… Kane was a bona fide superstar with the potential to get even better. Like Lampard, Rooney and Steven Gerrard before him, he’d become the kind of player continental giants like Real Madrid and Barcelona would soon try to pry away from the Premier League.
Except Kane hasn’t been that player since the 2018 season ended, and perhaps even before then.
Banged up and bummed out about the Lions’ futility, Calvin Johnson retired from the NFL three years ago, while still in his prime. Looking back on it all, the best receiver of his era—hands down, in his words—has no regrets.
PLOS One; Jairo Vázquez-Guerrero, Bruno Fernández-Valdés, Ben Jones, Gerard Moras, Xavi Reche, Jaime Sampaio from
Purpose
The aim of this study was to describe the physical demands during U18 elite basketball games according to the game quarter and to identify a smaller subset of variables and threshold scores that distinguish players’ physical performance in each quarter. Methods
Data was collected from ninety-four players who participated in the study (age: 17.4 ± 0.74 years; height: 199.0 ± 0.1 cm; body mass: 87.1 ± 13.1 kg) competing in the Euroleague Basketball Next Generation Tournament. Players’ movements during the games were measured using a portable local positioning system (LPS) (WIMU PRO®, Realtrack Systems SL, Almería, Spain) and included relative distance (total distance / playing duration), relative distance in established speed zones, high-intensity running (18.1–24.0 km·h-1) and sprinting (> 24.1 km·h-1). player load, peak speed (km·h-1) and peak acceleration (m·s-2) number of total accelerations and total decelerations, high intensity accelerations (> 2 m·s-2) and decelerations (< -2 m·s-2).
Results
There was an overall decrease in distance covered, player load, number of high intensity accelerations and decelerations between the first and last quarter of the games in all playing positions. A classification tree analysis showed that the first quarter had much influence of distance covered (above 69.0 meters), distance covered <6.0 km·h-1 and accelerations (> 2 m·s-2), whereas the fourth quarter performance had much influence of distance covered (below 69.0) and distance covered 12.1–18.0 km·h-1. Conclusions
A significant reduction in physical demands occurs during basketball, especially between first and last quarter for players in all playing positions during basketball games of under 18 elite players.
… Just how ready, willing, and able are people to “Bauer-ize” themselves to win? The recent World Series pennants adorning the Cubs, Red Sox, and Astros clubhouses suggest a healthy injection of analytics enhances performance even better than steroids do.
Six key lessons emerge from MVP‘s narratives and interviews. Lindbergh’s perspectives here are especially intriguing because they’re informed by his previous book, The Only Rule Is It Has To Work, that told the story of his efforts (with a colleague) to bring sabermetric sophistication to the minor league Sonoma Stompers. (Their results were entertainingly mixed.) In MVP, he explicitly addresses the very player development issues he avoided as a minor league moneyballer. His thoughtful commentary deserves serious attention by leaders committed to cultivating high-performance data-driven talent.
… Even within a single year, top athletes use repeated altitude camps to keep building on the previous camp. The review includes training details from several Olympic champions: a swimmer who did 34 camps totaling 120 weeks over eight years; a cross-country skier who spent more than 60 days a year at altitude; a racewalker who spent 45 to 60 days a year.
This heavy use leads the authors to a somewhat provocative suggestion. The conventional wisdom has long been that some people respond to altitude training while others don’t. But many of the studies that find non-responders are one-off studies using non-elite athletes who have never been to altitude before. Apparent non-responders, the review authors argue, “are probably a product of ‘one-off’ camps and/or inadequate planning, periodization, programming, and monitoring of altitude training.”
… “For me, it’s really very simple. I mean, a lot of people think it’s complicated, I think it’s really simple. If we have a good team of coaches and people around us, if we can go out and get good recruits and then we have the support of our administrative team, where we should be successful, we should win. If any one of those three elements isn’t working together, your chance of winning drops quickly.”
… Freelap USA: Have your thoughts on movement screens evolved over time?
Charlie Weingroff: I tend to think that the answer to this is “no.” Movement screens, in spirit, are meant to identify a potential barrier to training success. That barrier may be at best an inefficiency and at worst, frankly, a roadblock to the adaptation process. Have my thoughts changed on identifying a potential barrier before we begin any kind of intended training or rehabilitation process? No, not at all.
