Grizzlies general manager Chris Wallace says Chandler Parsons has chosen to continue rehabilitation in Los Angeles out of the options Memphis gave the 30-year-old forward.
“We will continue to monitor Chandler’s progress,” Wallace said in a statement Sunday night.
Wallace issued his statement just hours after ESPN.com reported that the Grizzlies and Parsons had agreed to a split, with Parsons leaving Memphis while his agent, James Dunleavy, and the team negotiate an end to his contract.
… FIFA’s Article 19 of its Regulations on the Status and Transfer of Players prohibits youth players from registering with a club outside their home country until they are 18. The regulation allows three exceptions: If a player lives within 50 kilometers of a country’s border and his desired club is within 50 kilometers of the same border; if a player is moving from one European country to the other (or has a passport from a European Union country) and is at least 16; or if a player’s family has moved to a different country for reasons not linked to soccer.
Lederman didn’t satisfy any of those criteria. FIFA began investigating, and Tammy recalled that the family was made aware of the problem soon after they relocated to Barcelona. But it wasn’t until 2014, when Ben was 14, that FIFA dropped the hammer and ruled that the Blaugrana had violated the statute relating to 10 youth players, including Lederman. Among the penalties, the players involved were forbidden from playing games for Barcelona youth teams, though they were allowed to train. For one year, Lederman was in limbo, consigned to practices and the occasional friendly, as the club fought FIFA’s decision.
“It was a very difficult situation because me and my family, we sacrificed our lives for this and to not be able to play every week, it was difficult for everyone,” Lederman says.
… And then there is the question of the depth of the European squads. The youngster has earned a move as a result of promising performances. He leaves an environment in which he was considered something special, and goes to one in which he is just another among many. His confidence might suffer.
Some of this surely applies to Marlos Moreno, the young Colombian support striker acquired by Manchester City in 2016. Moreno is currently in limbo — and as the Colombian press have pointed out, his career has been a case of 10 months of success followed by three years of frustration.
It is easy to forget the triumphs he had in those 10 months. Between his league debut for Atletico Nacional of Medellin in September 2015 and his sale to City the following August, there was no mountain he could not climb.
… Over the last three years, the Red Sox have helped pitchers improve at the big league level. They’ve developed their pitching infrastructure — both how they scout and work with pitchers — to get more out of their inventory of arms, part of the reason why they were able to add the finishing pieces to a championship team last year, and part of the reason why they feel they are well-positioned moving forward, regardless of the final shape of their staff.
“We feel like we’re in a good place. I feel like we’ve come a long way in the last couple years,” said assistant GM Brian O’Halloran. “It’s systemic.
“Pitching is a constant adjustment. I think our guys, our coaches, are positioned well. They have the expertise to figure out how to get the most out of guys.”
… In a two-month study involving 40 warfighters, the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) will employ IncludeHealth’s equipment and cloud-based platform at its Signature Tracking for Optimized Nutrition and Training (STRONG) lab at the Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.
AFRL STRONG lab director Dr Adam Strang said: “We are interested in applying IncludeHealth’s technology to develop and validate next-generation, mission-specific fitness protocols resulting in objective, data-driven, and evidenced-based duty qualifying scores.
“We also see powerful applications to remotely issue individualised training and rehab protocols across the Air Force network without the need for human proxy.”
Aim: Hamstring muscle injury is the main injury related to sports requiring sprint acceleration. In addition, hamstring muscles have been reported to play a role in horizontal force production during sprint acceleration performance. The aim of the present study was to analyze (i) the determinants of horizontal force production and (ii) the role of hip extensors, and hamstring muscles in particular, for horizontal force production during repeated sprint-induced fatigue conditions.
Method: In this experimental laboratory setting study including 14 sprint-trained male athletes, we analyzed (i) the changes in sprint mechanics, peak torque of the knee and hip extensors and flexors, muscle activity of the vastus lateralis, rectus femoris, biceps femoris, and gluteus, and sagittal plane lower limb motion, before and after twelve 6-s sprints separated by 44 s rest on an instrumented motorized treadmill, and (ii) the determinants of horizontal force production (FH) during the sprint acceleration in a fatigue state (after 12 sprints).
Results: The repeated-sprint protocol induced a decrease in maximal power output (Pmax) [-17.5 ± 8.9%; effect size (ES): 1.57, large] and in the contact-averaged horizontal force component (FH) (-8.6 ± 8.4%; ES: 0.86, moderate) but not meaningful changes in the contact-averaged resultant (total) force (FTot) (-3.4 ± 2.9%; ES: 0.55, small) and vertical force component (FV) (-3.1 ± 3.2%; ES: 0.49, small). A decrease was found in concentric peak torque of the knee flexors and extensors and in gluteus and vastus lateralis muscle activity during entire swing and end-of-swing phase. An increase was found in contact time and swing time, while step frequency and knee speed before ground contact decreased. Muscular determinants associated with FH and its decrease after the repeated-sprint protocol were concentric peak torque of the hip extensors (p = 0.033) and a decrease in gluteus maximus activity at the end-of-swing (p = 0.007), respectively.
