Aaron Long didn’t come through the ranks of U.S. youth teams, and he was hardly a valued commodity coming out of college. He’s since turned himself into a U.S. national team staple and a transfer target for European clubs, and he knows time is running short for him to take another leap on the club level.
Any question that Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton would have a clean bill of health for Sunday’s opener against the Los Angeles Rams was answered Wednesday when the 2015 NFL MVP did not appear on the team’s injury report.
If that wasn’t enough, then Newton’s big, familiar smile said the rest.
“I feel like a rookie again,” said the 30-year-old Newton, who is entering his ninth NFL season. “I’m having fun, feeling good, and the thrill is still there.”
… This group of Americans is probably more learned in pick-and-roll coverage than world geography. Fortunately, players, in the face of trying to distinguish the Czech Republic from Slovakia, are allowed to use a lifeline, like on “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?,” with Popovich in the role of Regis Philbin.
Need help? Your teammate is there for you.
“Being willing to ask for help, willing to go to your teammate,” Donovan Mitchell told NBA.com, “that’s what, really, a lot of this is all about.”
… Ramsey Nijem, who spent the past five years working with the NBA’s Sacramento Kings, has agreed to fill the role of men’s basketball director of sport performance at KU, and he is expected to arrive in Lawrence this weekend.
… According to Denise Pope, a senior lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Education, these three factors — or PDF as she calls them — protect kids against a host of negative outcomes, strengthen resilience, and bolster students’ mental wellness and academic engagement.
Pope is co-founder of Challenge Success, a Stanford-based organization that works with families and schools to redefine and embrace a broader definition of success and promote student well-being. In a recent interview with KQED’s Forum, Pope shared her suggestions for raising resilient, ethical and motivated learners.
… The problem is, when you ask kids to describe what make playing sports fun, their responses vary. A lot.
To my point, when Amanda Visek and her colleagues asked 142 youth soccer players this exact question, they came up with 81 different answers.
The cool thing was, however, that Visek was able to group the fun-determinants, generating more understanding and consensus about the multidimensionality of fun.
Distractions are the death of good content. I can’t pen an email, much less a full-length article, without a quiet space.
Because I work remotely, I can get up and move. I can silence my phone. But when an editor calls, I forget all about the mental space I’ve made for myself. I take the call, knowing full well I could’ve waited until I’d finished the piece.
That’s why, before writing this one, I reached out to Nir Eyal. A behavioral designer and former startup founder, Eyal is the author of Indistractable, a book about learning to control your attention in the age of distraction.
What intrigued me about the book was its pragmatism. Eyal never suggested — in his book or in our conversation — that I abandon tech. In my line of work, both as a writer and as an NAACP unit lead, I simply can’t. Without a computer or a smartphone, I couldn’t do my job.
… The advantage to “one app to rule them all” is obvious on its face. Patients would have fewer apps to download and engage with, advantages that seem more pronounced in more complex and comorbid patients. Organizations would also be able to guide patients to their preferred providers, treatments and services via a single app.
But there’s a significant problem with this approach.
When one platform tries to excel in a vast number of areas, it usually ends up doing them all badly. If you’ve used a leading marketing software platform that I won’t name, you know this to be true. And healthcare is even more difficult, because it’s at once more complex and more personal. It turns out it is pretty easy to build a complex and complicated product, but it is very hard to build a simple one, especially with a multitude of inputs and use cases.
Everyone probably recognizes that moment when tiredness kicks in, but you actually need to stay focused. Some coffee or an energy drink will do the trick and not only on those moments. Athletes use energy drinks as well for extra focus during a race, from a marathon runner to our riders. In this weeks’ Food Friday, we deep dive into the energy drink protocol for our riders.
… The first sign of trouble was that interim commissioner Jayna Hefford was on the call, a rarity. “Jayna is never on the call. And so when Jayna was on the call and just her tone that she started with was very … ominous.”
Hefford, along with board of directors chair Laurel Walzak, handed down the stunning news: The Canadian Women’s Hockey League would cease operations in 29 days, citing an unsustainable business model.
After two more phone calls and a press release, nearly every one of the CWHL’s 150 players and hundreds of volunteers knew, along with the public, sending shockwaves across a sport that grew in popularity after the 2018 PyeongChang Olympics.
… Strategic planning at every level of a club, defined by the key principles of the club’s game model and overseen by a key figurehead such as a technical director is fundamental to ensuring players are recruited and developed in line with the club’s specific KPI’s to not only achieve short-term results, but maintain the long-term, sustainable performance of the first team.
In Eredivisie, AZ Alkmaar are one such club who have embraced the application of data within their strategic planning, having started to work with Opta data four years ago.
Recently, StatsBomb released the Messi Data Biography, a fantastic compilation of the company’s detailed match and event data on all Lionel Messi’s La Liga games from 2004/05 to 2015/16.
The depth of the data is vast. While analytics pros inevitable trudge through mountains of this kind of data on a daily basis, such detailed – and historically comprehensive! – data is rarely available for the amateur analyst. So I was beyond excited to begin exploring the data, finding and visualizing significant patterns of interest.
In what follows, I will provide some (relatively high-level) analysis of the Messi Biography data, exploring various visualization concepts in turn.
That might be the best way to describe the schematic evolution of football. Typically, it’s the offense out in front. The guys with the ball present a new concept or system that puts defenses at a disadvantage; other offenses follow suit as defensive coaches scramble to find answers. They invariably do and force another adjustment from offensive coaches.
The fight never ends. It just gets more complicated.
In 2019, NFL defenses — having claimed a small victory during the 2017 season, when the scoring average dropped to 21.7 per game and inspired countless What’s wrong with NFL offenses? think pieces — are once again on their heels.
A study commissioned by UEFA to aid in the debate over the future of the Champions League shows the financial and talent gap between the top five European leagues and the other 50 leagues on the continent is growing.
The destabilizing effect of the power of the “Big Five” leagues — England, Spain, Germany, Italy and France — is set out across a 50-page study by accounting firm Deloitte marked “private and confidential” and obtained by The Associated Press after being presented to UEFA’s Professional Football Strategy Council in Monaco.