseman. Better yet, clone their personalities. The more of this youthful energy baseball can promote, the better.
The challenges for professional football players are becoming more and more complex due to the multifaceted physical, technical, and psychological demands of the modern game. Psychological components have especially attracted the attention of science and are finding their way into practice. This overview article aims to discuss five psychological issues in football which the authors consider to be among the most relevant for sport-psychological practitioners. Each topic is structured identically: (a) topic description, (b) empirical evidence highlighting its relevance in football and potential impacts on performance, and (c) practical recommendations. The first two topics focus on the environment in football by discussing (1) organisational issues and (2) player–coach–parent triads within football teams. Subsequently, the central theme performance is evaluated. (3) How do health and well-being impact long-term elite performance? (4) How can the training of psychological skills enhance performance? (5) How does “choking under pressure” affect performance? It can be stated that sport-psychological football research has provided several important and meaningful findings so far which can partly be adapted to practical settings. An even stronger focus of research in applied settings is warranted to gain further insights into the psychological underpinnings prevalent in the world of football. From a practical perspective, the article may provide both researchers and practitioners with valuable input on selected psychological topics in football. The summarised research can serve as a starting point for further research or interventions in practical settings.
It is difficult to imagine life before our personal and professional worlds were so dominated and “switched on” via smartphones and the other devices that make us accessible and, crucially, so easily distractible and interruptible every second of the day. This constant fragmentation of our time and concentration has become the new normal, to which we have adapted with ease, but there is a downside: more and more experts are telling us that these interruptions and distractions have eroded our ability to concentrate.
We have known for a long time that repeated interruptions affect concentration. In 2005, research carried out by Dr Glenn Wilson at London’s Institute of Psychiatry found that persistent interruptions and distractions at work had a profound effect. Those distracted by emails and phone calls saw a 10-point fall in their IQ, twice that found in studies on the impact of smoking marijuana. More than half of the 1,100 participants said they always responded to an email immediately or as soon as possible, while 21% admitted they would interrupt a meeting to do so. Constant interruptions can have the same effect as the loss of a night’s sleep.
Unfavorable methods of teaching statistics in schools and universities may be to blame for people ignoring simple solutions to statistical problems, making them hard to solve. This can have serious consequences when applied to professional settings like court cases. Published in Frontiers in Psychology, the study shows for the first time that fixed mindsets — potentially triggered by suboptimal education curricula — lead to difficulties finding the simple solution to statistical problems.
From my first day as a sociology professor at a university with a Division I football and men’s basketball team, education and athletics struck me as being inherently at odds.
Student-athletes filled my courses to take advantage of the fact that the classes met early in the morning.
The football and men’s basketball players – most of whom were black – quickly fell behind due to scheduling constraints. Only so much time was set aside for academics and, often, it wasn’t enough. Academic rigor and athletic success were simply incompatible goals.
Now – as a researcher who is studying college athletes through the lens of race and class – I have compiled evidence to show just how much more time college athletes devote to sports over academics.
XOS Digital, a subsidiary of the Catapult Group, has signed an extension of their league-wide, in-game video analysis services agreement with the National Hockey League (NHL).
The XOS ThunderCloud iBench system, whereby in-game video is streamed live to each NHL team’s bench, was first used during the 2017 Stanley Cup Playoffs and was rolled out to all 31 teams at the beginning of the 2017/18 season.
Wearable devices with body sensors have been seen by many as a way to get the general public to be better aware of their overall health. It’s a nice idea, but it still requires people to remember to wear their devices, to check up on the readings via the smartphone, and to recharge the devices when they are low on power. Some people think that wearables still have fundamental limitations that can be overcome with more passive and pervasive monitoring. Engineers at Portugal’s Institute of Telecommunications are working on integrating electrocardiography (ECG) into everyday objects that people touch long enough to get a good reading. We spoke with Ana Fred and Hugo Silva, who have worked extensively on the Bitalino project that allows people to build body monitoring devices, very similar to how Arduino is used by tinkerers making general purpose gadgets. They gave us an interesting rundown of this current project and what it means for the future of body monitoring.
