He vowed not to take his opportunity for granted — and perhaps that helps to explain Xander Bogaerts’s perspective now on his 10 years in the Red Sox organization, and his status for years to come as a franchise linchpin.<
“I don’t think anyone from Aruba had played in the playoffs and I have two rings. Coming from a little island, all those obstacles you have to beat — most guys are signed and released — that’s where I go, ‘Wow, you came this far from such a small place,’ ” said Xander Bogaerts. “Sometimes you can’t believe you made it this far.”
… playing into your 40s isn’t easy and Rodgers is well aware of that. During the same interview, the 35-year-old quarterback was asked if he actually thought he could play that long.
“We’ll see. I envision playing as long as my body feels good and I have the love for the game that I do right now,” Rodgers said. “That still fuels me and is still a passion, and I still love the daily grind and the practice and the preparation. If I can give everything to a team in that manner and my body feels good, I’m going to keep rolling.”
Innovation, or progressive thought, or disruption – heck, whatever you want to call it – has done some remarkable things to baseball’s landscape over two decades. It has rendered entire roles obsolete, changed the way the game is played, the way it looks, the way it’s mastered.
But there’s one paradigm that analytics and optimization cannot topple: The ace reigns supreme, and always will.
Justin Verlander threw his third career no-hitter Sunday against the Toronto Blue Jays, powering through a young and overmatched lineup on 120 pitches and racking up 14 strikeouts. It was a startling performance, all the more remarkable given his Houston Astros could not score a run for him until rookie Abraham Toro hit a two-run home run to break a scoreless tie in the top of the ninth inning.
Members of the Nebraska softball team have discussed boycotting the start of fall practice on Sunday, according to a student-athlete advocacy group supporting the players.
The revelation came in a statement released by College Athlete Advocacy Initiative that criticizes Nebraska’s handling of accusations against coach Rhonda Revelle, who was reinstated Sunday after a two-month investigation into her treatment of players. The CAAI statement accuses Revelle and others in the program of persistent verbal and psychological abuse.
You sit in a job interview, nervously sweating through every question thrown at you, and then comes the hardest one of all: “What is your worst quality?” Being a perfectionist is regularly thought of as a good answer – you might hope your fastidiousness will help you secure the role. But is perfectionism actually a good trait?
To be a healthy and successful human, you have to learn from your mistakes; and to be able to learn from your mistakes, you have to be comfortable with making them. But in general, perfectionists are not. They tend to avoid making mistakes by sticking to tasks they feel most comfortable with or overreacting to obstacles, feeling more guilt, shame and anger when they do make mistakes.
Perfectionism in on the rise and has been linked by to a whole host of mental health problems including depression, anxiety and self-harm. [video, 3:06]
SportRxiv Preprints, Sam Robertson and David Joyce from
Sport science’s accelerated uptake of technology and the resultant data growth has enabled new light to be shed on many of its most complex problems. However, this in turn has led to varying interpretation of these problems and often disagreement across sport science disciplines. This article proposes that revisiting the theory of bounded rationality as it pertains to applied sport science can provide a framework for understanding, accepting and utilising this complexity in judgement and decision-making contexts. Bounded rationality contends that individuals who intend to make rational decisions are bound to make merely satisfactory choices, rather than maximising or optimising ones. Here, the theory is dis-cussed with respect to how it enables for differences in human judgements to be elucidated based on inter-individual variations in information sampling and processing. As data generated from technology in sport continues to grow, these differences are likely to continually increase. The systematic nature of the differences between humans and machines are also explained. Adoption of a bounded rationality approach in applied sports environments can help to understand why differences exist in the interpretation of some of sport science’s most complex problems, as well as provide a framework for progressing a collective understanding of these areas.
There’s a not-so-secret epidemic happening on high school and college campuses: hazing. Although the hazing culture is condemned, sadly, it’s common.
In the National Study of Student Hazing, 55 percent of college students involved in clubs, teams, and organizations experience hazing. The same study found that “for many students who step onto a college campus and choose to join a team or organization, hazing is not a new experience.” In fact, 47 percent of the respondents report experiencing at least one hazing behavior in high school.
