… With one year of college eligibility remaining, Jackson bet on himself by declaring for the draft. The NFL’s college advisory committee did not grade him as a first- or second-round pick after the 2018 season, implying he should stay in school.
However, intrigue about where he will be selected was heightened after he was named South MVP of the Senior Bowl in January and ran a 4.59-second 40-yard dash at February’s NFL combine.
“He’s got some unbelievably unique traits,” said former NFL quarterback Jordan Palmer, who has been preparing Jackson for the draft. “I have no idea what round he’s gonna go.”
Jeremy Wolf loved being a professional baseball player. The New York Mets were his favorite team as a child, and it was a dream fulfilled when they selected him in the 31st round in 2016.
The reality was something else. From first pitch to the final out was a blast, but the time between games was filled with anxiety. His meager signing bonus wasn’t delivered until after his first season ended. In the meantime, he needed money for rent, cleats, bats, car payments, food and more — an impossible amount to cover on his $1,100 per month salary. Then he hurt his back, was cut 16 months after he signed, and left baseball with a couple thousand dollars in credit card debt.
“It’s really great to play minor league baseball,” Wolf said. “It’s an honor and a privilege. But I can’t eat privilege.”
Roberto Luongo won 227 games during his 20s. He won 262 more games during his 30s.
And now, his 40s await.
Florida’s veteran goalie — the oldest netminder and third-oldest player to appear in the NHL this season — will celebrate his milestone 40th birthday on Thursday. He’s tentatively scheduled to start the Panthers’ season-finale on Saturday night. Then it’ll be time for Luongo to begin his rite of spring: figuring out whether to keep playing.
“I don’t really want to make any decisions over the course of a season,” said Luongo, who would be the 20th goalie to play an NHL game as a 40something. “Obviously, there’s a lot of emotions involved with that and you want to make sure that you make the right decision for all parties involved. I still love to play the game, and we’ll see where it goes.”
Inspired by her siblings, senior Melissa Lord developed a love for the game of tennis and found a home at Stanford. In her final season, she’s seeking a third championship ring after clinching the Cardinal’s 2018 NCAA crown.
… UMass has already extended scholarship offers to three players who competed at the combine, and it’s highly possible they could target others as well. Linebacker Neche Ugwuozor, Hugo Klages and Liridon Mujezinovic all received offers from the Minutemen, with at least one (Klages) potentially eligible to begin playing this fall.
The push is a fascinating one from an independent UMass program that often struggles to compete with more well-known programs (read: all of them) across the FBS. Perhaps targeting pure potential in Europe is a path to success when facing tough schedules and facility and fan challenges.
Soccer is an increasingly popular sport for children and adolescents in the United States. Little is known about participation patterns related to sport specialization. Purpose:
To investigate soccer participation levels and sport specialization characteristics among youth soccer athletes. Study Design:
Cross-sectional study. Methods:
Adolescent athletes aged between 12 and 18 years completed an online survey addressing participant demographics, sports and soccer participation history, and level of specialization. Descriptive analyses characterized participation, while chi-square and Kruskal-Wallis tests assessed the influence of specialization, sex, and grade on survey variables. Results:
Overall, 83.7% of 746 respondents participated in an organized soccer league outside of school, and 37% played in multiple leagues concurrently. Nearly three-quarters of respondents trained in soccer more than 8 months of the year, with those who participated in club soccer being more likely to train more than 8 months of the year. More respondents were classified as high specialization (37.5%), followed by moderate (35.6%) and low (28.6%) specialization. No differences between sexes were noted for level of specialization or quitting other sports to specialize in soccer, but male athletes were more likely to train more than 8 months per year compared with female athletes. Respondents in older grades (9th-10th and 11th-12th grades) were more likely to be highly specialized and quit other sports to focus on soccer. No differences between grade levels were found among respondents training more than 8 months per year. Conclusion:
The study findings suggest that many youth soccer athletes participated in multiple teams or leagues at the same time and trained more than 8 months of the year. Characteristics including participation on a club team, level of specialization, and male sex were associated with a greater likelihood of exceeding the 8-month training recommendation. [full text]
The purpose of this study was to determine the effect of in-season demands, such as games, travel, and the subsequent fatigue related to these demands, on lower-body power (LBP) in collegiate hockey players. Two jump protocols (countermovement and squat jumps) were used to calculate LBP. Twenty-seven NCAA (National Collegiate Athletic Association) Division I male hockey players (age, 21.9 ± 1.4 years; height, 176.7 ± 6.5 cm; body mass, 81.4 ± 7.9 kg) participated in the study that spanned 18 weekly sessions. At each session, participants completed an 8-item fatigue questionnaire, which provided a cumulative numerical value for fatigue (total score of fatigue [TSF]), before performing maximal jumps on a contact mat. General linear modeling was conducted to compare dependent variables (jump height, relative LBP, TSF) across weekly sessions. Pearson product-moment correlation coefficients were calculated to examine the relationship between jump height and LBP across the jump protocols, as well as to examine the relationship of TSF with all measured variables. Jump height and LBP declined throughout the season with greater effect of travel observed following the longest travel sequence (p ≤ 0.05; η ≥ 0.60). Differences in TSF were observed from baseline (p ≤ 0.037), and a large effect was seen for away trips that included air travel (d ≥ 1.35). Total score of fatigue had a negative correlation with jump height and power during both jumps (r ≤ -0.742; p < 0.001). In conclusion, the in-season demands of ice hockey resulted in significant reductions in LBP throughout a hockey season, and the 8-item fatigue questionnaire is a sensitive tool reflective of athletic performance measures.
