In a hockey-mad city with a history of riding standout young goalies to Stanley Cup Finals, former Everett Silvertips netminder Carter Hart has Philadelphia Flyers fans dreaming anew. But the bar of expectations is sure to rise on Hart after an impressive start.
There’s probably no better place, against no better team — and with the highest stakes — for Colts quarterback Andrew Luck to complete what has been the best comeback by any player in the NFL this season:
Nashville, Tennessee, against the Titans — a team that has never beaten him — in a win-and-in game in the final week of the regular season.
That’s because it was in Week 3 of the 2015 season at the Titans that Luck’s rise in the NFL took a drastic turn and the progress the franchise had made his first three seasons came to a halt. It was during that game Luck injured his right shoulder, which started almost three seasons of injuries for the quarterback. He missed 26 of the following 45 games.
Whether you want to beat your marathon PR or simply be able to do a 5K without stopping, runners of all levels are always looking for ways to improve their performance. And what better way to do that than rely on the latest research to help you out? There have been tons of scientific studies published in 2018 aimed at figuring out how people can get give their overall fitness a boost. Here are 11 with results that offer some serious benefits.
University of Memphis Athletics, Lamar Chance from
Athletes hear coaches all the time. In games. In practices. At team meetings. And maybe even in their sleep.
How about a coach talking to athletes while they’re walking just across campus? Crazy, but it’s happening for Tigers athletes with a new program that’s bringing together sports science and athletics at the University of Memphis.
Simply put, the program tracks bone loading using inertial sensors that can be worn around the ankles or wrists. The data gathered is used to help athletes learn how much force they are putting on their joints and how to bone load appropriately – even when walking to class.
… The information age has been a boon to quarterback development. What iPhone-dependent teens might lack in interpersonal skills, they often make up for in ability to absorb information.
“So a student-athlete comes in and he’s like: ‘I get what two-high safeties look like. I get what one-high safeties look like and that paints a picture for me.’ They’re learning that in the sixth grade. Eighth grade,” said Pac-12 Networks analyst Yogi Roth, who works with Dilfer on Elite 11 and was part of Pete Carroll’s staff at Southern California from 2005-09.
Dilfer called Tagovailoa, the MVP of the 2016 Elite 11 competition, an “incredible learner. Maybe the best I’ve been around.”
This commentary delivers a practical perspective on the current state of subjective training load (TL) monitoring, and in particular sessional ratings of perceived exertion, for performance enhancement and injury prevention. Subjective measures may be able to reflect mental fatigue, effort, stress, and motivation. These factors appear to be important moderators of the relationship TL has with performance and injury, and they also seem to differ between open and closed skill sports. As such, mental factors may affect the interaction between TL, performance, and injury in different sports. Further, modeling these interactions may be limited due to the assumption that an independent signal can adequately account for the performance or injury outcomes. An independent signal model does not accurately reflect training environments where multiple stressors (e.g., mechanical, emotional, nutritional) impact adaptations. Common issues with using subjective TL monitoring, including a lack of differentiation between biomechanical, physiological, and cognitive load, may be overcome by considering psychometric measurement best practices, finer graded scales, and differential ratings of perceived exertion. Methods of calculating TL, including different acute and chronic time periods, may also need to be individualized to different sports and potentially different individuals within the same sport. As TL monitoring is predominately a “chronic” decision-making tool, “acute” decision-making tools, e.g., subjective wellness and autonomic nervous system measures, should be combined in a bespoke multivariate model to aid sports coaches. A call to action is presented for future research on key issues associated with TL monitoring that will have relevance for practitioners in an applied setting. [full text]
… The Barcelona delegation was led by Javier Sobrino, head of strategy and innovation FC Barcelona, and Marcos Picalló.
“We are delighted to have signed an agreement with the University of Edinburgh. We recognise the expertise within Edinburgh’s Academy of Sport but also what the university can offer through professional learning,” said Mr Picalló.
Edinburgh is a world leader in online distance learning, with more than a million students engaged in digital courses. It delivered one of the first massive online football courses, Football More than a Game.
Imagine a future of limitless connections. Tiny devices implanted in your body relay health information to your smartphone. Young students operate high-definition microscopes at a university hundreds of miles away. Networks of underwater sensors provide real-time ocean data to scientists on shore.