ShotTracker LLC is relishing another first: securing the first conference waiver from the NCAA that allows coaches to use electronically transmitted data on the bench during games.
“Just having the waiver is a significant opportunity,” ShotTracker co-founder and COO Davyeon Ross said.
The NCAA granted the waiver to the Mountain West Conference, which piloted ShotTracker’s basketball analytics technology during the 2018-2019 regular season. The pilot’s success spurred the conference to sign a deal with the Merriam-based company to install ShotTracker’s sensors and tech at 23 practice and game facilities at 11 schools in the conference, which includes both men’s and women’s programs. Now coaches in the conference will be able to use the company’s technology during practice and at games.
It opens the door for other conferences to receive waivers, he said, and several already have submitted the paperwork requesting the use of ShotTracker’s solution during games.
University of California-Los Angeles, UCLA Samueli Newsroom from
UCLA engineers have made major improvements on their design of an optical neural network –a device inspired by how the human brain works – that can identify objects or process information at the speed of light. … The technology was first introduced by the UCLA group in 2018. The system uses a series of 3D-printed wafers or layers with uneven surfaces that transmit or reflect incoming light – they’re reminiscent in look and effect to frosted glass. These layers have tens of thousands of pixel points – essentially these are artificial neurons that form an engineered volume of material that computes all-optically. Each object will have a unique light pathway through the 3D fabricated layers.
arXiv, Computer Science > Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition; Tal Hakim, Ilan Shimshoni from
Assessment of motion quality has recently gained high demand in a variety of domains. The ability to automatically assess subject motion in videos that were captured by cheap devices, such as Kinect cameras, is essential for monitoring clinical rehabilitation processes, for improving motor skills and for motion learning tasks. The need to pay attention to low-level details while accurately tracking the motion stages, makes this task very challenging. In this work, we introduce A-MAL, an automatic, strong motion assessment learning algorithm that only learns from properly-performed motion videos without further annotations, powered by a deviation time-segmentation algorithm, a parameter relevance detection algorithm, a novel time-warping algorithm that is based on automatic detection of common temporal points-of-interest and a textual-feedback generation mechanism. We demonstrate our method on motions from the Fugl-Meyer Assessment (FMA) test, which is typically held by occupational therapists in order to monitor patients’ recovery processes after strokes.
… Louis Passfield, professor of sports science, puts it another way. “In your day-to-day training, you’re trading fatigue with the potential benefits of improving fitness. When it comes to your taper, you want to clear the fatigue and accumulate freshness to maximise that fitness. Get it right and you could enjoy performance improvements over your pre-taper of 2-3%.” For an Olympic-distance athlete with a PB of 2:30hrs, that’s up to a 4:30min saving; for a 12hr Ironman athlete, over 22mins.
According to research by exercise physiologist Inigo Mujika, optimal tapering duration ranges between eight and 14 days with training volume dropping by around 41-60% by reducing either the session duration or frequency. But maintaining intensity is key to ensure you don’t lose speed.
… Nestlé Health Science this month acquired Snoqualmie, Wash.-based Persona Nutrition, a startup that customizes daily supplement regimens using algorithms designed with the help of doctors and nutritionists.
The deal gives Nestlé Health Science the technology to make sense of the “confusing, cluttered marketplace” of nutrition, said Jason Brown, co-founder and CEO of Persona. “They see the tipping point of real information coming across your phone that is all about you and can enhance your personal life.”
Financial Times, Murad Ahmed and John Burn-Murdoch from
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https://www.ft.com/content/9bd82b30-caf2-11e9-a1f4-3669401ba76f
When Inter Milan signed Alexis Sánchez from England’s Manchester United this week, the Italian club wanted to avoid paying a hefty transfer fee.
The teams instead agreed a season-long “loan” in which they would split the cost of the Chilean forward’s £18m annual salary, according to two people familiar with the terms of the deal.
This strategy is familiar to fans and pundits, with short-term player loans being part of the game for decades. But their use has grown in recent years as clubs try to avoid the large fees typical for top players within European football’s multibillion-euro transfer market. This summer’s transfer window — a three-month period in which teams can sign players — closes for most big European leagues on Monday.