… “I think this is by far the best Serena has looked since coming back,” said 21-time Grand Slam doubles champion and ESPN analyst Pam Shriver on Thursday. “Caty McNally threw her off in the second round with her different style of play, but she found a way to adjust and switch gears to win. And then what she did in the quarterfinals was out of this world. She is ready to win, and I think has set herself up at this point to have a better chance to do that than anyone else.”
Williams has looked laser-focused throughout the tournament and is arguably playing her best tennis since before her pregnancy. She beat longtime foe Maria Sharapova 6-1, 6-1 in her much-hyped opener, dropped a set against 17-year-old McNally in the second round before taking control, and then recorded routine straight-sets victories over Karolina Muchova and Petra Martic before a 44-minute rout of Wang Qiang in the quarterfinals to set up the meeting with Svitolina in the semis.
“She has unbelievable strength,” said Svitolina after their semifinal match. “She gives lots of power. There’s lots of power behind her shots all the time. That’s what makes her [an] unbelievable, legendary tennis player.
Back in March, after losing to Bianca Andreescu in the third round of the Miami Open, and only a few days after losing to her in the final of Indian Wells, Angelique Kerber approached the net for the traditional post-match handshake with a grim look and a message. “You’re the biggest drama queen ever,” she said to the Canadian, who was then eighteen, pointedly looking away as they shook hands. Kerber, who is known as one of the nicer players on tour, was irritated by a medical time-out that Andreescu had taken after the first set, to deal with an injured shoulder; no doubt Kerber was also angry about losing to her twice in one week. Before 2019, Andreescu was mostly unknown. She began the year ranked No. 152 in the world. But, ever since, she has defeated some of the best players in the world, demonstrating a stunning array of skills—flat, deep ground strokes topping out at close to ninety miles per hour; moony topspin shots designed to disrupt the rhythm of her opponent; nasty skidding slices and delicate drop shots—and the intelligence, imagination, and audacity to use them effectively. She exposed Kerber’s defense-minded game, which Kerber has used to win three grand slams, as one-dimensional. More than that, though, she showed self-assurance—the kind of competitive intensity and unapologetic swagger usually reserved for a few legends of the game. She carried herself more like Serena Williams than like what she was: a teen-ager with a wild card.
That shoulder problem turned out to be a torn rotator cuff. Andreescu had to retire from her fourth-round match in Miami.
… Already, during the national team call-ups for the Mexico and Uruguay friendlies, Cannon has gone out of his way to ensure that the new guys on the team are settled in properly. He’s making sure their transitions go smoothly — starting with one of his teammates from FC Dallas.
“We’ve been trying to get Paxton [Pomykal] ingrained into this national team system,” Cannon said. “I offered to room with him. Josh Sargent is pissed off at me because of that. I really wanted to integrate him and give him the most success he could have possible with the national team because I really do believe that he’s the future. People like that, with the amount of talent that he has, it’s really important to get them settled quick and give them the confidence that they need.”
Sure, there are older and more experienced players that the U.S. has available during the two friendlies in September, but Cannon has played with a lot of the younger guys before on youth teams.
He has the unique opportunity to be the bridge between U.S. Soccer’s transition from the last generation to the next. That’s a huge help for Berhalter, who is in the beginning of his tenure as national team head coach.
Sidney Crosby joins Tim and Sid on media day to give his thoughts on the Pittsburgh Penguins upcoming season, the loss of Phil Kessel, and how his off-season training including working on his speed, as the NHL continues to accelerate. [video, 11:34]
Over the last three weeks, the Rangers have, to put it bluntly, blown out a bunch of guys in the player development system. The director was reassigned after less than a year. Two long-time managers were dismissed. The coaching staff at Triple-A Nashville will be changed in its entirety.
And then there is Danny Clark.
Clark, who turns 50 next month, is finishing up his 11th season as the Rangers minor league pitching coordinator by spending a week with the major league team to help assimilate some of the recently recalled young pitchers, to the big leagues. And then he’ll get back to trying to solve the half-century long issue known as the development of Rangers pitching.
“It’s not a negative on the organization because developing pitching is difficult,” Clark said Saturday of the Rangers’ lack of homegrown pitchers, particularly starters. “But I take it personally. We talk constantly about producing a front-line starter. We are constantly asking what are we missing? What do we lack? How can we improve?”
Penn State Vice President for Intercollegiate Athletics Sandy Barbour has announced the hiring of Josh Nelson as assistant athletic director for applied health and performance science. Nelson brings more than 10 years of experience in the fields of applied performance and strength and conditioning, most recently serving as the director of applied performance and operations at Baylor.
A wireless sensor small enough to be implanted in the blood vessels of the human brain could help clinicians evaluate the healing of aneurysms — bulges that can cause death or serious injury if they burst. The stretchable sensor, which operates without batteries, would be wrapped around stents or diverters implanted to control blood flow in vessels affected by the aneurysms.
To reduce costs and accelerate manufacturing, fabrication of the stretchable sensors uses aerosol jet 3D printing to create conductive silver traces on elastomeric substrates. The 3D additive manufacturing technique allows production of very small electronic features in a single step, without using traditional multi-step lithography processes in a cleanroom. The device is believed to be the first demonstration of aerosol jet 3D printing to produce an implantable, stretchable sensing system for wireless monitoring.
“The beauty of our sensor is that it can be seamlessly integrated onto existing medical stents or flow diverters that clinicians are already using to treat aneurysms,” said Woon-Hong Yeo, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the Wallace H. Coulter Department of Biomedical Engineering at Georgia Tech and Emory University. “We could use it to measure an incoming blood flow to the aneurysm sac to determine how well the aneurysm is healing, and to alert doctors if blood flow changes.”