A group of researchers at Northeastern isn’t just imagining this future—they’re designing it.
“We’re moving into a world in which everyday objects, and all the fabric of our daily lives, have intelligence,” said Tommaso Melodia, the William Lincoln Smith Chair Professor in Northeastern’s Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering. “This intelligence enables interactions between the cyber world and the physical world.”
… It is a fair bet Garmin will have something in store on the hardware front for CES 2019. It always does.
A watch in the Forerunner series that is rumored for a debut in the near future is the 245. An upgraded version of the 235, it is likely to resemble the 645 but with fewer features and performance metrics. A Forerunner 935 plus (or 945) is also a possibility. Fenix 6 is a bit of a long-shot considering we saw the release of the Fenix 5 Plus during the summer. But we may see something new in Garmin’s fitness tracker line.
Sports & Technology, the Dutch innovation cluster in the field of sports and vitality, will be in charge of a European innovation project. Five clusters from Spain, Hungary, Finland, Poland and the Netherlands will work together under the name Inno4Sports. The aim is to improve the performance of innovation clusters in the field of sport and vitality and thus to fight against inactivity – and for a more vital society. The total project size is around €1.5 million, 85% financed by Interreg Europe.
… Two of [Walker] Williams’ teammates, former Badgers fullback Austin Ramesh and former outside linebacker Jake Whalen, also quit football after suffering post-concussion symptoms. Whalen, who is still a UW student, quit the team in 2017. Ramesh, who was in line for a possible contract with the NFL’s Arizona Cardinals, walked away in May.
In all, UW-Madison student-athletes were diagnosed with 137 concussions from 2014 to 2018, according to records from an ongoing NCAA and U.S. Department of Defense concussion study obtained by the Wisconsin Center for Investigative Journalism under the state Open Records Law.
Key information — including athletes’ names, which sports they played and whether the brain injuries were sports-related — was omitted in records released by the UW. Officials cited exceptions for research, student privacy and personal health information in withholding the information.
Dan Carcillo retired from the NHL three years ago at the age of 30. During his nine-year career, he was one of hockey’s most notorious agitators. You loved him when he was wearing your team’s jersey and loved to hate him when he wasn’t. But now the player who earned nine career suspensions is trying to make a different kind of impact. He is speaking out about the dangers of concussions and calling on the NHL to do more to protect and educate its players.
The NHL reached a tentative non-class settlement in November in a lawsuit brought by more than 100 retired players, including Carcillo. The lawsuit alleged NHL negligence in the treatment of head injuries and also claimed that the league withheld information on the long-term risks of head trauma associated with playing hockey. The agreement included payments that cannot exceed $18.92 million in total, but did not require the NHL to admit liability for any of the plaintiffs’ claims. Carcillo says he will opt out to continue his fight for accountability.
It was a question about soccer that got Philip Bayly interested in brain injuries.
Bayly, a mechanical engineer at Washington University in St. Louis, was approached by several doctors who wanted advice about some young soccer players they were treating.
“They said, ‘Well, we’ve got some kids who have concussions and they want to know if they can go back to play. And we don’t know what’s happening to their head when they’re heading a soccer ball,’ ” Bayly recalls.
Does a header have a big effect or a small one? The doctors thought Bayly might have the answer. [audio, 2:52]
This blog post provides highlights and a full written transcript from the panel, “Data Science Versus Engineering: Does It Really Have To Be This Way?” with Amy Heineike, Paco Nathan, and Pete Warden at Domino HQ. Topics discussed include the current state of collaboration around building and deploying models, tension points that potentially arise, as well as practical advice on how to address these tension points.
Harvard Business Review, Brad DeWees and Julia A. Minson from
Management teams are responsible for making sense of complex questions. Maybe it’s estimating how much a market will grow next year, or finding the best strategy to beat a competitor. One popular approach for navigating these questions is turning to the “wisdom of crowds” – asking many people for their opinions and suggestions, and then combining them to form the best overall decision. Evidence suggests that the combination of multiple, independent judgments is often more accurate than even an expert’s individual judgment.
But our research identifies a hidden cost to this approach. When someone has already formed an opinion, they’re far less likely to be receptive to the opinions of others – and this can lead to evaluating other people and their ideas more negatively. Fortunately, our work also suggests a few ways to minimize this cost.