It was 2011. Ivo Karlovic was already an ATP Tour veteran with graying temples, and his close friend and former coach Tarik Benhabiles was talking about Karlovic’s serve, and his future.
“He has a huge weapon,” Benhabiles told me. “He can play until he’s 40 years old, no problem.”
Kudos to Benhabiles, who once helped Andy Roddick become a force, for knowing his tennis. But, above all, kudos to Karlovic, the 6-foot-11 Croatian, for finding a way to fight and serve through everything life has thrown at him.
It has hardly been “no problem,” but Karlovic turned 40 on Feb. 28, and he is definitely still playing.
All told, Marcel Schmelzer must have spent hours scouring the video, searching for some sort of tell, some kind of clue.
Schmelzer, Borussia Dortmund’s long-serving left back, has performed the ritual 16 times over the last decade, building up an unparalleled expertise in the field. He has pored over countless clips. He was hoping to find something, anything that would give him a little advance warning, a bit of a head start.
“I tried to find a pattern,” he said. Thus far, though, he has drawn a blank. Even after all these years, even after all those hours of study, even after all those games, the defender who knows Arjen Robben better than anyone else still cannot work out when, exactly, he is going to cut inside.
… While next summer’s Olympics might be more than a year away, this volleyball star has already been preparing to be the healthiest she can be in order to serve another career-topping win.
So, what does it take to get ready for the Olympics? She says it’s all about preparation.
“Preparation in life is just key. It’s about consistently showing up to make the right choices. I pride myself on preparation on the court, in life as a mommy, as a working woman,” Walsh Jennings told Healthline.
Any questions about Jason Peters and his return to the Eagles’ offensive line in 2019 have been answered as the team announced on Monday that Peters signed a one-year deal to play in Philadelphia for his 16th NFL season. A nine-time Pro Bowl player and six-time Associated Press All-Pro performer, Peters is expected to line up at left tackle for his 11th season as an Eagle.
A remarkable career continues at the age of 37.
“Jason is not a normal human being. He’s freaky,” Howie Roseman said of Peters last month at the NFL Scouting Combine in Indianapolis. “He’s a first-ballot Hall of Famer as a player and as a person.”
… Those at the top choose players by shrinking the pool of potential picks as much as possible and by spending a true lifetime developing educated hunches and theories. They succeed by understanding what they don’t know: namely, how or why 11 people work in concert together when the ball is snapped. An NFL team on the field is an organism, which is why baseball-style analytics don’t work. There isn’t a duel baked into the center of the game that can be studied. There isn’t a Moneyball solution waiting on a Wall Street quant to get rid of all the scratching and spitting. This is more about human behavior and tolerance for pain. At every moment on a football field, 22 X’s and O’s are in constant motion. Actually, 22 human beings are in motion, and that’s where the problems begin. The combine treats players like animals, which they aren’t. If they were, all this would be easy.
Researchers at the cutting edge of the thoroughbred business believe speed itself is less a predictor of future success than certain measurements, like body length-to-stride ratio. Jay Kilgore of Data Track, who sells information to investor syndicates, has a theory about the physical traits winning horses have in common. He can record a 2-year-old horse run and, after checking about two dozen measurements and angles, tell with a reasonable degree of accuracy whether that horse will have a chance to be great at 3 and 4.
But horses aren’t people. Human beings walk through the world with fear, anxiety and doubt. Human beings self-destruct, nearly all of us at one time or another.
… As some of these things are often hard to talk about and we sometimes don’t have a lot of information around them, the first step in understanding your female athletes is opening a dialogue.
In her past roles as the Head of Physiology at the Scottish Institute of Sport, and the Director of Sports Science at The U.S. Ski and Snowboard Association (USSA), Sue Robson sat down with high performing and gold medal winning female athletes to do just that.
During these conversations, Sue realized this was actually the first time as an elite sports professional someone had had a conversation with them to go through their menstrual history, worked with them on performance intelligence and started working through information gathering with a view to improving their understanding of themselves and their performance.
… Only 36 percent of youth coaches are trained in effective motivational techniques, according to 2017 data from the Sports & Fitness Industry Association. Those numbers are even lower among coaches in basketball (31 percent) and soccer (28 percent).
What if there was a way to systematically measure youth coaches by personal development of their athletes and not wins and losses? Sports provide such a unique opportunity to help youth develop physical, social, emotional and cognitive skills, yet too often this golden chance to build kids up gets squandered in our hypercompetitive sports culture.
