… For about eight months—the first two completely isolated from loved ones before his girlfriend moved in—this was [Rodney] McGruder’s life. Games, practices (for which he was in the gym from 10 AM to noon, followed by another run from 6-8 PM) and everything else, which was nothing else. There was never enough time to sightsee or take in the culture of a foreign country. A two-hour drive north to Budapest was out of the question. McGruder lived in a small town where everything closed early. All he had was basketball, his club’s looming championship run—two hard practices were held the day before the Finals—and God. He prayed and dove deeper into his faith. He sat and thought about life.
Hungary confirmed to McGruder just how badly he wanted to be in the NBA. The experience reaffirmed his love for the game, and doubled as something he wouldn’t trade for the world while not wanting to endure it ever again. McGruder’s agent kept telling him NBA teams were watching. That he was on their radar. But it never seemed that way. Only six months removed from being named first-team All-Big 12, McGruder felt like his basketball relevance was already dangling by a fingernail.
… The most underappreciated aspects of Beltre’s mastery of the game were his longevity, his defensive prowess, and the parks in which he spent much of his career.
His 2,933 career games ranks just ahead of Robinson for 14th all-time and his 11,068 at-bats rank eighth. He was a major league regular by the time he was 19 — it was determined after he had made the majors that the Los Angeles Dodgers had improperly signed him a year too early, which resulted in several suspensions as well as the team being forced to pay Beltre damages — and was still an above average player at 39.
“I remember one time I was going to give him a day off, and we’re on the field and he just could not help himself,” Ron Washington, one of Beltre’s managers with the Texas Rangers.
Leading up to the 2018 NWSL College Draft, Latsko lined up options in case she wouldn’t be drafted by one of the nine teams. Latsko talked to teams overseas in Europe and other locations. However, thankfully for her, she didn’t need it.
Drafted by the Houston Dash with the 28th overall pick, Latsko joined a hefty group of Pennsylvania-based NWSL players. Even more specific, she joined the rankings of players from Western Pennsylvania that includes Meghan Klingenberg.
… [Jeff] Wojtowicz is completing his 33rd season as a Purple Raiders assistant coach. He has been a part of all 13 NCAA Division III national championship teams and was voted the nation’s Division III Assistant Coach of the Year by the American Football Coaches Association in 2006. In addition to coaching the safeties, he also serves as the athletic department’s compliance coordinator and has spent the past 22 years coaching the Purple Raiders men’s and women’s tennis teams.
“He wears a lot of hats,” current head football coach Vince Kehres said.
Wojtowicz also has something in common with the majority of his fellow assistants. Most of them are former Purple Raiders players.
… To enhance player’s love and development within sport, Martel and many before him promoted sampling of sports at a young age. Côté and colleagues’ developmental model of sport participation (DMSP) proposes that athletes pass through three stages of sport development; sampling, specialising and investment stages. The model is built upon a foundation of athletes participating in a variety of sports during the sampling years and a decreasing number of sports during the specialising and investment years. Deliberate play environments in young years when sampling prior to specialising “is closely linked to mastery or task focused climates that will ultimately foster motivation for sport” (Côté, 2009). This model also suggests “athletes engage in large quantities of deliberate play activities during the sampling years (activities that are less structured, designed to maximize inherent enjoyment, and regulated by flexible age-adapted rules) and do not focus on deliberate practice activities until the specializing and investment years”.
Holland and Woodcock’s research (2010) recognised that having persistent determination to improve while still enjoying sport participation is crucial for sporting success at specialisation stage. The qualities perceived crucial for elite youth participation include confidence, appropriate attentional focus, game sense and mental toughness (Holland, Woodcock, Cumming, & Duda, 2010). Developing expert status requires interest and motivation within sport to increase along with proficiency of skills, which is inline with USA Hockey’s mantra of “play, love and excel” meaning you must love the sport prior to mastering.
… sleep is sleep, right? So why do you need to track it?
Here’s what Michael Breus, PhD, DABSM, the clinical psychologist best known as “The Sleep Doctor,” says athletes in particular need to understand about the importance of tracking sleep.
While after-hours extracurricular activities on the road are commonly credited for NBA losses, a new study shows late-night tweeting has a direct correlation to a decrease in player shooting percentage.
Arrhythmia & Electrophysiology Review journal from
It has been demonstrated that heart rate variability (HRV) is predictive of all-cause and cardiovascular mortality using clinical ECG recordings. This is true for rest, exercise and ambulatory HRV clinical ECG device recordings in prospective cohorts. Recently, there has been a rapid increase in the use of mobile health technologies (mHealth) and commercial wearable fitness devices. Most of these devices use ECG or photo-based plethysmography and both are validated for providing accurate heart rate measurements. This offers the opportunity to make risk information from HRV more widely available. The physiology of HRV and the available technology by which it can be assessed has been summarised in Part 1 of this review. In Part 2 the association between HRV and risk stratification is addressed by reviewing the current evidence from data acquired by resting ECG, exercise ECG and medical ambulatory devices. This is followed by a discussion of the use of HRV to guide the training of athletes and as a part of fitness programmes. [full text]
Due to the differences in the mechanical properties of carbon fibres and polymer resins, the former can potentially detach from the latter under excessive stresses or fatigue. As a result, damage in carbon fibre composite structures can remain hidden below the surface, undetectable by visual inspection, potentially leading to catastrophic failure.