… Located in WHQ’s north campus, the LeBron James Building will be home to Nike’s Beaverton-based Advanced Innovation team. It will house a state-of-the-art Sport Research Lab — an investment in Nike’s most powerful competitive advantage, and continued proof of Nike’s leadership in sport science.
“It’s so surreal,” says James. “It’s been an honor to be a part of such a great company for the last 18 years. And to know that a building with my name will reside on campus — it’s truly an honor, and I feel truly special.”
… The conference was the first to launch a 24/7 linear TV network, The Mountain West Sports Network, in 2006, a year before the Big Ten Network. It was also the first conference to sign with Precision Timing Systems in 2003 and work with DVSports basketball instant replay system, and the first conference to broadcast on Twitter and Facebook. And it’s all in the spirit of why the conference was started in 1999.
“Since the beginning of the Mountain West, we try to be progressive with what we do,” said Dan Butterly, senior associate commissioner of the Mountain West. “We love being innovators, we cherish the opportunity to be guinea pigs. We’re willing to test the water, jump in the pool and see how many follow.”
As it happens, Butterly said it’s more than luck the conference has been able to be the first to many innovations to the college game, especially as technology changes so quickly. While most, if not all, conference and school administrators are trying to stay up-to-date on where the world is going and where fans are, Butterly said the simple step to take is picking up the phone.
In May 2018 — during its annual Build developer conference in Seattle — Microsoft announced a partnership with Qualcomm to create what it described as a developer kit for computer vision applications. This effort resulted in the Vision AI Developer Kit, a hardware base built on Qualcomm’s Vision Intelligence Platform designed to run AI models locally and integrate with Microsoft’s Azure ML and Azure IoT Edge cloud services, which became available to select customers last October.
Today, Microsoft and Qualcomm announced that the Vision AI Developer Kit (made by eInfochips) is now broadly available from distributor Arrow Electronics for $249. A software development kit containing Visual Studio Code with Python modules, prebuilt Azure IoT deployment configurations, and a Vision AI Developer Kit extension for Visual Studio is on GitHub, along with a default module that recognizes upwards of 183 different objects.
Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise journal from
INTRODUCTION:
Fatigue has a negative impact on lower extremity neuromuscular and biomechanical control. Since ACLR athletes show already neuromuscular/biomechanical deficits in an unfatigued state, the negative impact of fatigue may magnify these deficits or help expose other deficits. So far this has only scarcely been assessed warranting further research. METHODS:
Twenty-one athletes who had an ACLR and twenty-one uninjured controls performed five unilateral landing tasks before and after a match simulation protocol while muscle activation (vastus medialis, vastus lateralis, hamstrings medialis, hamstrings lateralis, gastrocnemius medialis, gastrocnemius lateralis, gluteus medius) and landing kinematics and kinetics of the hip, knee and ankle joint were recorded. A two-way ANOVA with a mixed-model design (main effects for group and fatigue) was used to compare landing kinematics, kinetics and muscle activation between groups, and pre- and post-fatigue. To avoid unjustified reduction of the data to discrete values, we used one-dimensional Statistical Parametric Mapping. RESULTS:
Only two interaction effects were found: an increased post-fatigue knee abduction moment and an increased post-fatigue thorax flexion angle was found in the ACL injured legs but not in the uninjured legs of the ACL group or in the control group, during the lateral hop and the vertical hop with 90° medial rotation, respectively. CONCLUSION:
This study showed that overall ACLR athletes and uninjured athletes have similar biomechanical and neuromuscular responses to fatigue. For 2 biomechanical parameters however, we did find an interaction effect suggesting that landing deficits in ACLR athletes may become clearer in certain tasks when fatigued.
… In May, the American Psychiatric Association reported that for the second year in a row, two out of three Americans say they are “extremely or somewhat anxious” about their health, paying bills and keeping themselves and their family safe. The problem is most pronounced for younger adults—70 percent of those between 18 and 34 report anxiety about paying bills and keeping their families safe, and two out of three are also anxious about relationships (compared with 40 percent for those over 55). About one in five has sought professional care.
College graduates are the most anxious of all, surveys suggest. Last fall, members of Generation Z (those born after 1996) reported the worst mental health of any generation, with 91 percent saying they had felt physical or emotional symptoms associated with stress, such as depression or anxiety, according to the American Psychological Association. Meanwhile, more than 60 percent of college students said they had experienced “overwhelming anxiety” during the previous year, and the number of students who visited campus counseling centers increased by more than 30 percent between the fall of 2009 and 2015.
As Manchester City’s players returned to the home dressing room after January’s exhilarating, exhausting 2-1 win over Liverpool, music shuddered from speakers. A house remix of Gregory Porter’s Liquid Spirit mixed with gleeful shouts as the celebrations began.
But in one corner, three men huddled quietly together.
Ederson and John Stones stared at a big screen as Harry Dunn, a member of manager Pep Guardiola’s backroom staff, zipped through a timeline of the match action to show a replay of Stones clearing the ball off his own goalline, with just 11mm to spare.
By the time they were showered, changed and back in the tinted privacy of their cars, Ederson, Stones or any of their team-mates could open the Hudl app on their phone and watch that moment, along with every other involvement they had in the game.
Baseball is a game of traditions, but one of them is coming to an end this month with little lamentation.
The era of expanded September rosters will end after this season. Where teams have previously been allowed to summon anyone from their 40-man roster to play in the big leagues in the final month of the season, they will be restricted to a 28-man roster after August 31st of 2020.
Because rosters will increase in size to 26 players for the full season next year, this means that just two additional players will be brought in for the final stretch of the schedule.