“I think we have to redefine what the purpose of coaching is,” University of Maryland men’s soccer coach Sasho Cirovski said. “We have to go back to the teaching and caring and serving portion of coaching. Now, it’s more of a transactional job.”
The beginning of the year is often a time for fresh starts. It marks a new period — a distinct point between the past and the future — which motivates people to set new goals and strive for self-improvement.
But what if you were already doing pretty well? Would a fresh start still be motivating? Or might it actually set you back?
I explored these questions in the context of work performance. Across one field study and three laboratory experiments, I found that a fresh start on people’s performance records — what I call a “performance reset” — affected their motivation and future performance differently, depending on their past performance. Those with lower performance became more motivated and improved after their performance was reset, while stronger performers found resets demotivating.
English Institute of Sport (EIS) national director Nigel Walker believes that the organisation is now among the leading national sports science and medicine institutions in the world, and can point to an enviable track record of elite performance success as proof.
Heads have been turned around the world by Britain’s Olympic medal-winning excellence, going back to 2008 in Beijing, followed by the home games of 2012, and then even better results in Rio in 2016. Other countries want to know the keys to success, says Walker.
“It’s interesting that when we were established, the first national director, a woman called Wilma Shakespear, had been working in the Australian system before she came across and set up the EIS in 2002.
As a cell biologist, Sundar Balasubramanian never forgot his rural southern Indian roots, or the traditional practices his uncle, the village healer, exposed him to. Today, as a researcher and assistant professor at the Medical University of South Carolina, Balasubramanian has turned his focus back to those roots — specifically, to pranayama, a deep-breathing relaxation technique. He’s showing that this ancient yoga practice is about more than relaxing — it can change us at the cellular level.
Q: What made you examine this technique through a cellular biology lens?
A: In 2005, I noticed while I was practicing pranayama, I was producing so much saliva that I was almost drooling. I wondered why and what the overall impact of that was. This led me and my team to study whether increased saliva production was a common response to the practice, and we found that it was.
Fraunhofer Institute for Organic Electronics, Electron Beam and Plasma Technology from
Just recently, the Mobile World Congress, the showcase for brand new electronics, came to an end in Barcelona and once again brought with it a wave of overwhelming innovations from the wearables sector. However, all new products require one thing – a powerful and reliable power supply. The recently launched Smart2Go project, funded by the EU as part of the Horizon 2020 programme, focuses precisely on this challenge – the development of an autonomous energy supply platform. At the Wearable Europe Show 2019 the Fraunhofer FEP as project coordinator will present the project and its competencies and objectives at booth no. P12, 10 – 11 April 2019 in Berlin, Germany.
… “Our work presents an important step toward the practical realization of self-powered, human-integrated technologies,” Wu said.
The Purdue team invented a liquid-metal-inclusion based triboelectric nanogenerator, called LMI-TENG. Triboelectric energy harvesting transducers – devices which help conserve mechanical energy and turn it into power – are predicted to be a $480 million market by 2028, according to IDTechEx.
The LMI-TENG can harvest and sense the biomechanical signals from the body and use those to help power and direct technological devices. The LMI-TENG consists of a layer of liquid metal embedded functional silicone sandwiched between two Ecoflex layers.
… It’ll be interesting to look back in a few years’ time and see how processes have changed from a scouting perspective as the sample of youth data grows, and a new generation of coaches at the helm of the sport. With such a different pathway in football compared with traditional US sports, this is an area where football can shape its own analytics future.
While in the next five years, clubs will undoubtedly progress at different rates (just as we have seen over the past five), the key areas that will become the norm in the context of data and analytics informing player progress are likely to surround loan management and the provision of appropriate playing experiences. While this is taking place to a certain degree, this currently stops at confirming a team for said player, rather than exploring how a loan impacts their future development.
This will extend to the number of players that turn professional with their clubs, rather than being sold on or dropping out of the game. A club that understands what the modern footballer looks like now and in five or so year’s time in their given league will be able to tailor an academy programme to develop players with a skillset geared towards this goal.
In this episode of the Inside the Strategy Room podcast, partner Tim Koller and Dan Lovallo, a professor of business strategy at the University of Sydney, and Sean Brown discuss how executives can use a set of reference cases to quickly build an “outside view” that will help debias their forecasts. They also talk through who is best placed to deploy this debiasing technique and the outside view can become part of your ongoing strategy process. [audio, 22:05]