“Carbon fibre composites fail catastrophically, so you won’t see damage until the entire structure has failed,” says Chris Bowland, at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). “By knowing what’s going on within the composite, you can better judge its health and know if there is damage that needs to be repaired.”
As a gastroenterologist-in-training, here’s an innovation I could use: A “smart” toilet.
What do I mean by that? Well, I’m not referring to those comfort-focused toilets with warm-water washing, air drying, and heated seats have been ubiquitous in Japan (and at Google’s headquarters) for years. And I’m not talking about the hygiene-focused toilets that made recent news when Bill Gates announced a $200 million investment in toilet design to convert human waste into useable fertilizer and clean water. Although the latter is useful and needed, as the the improved sanitation could reduce infant deaths by 50,000 and save billions of dollars annually.
The smart toilet I’m referring to is a health-tracking toilet.
The dreaded bonk. Those who have experienced the physical shutdown of this energy-less state know how important carbs are to long distance running. It’s those stored carbohydrates, in the form of glycogen, that are primarily used by the body to fuel endurance exercise and because of that, ensuring adequate carb intake—i.e. carb loading—has become an important facet of training and a pre-race ritual for many athletes.
“Carb loading works and will continue to work. It works within a day,” says Dr. Asker Jeukendrup, one of the world’s experts in performance nutrition and author of Sport Nutrition: An Introduction to Energy Production and Performance. “We have known this since the 1960s that it is important to have full glycogen stores at the start of an important endurance event.”
But researchers wanted to go a step further: store carbs but also spare them by ramping up fat burning. Muscles then rely more on fat stores, a virtually inexhaustible source of energy for long-distance exercise, and save glycogen, lowering the chance of bonking. The body can only store enough glycogen for roughly two hours of exercise, but even the skinniest runner has enough fat to fuel over 100 hours of running.
Yes, the Cubs do have an actual position titled “run prevention coordinator,” and Tommy Hottovy‘s done such a good job in that role that he might be ready for a promotion. According to ESPN’s Jesse Rogers, who joined David Kaplan for a brief radio hit Wednesday afternoon, Hottovy is the top name to watch when it comes to replacing Jim Hickey as pitching coach.
… Chiarelli said he spoke with Hitchcock about two significant areas of the game that contributed to McLellan’s downfall: integration of young players and defensive structure that did not do goaltender
any favours.
There was clear friction there between coach and GM when it came to young players. It appeared Chiarelli and management were keen on giving No. 10 overall pick, already the Oilers’ best puck mover at 18, a longer look than 10 games.
McLellan sitting Bouchard for four straight games as a healthy scratch left Chiarelli little option. Ditto the demotions for first-round picks
and
after they bounced in and out of the lineup and saw limited minutes.
“That was a point of discussion,” Chiarelli said. “We talked about a number of things including integrating some youth.”
… For starters, it’s fairly clear at this point that the data revolution in football is ongoing. It’s not just rich teams like Barcelona, Liverpool, and Arsenal that are investing here. And it’s not even all the rich teams, to be honest – there are plenty of teams with money that haven’t touched serious data analytics. It’s the SMART teams that are now involved. Early mover advantage is serious. What I know now after working in this field dwarfs what I knew at the start, and even though our early work was pretty good, we’re far more capable of contributing useful insight across most of a football club than we were in 2013-14.
What the smart teams know now – with better data access and a lot of money to invest – may even dwarf what we know outside, or at least it probably will soon, largely because they get to incorporate our research alongside their own.
Organizations are awash in data — from geocoded transactional data to real-time website traffic to semantic quantifications of corporate annual reports. All these data and data sources only add value if put to use. And that typically means that the data is incorporated into a model. By a model, I mean a formal mathematical representation that can be applied to or calibrated to fit data.
Some organizations use models without knowing it. For example, a yield curve, which compares bonds with the same risk profile but different maturity dates, can be considered a model. A hiring rubric is also a kind of model. When you write down the features that make a job candidate worth hiring, you’re creating a model that takes data about the candidate and turns it into a recommendation about whether or not to hire that person. Other organizations develop sophisticated models. Some of those models are structural and meant to capture reality. Other models mine data using tools from machine learning and artificial intelligence.
The most sophisticated organizations — from Alphabet to Berkshire Hathaway to the CIA — all use models. In fact, they do something even better: they use many models in combination.