Researchers at Binghamton University, State University of New York, have developed skin-inspired electronics to conform to the skin, allowing for long-term, high-performance, real-time wound monitoring in users.
“We eventually hope that these sensors and engineering accomplishments can help advance healthcare applications and provide a better quantitative understanding in disease progression, wound care, general health, fitness monitoring and more,” said Matthew Brown, a PhD student at Binghamton University.
Global open innovation is the key framework to implement Barça’s innovation strategy. The Innovation Hub prioritises sharing and incorporating knowledge with third parties and dispersing it to an even larger audience. One example is the standardisation of match data created by the Hub and shared with FIFA. This openness can help elevate football via analytics, and the hope is that the industry will use this type of open standard.
“Our mission is to become the biggest sports innovation centre in the world,” Sobrino explained, describing how the Innovation Hub looks to universities, research centres, hospitals and other third parties. “On the business side we also count on start-ups, and we contribute to develop different start-ups in different fields.”
When Eliud Kipchoge of Kenya crossed the finish line at the Berlin Marathon in September 2018, he smashed the world record with a time of 2 hours 1 minute 39 seconds. Just a few days before Kipchoge’s win, scientists identified a new factor that might have contributed to humankind’s capacity for endurance: the long-ago loss of a gene called CMAH.
Studies suggest that a mutation caused humans to lose function of the CMAH gene two to three million years ago—around the same time humans seem to have developed an increased capacity for endurance running. Since CMAH is involved in making a sugar called Neu5Gc, humans, unlike most other mammals, no longer have this sugar. Building on previous work led by study author Ajit Varki, a physician-scientist at the University of California San Diego, a new study suggests that losing the CMAH gene and Neu5Gc sugar might have given ancient humans an endurance running boost.
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New York Yankees players take part in batting practice during a workout Wednesday, March 27, 2019, in New York. The Yankees host the Baltimore Orioles on opening day Thursday. (AP Photo/Frank Franklin II)
Four-man outfields. High-tech anti-spying rules. A starting pitcher facing just one batter in a playoff game.
But beyond all the shifts, analytics and social media outreach, here’s the best way to tell Major League Baseball has zoomed into a new era: There’s not a single active player left from the 20th century.
Not one.
Adrian Beltre and Bartolo Colon were the last, the Elias Sports Bureau said.
The devaluation of older NFL veterans continues. It has been trending for years, fueled by inexpensive rookie contracts that are cost-controlled for four years—the most valuable part of their careers, and often all they ever see. Perhaps the most glaring example of this trend is a trade market that has cratered for still-productive veteran players.
Players such as Michael Bennett, Robert Quinn, DeSean Jackson, Marcus Gilbert and Jordan Howard have been traded in the last couple of weeks for low round draft picks, some of which won’t even convey until 2020. Other recently productive and highly paid veterans such as Malik Jackson, Justin Houston, Dwayne Allen, Isaiah Crowell and Vinny Curry could not even muster a low draft pick, as each were released before signing with new teams. These players are being released or offered as part of “ham sandwich” trades, with teams getting anything they can rather than releasing them outright. Why is this happening?
Bianca Andreescu is really good, right now. Still a few months away from her 19th birthday, she has collected her first Premier Mandatory title, beaten a few top-ten players (including Angelique Kerber twice), and climbed to 7th in the Elo ratings. She is the only teenager in the WTA top 30 and one of only five in the top 100.
The burning question about Andreescu isn’t how good she is, it’s how good she could become. It’s easy to look at the best 18-year-old in the game and imagine her becoming the best 19-year-old, best 20-year-old, and so on, until she’s at her peak age and she’s the best player in the world, period. As the sport in general has gotten older, teenage champions have become rarer, so she seems all the more destined for success. But it isn’t that simple: Prospects get injured, opponents learn how to beat them, they peak early and fizzle out. Tennis history is littered with teen starlets who failed to reach their potential.
Behavioral Scientist, Cailin O’Connor and James Owen Weatherall from
… In the model developed by Bala and Goyal, social ties can have a remarkable influence on how communities of scientists come to believe things. But the original model assumed that what each scientist cares about is truth. In some cases though, like the Semmelweis case, people are prepared to ignore good evidence to better fit in or conform with those around them. In that case, as we saw, gentlemen in Vienna were unwilling to go outside the norm to adopt Semmelweis’s practice.
How might a feature like a bias towards conformity influence communities of physicians or scientists?