Conclusion: Sprint-induced fatigue lead to changes in horizontal force production muscular determinants: hamstring muscle seems not to have the same role than in non-fatigue condition. Horizontal force production seems to be more dependent on the hip extensors and gluteus maximus function. Given the fatigue-induced decrease in hamstring muscle strength, we can hypothesize that muscle compensatory and kinematic strategies reported in a fatigued state could be an adaptation to allow/maintain performance and a protective adaptation to limit hamstring muscles constraints. [full text]
The Chula Vista Elite Athlete Training Center is a pretty quiet place, short on distractions and attractions – though as its name would suggest, packed to the gills with top-class modern sports facilities and technology.
That’s exactly why Gregg Berhalter selected it as the site of his first event in charge of the US national team, gathering his January camp squad to stay in spartan dormitories and immerse themselves in his new project 24/7.
“We mixed up the roommates on purpose so that the guys are getting to know other people; some of them are bunking four in a room. And that’s all part of it,” Berhalter explained to reporters on Monday, the first full day of this month’s workouts. “The most important thing we can focus on right now is building the group cohesion and our style of play, and working on that. And there’s no better place to do it than here.
During the annual Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Sports Innovation Lab, a market intelligence firm for sportstech, launched is first-ever Leadership Boards for the sports industry.
Each Leadership Board addresses a specific challenge facing sportstech and then convenes thought leaders to collaboratively solve for the issue, under the independent guidance of Sports Innovation Lab. The inaugural Leadership Board is focusing on athlete data, with the goal of creating measurement standards that athletes, teams, leagues, and sportstech companies can integrate into future initiatives.
The members of the Athlete Data Leadership Board were publicly unveiled at the CES Sports Zone ahead of their first board meeting, and include members from leagues, tech, and academia.
arXiv, Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition; Wenbo Li et al. from
Existing pose estimation approaches can be categorized into single-stage and multi-stage methods. While a multi-stage architecture is seemingly more suitable for the task, the performance of current multi-stage methods is not as competitive as single-stage ones. This work studies this issue. We argue that the current unsatisfactory performance comes from various insufficient design in current methods. We propose several improvements on the architecture design, feature flow, and loss function. The resulting multi-stage network outperforms all previous works and obtains the best performance on COCO keypoint challenge 2018. The source code will be released.
Big-money quarterbacks like Kirk Cousins, Matt Ryan, and Aaron Rodgers are sitting at home during the playoffs, while the Rams, Chiefs, and Texans have built contenders around young starters still on their rookie deals. The lesson is obvious if NFL teams pay attention.
… the spread still took hold eventually, initially because it actually made it easier to run the football, thus making it more attractive to the big schools. With the RPO, offenses could start to force defenses to keep defenders out of the box and set up their OL and RBs to dominate as they preferred.
However that has created three crucial enemies that are killing the idea of the bell cow RB.
… We recently explored some of the biggest reasons behind teams’ sudden distaste for paying power hitters. But more than that, teams are gaining the upper hand in negotiations, citing fiscal responsibility in holding the line on contracts, in many cases forcing players to settle for one-year deals.
When those one-year deals expire, those players all go back on the open market, further cluttering the landscape with talent and giving teams even more leverage to wait on, say, a relief pitcher or second baseman. When a dozen teams jump into some kind of rebuild all at the same time, the list of motivated buyers shrinks even further, throwing even more leverage teams’ way.
What do the people who run front offices have to say about some of the market’s shifting trends? We polled a number of different executives to find some additional answers.
Over the past two decades, single-value basketball metrics have been popping up like weeds. The first composite stat to really take hold was John Hollinger’s Player Efficiency Rating (PER), which has been followed by further advancements on the box score along with metrics that harness plus-minus data, like ESPN’s Real Plus-Minus (RPM). Besides feeling like alphabet soup, what do these all-in-one stats really measure, and how valuable are they for player analysis?
To investigate this, I grabbed the following metrics for every player-season since 1997 (unless otherwise noted) in attempt to glean value and a deeper understanding of these numbers.
Data collaboratives are partnerships to share and use data for the public good. They require partnerships between organizations that have data, can derive insights from the data, and take some action or make a decision that is informed by those insights. They often involve collaborations between companies, university researchers, non-profit organizations, and government agencies.
Much of the excitement about data collaboratives stems from the flood of data from the private sector, such as social media data, mobile Call Data Records, satellite imagery, and e-commerce transactions. There are many scenarios in which private sector data can be reused to create additional public value by helping to solve some important societal problem.
… Though it sounds counterintuitive, more dashboards often make people less informed and less aligned. A company with a few highly-monitored dashboards can focus on consistent core metrics that drive the success of that business. A company with hundreds of dashboards can’t focus on anything. Organizational goals are diluted, and people instead pay attention to personalized pictures of their own corner of the company.
Moreover, “the right dashboards” are a moving target. No matter how many you build, the requests for dashboards won’t stop. There are always new products, new marketing campaigns, and new business goals that “need” new dashboards. As long as your company is growing or changing, there will be new metrics to monitor.