Safety is the common ground motivating officials from the NFL and NCAA to convene in New York later this month for an unprecedented in-season summit aimed at aligning player protection rules.
No, the NFL isn’t angling to institute college football’s wild overtime system. Defensive pass interference will remain a spot foul in the pro game. But power brokers on both sides sense a need for consistency when it comes to measures — chiefly rules and techniques — needed for a safer game.
“It’s long overdue,” Troy Vincent, NFL executive vice president for football operations, told USA TODAY Sports. “I think we can learn from each other. That’s the intent.”
This paper postulates that overuse injury in sport is a biomechanical event resulting from the mechanical fatigue of biological tissue. A theoretical foundation and operational framework necessary to model overuse injury as a mechanical fatigue phenomenon is introduced. Adopting this framework may provide a more mechanistic understanding of overuse injury and inform training and preventive strategies to reduce their occurrence.
The Aspen Institute, Project Play, Tom Farrey from
Ten years ago, I wrote a book that altered the trajectory of my life’s work. I was hoping its insights somehow would bend the arc of youth sports in America as well, given what I had learned about the modern-day challenges in providing experiences that align with best practices in child and athletic development. My interests began to shift from breaking down problems as an investigative journalist with ESPN to identifying shared solutions with The Aspen Institute. Walked into the boss’s office, asked off E:60, and started dreaming of what’s possible. How to help sports tell its best story.
The model that France uses to develop soccer players was a catalyst.
I wrote about that model in the fourth chapter of the book, Game On: The All-American Race to Make Champions of Our Children. The methods the French deploy to cultivate talent in its youth population were a revelation to me — counter to so many of the features that we had tacitly embraced in the U.S. Upon visiting France and talking with the architects of their system, I came to understand how Les Blues came to win the 1998 World Cup, and why the U.S. had yet to develop even one field player who could be described as world class, despite having more children in soccer uniforms than any nation on the planet.
Recently, we sat down with legendary author of The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstracts, Bill James. Gain insights and learn about Bill’s passion for baseball analytics:
Bill, you incorporated analytics into sports long before it was hip or trendy. In fact, the term data analytics wouldn’t appear for decades. We all know you were an obsessive baseball fan and follower of the game, but what initially drew you to a data-based approach?
A recognition of my limitations. “Data” is incidental, and it isn’t a data-based approach. It’s a fact-based approach. Sportswriting was and is based primarily on authority. The game broadcaster says implicitly that “I have the right to say this because I played the game, and therefore I know what I am talking about.” When I started writing about baseball I was very aware that I had no standing, no authority. I had no license. Therefore, whatever I said had to be something that the reader could check out for himself, for herself, and confirm. Every word was supposed to be something that could independently be validated. Incidentally, that drives one toward data in many cases. But what I was trying to do was to create a fact-based analysis to challenge the authority-based analysis.
… When [Cory Gibbs] was playing, he didn’t like what he saw when it came to the “client to agent” relationship, saying he had teammates of his in Europe and the States that barely knew the name of the company of their agent, some not even knowing their agent’s last name. That sparked an interest inside of him to get into representing players and trying to bond with players on a more personal, friendly level instead of a purely business, cut-and-dried relationship. Having been represented by Wasserman as a player and having a great bond with Richard Motzkin, executive vice president of the soccer division, he got into representing players and has sent numerous players overseas.
He sat down with CBS Sports to discuss his move into representing players, how Weston McKennie was discovered and more:
… Goldschmidt and Rendon are somewhat comparable players in terms of their offensive output; Goldschmidt finished third in WRC+ in the NL in 2018, Rendon fourth. Rendon’s ejection — and Goldschmidt’s subsequent non-ejection — presented me with an opportunity to examine ejection data. I was curious whether umpires eject nonwhite and white players in proportion to their representation in baseball.
To answer this question, I analyzed 860 umpire ejections of players from 2008-2017 and found that, even when controlling for other factors, umpires eject nonwhite players disproportionately compared to those players’ representation in major league baseball. The following analysis examines position players compared with pitchers; player usage and roles; players ejected multiple times; cause of ejections; and individual umpires and umpire ethnicity.