I think maybe if instead of calling it a movement screen, we called it a level of evaluation to determine if joints can get into your training’s predetermined positions to absorb and adapt to stress, then people wouldn’t be so cynical anymore. Movements occur with joint actions. We should be able to screen out joint actions that we think can further impact more complex or loaded movements. This has never changed, and I’m not sure it ever will when a movement screen is looked at this way and not looked at for more than its inherent value.
… With the latest iteration of the Strap, Whoop brings new improvements including a Strain Coach to help you train smarter according to your recovery level and goal. You can now also overlay your performance metrics over videos you record in the Whoop app. Battery life has also been improved to up to a rated five days from three on the Whoop Strap 2.0. … We were fans of the last generation Strap, so do the latest improvements make it a great wearable option for training like a pro? I’ve been living with the Whoop Strap 3.0 for over a month to find out. Here’s my comprehensive verdict.
During the Games, Intel will connect fans and athletes like never before by enabling new Olympic experiences with technologies such as 3D Athlete Tracking (3DAT) – a first-of-its-kind computer vision solution that uses artificial intelligence to enhance the viewing experience for Olympic fans with near real-time insights and overlay visualisations during events.
Developed by Intel and hosted on Intel-based data centres in Alibaba’s Cloud infrastructure, 3DAT, in partnership with Olympic Broadcasting Services (OBS), uses four pan-tilt mounted, highly mobile cameras to capture the form and motion of athletes, before applying pose estimation algorithms, optimised for Intel® Xeon® processors, to analyse the biomechanics of athletes’ movements. The system transforms that data into broadcast overlay visualisations that will be available during replays of the 100 metres and other sprint events.
… One day after reading a report that illustrated Rutgers’ struggle to upgrade its basketball facility, [Ray] Lesniak wrote a letter to university President Robert Barchi that said, “It’s time for Rutgers to step up in class. We’re in the Big Ten. We should act like it.’’
… The four-level, 87,000 square-foot Sutton Sports Performance Center is connected to McCreary Football Field House, making it easy for players to move quickly from practice fields to the weight rooms to team meetings. Less time getting from place to place makes a difference in already tight schedules.
In addition to strength and conditioning facilities dedicated for football and men’s and women’s basketball, there is a strength and training area shared by men’s and women’s soccer, men’s and women’s tennis, track & field, men’s and women’s golf, field hockey and volleyball.
The Canadian Premier League (CPL) is pleased to announce Kinduct — an industry-leading Athlete Management System — as an Official Partner. This partnership — entitled the Injury Surveillance Program — is aimed at limiting the risk of soccer-related injuries in the Canadian Premier League by logging and tracking soccer-related illnesses and injuries on a league-wide scale. Kinduct’s robust and secure platform allows this data to be consolidated into one centralized location, which can then be further shared and analyzed across the league. The partnership was negotiated by Canadian Soccer Business (CSB) on behalf of the CPL and is intended to improve injury-related protocols and prevent future risk of injury.
“We are pleased to have an industry-leader like Kinduct as partner,” said David Clanachan, Commissioner, Canadian Premier League. “Having access to quality data easily can only help our Soccer Operations team continue to provide the best information and data possible to our clubs.” Additionally, Kinduct assisted in the Canadian Premier League’s 2018 #GotGame Open Trials as a data collection tool, which enabled each of the league’s organizations to compile meaningful performance data to help evaluate cross-Canadian talent.
The most popular category of applications used on smartwatches are health and fitness-related, according to a survey by research firm Parks Associates.
More than three out of four heads of U.S. households who own and use a smartwatch said they track their steps with their device. Another 60% monitor their heart rates and 53% use the wrist-worn devices to count calories. Among all smartwatch owners, 41% say their most commonly used app is to count calories or reach weight loss goals.
“The market for connected wellness and fitness devices and wearables is surging as people realize their health benefits,” Kristen Hanich, senior analyst at Parks Associates, noted in the report.
MIT researchers have been working on, developing a new method that uses standard 3D printers to produce functioning devices with the electronics already embedded inside. The devices are made of fibers containing multiple interconnected materials, which can light up, sense their surroundings, store energy, and more.
According to the new 3D printing method described in a paper by MIT research assistant Gabriel Loke, professors John Joannopoulos, Yoel Fink, Rodger Yuan, Michael Rein, Tural Khudiyev and Yash Jain, the design and fabrication of functional systems shaped in 3D form factors can enable applications in diverse areas such as photonics, sensing, energy storage, and electronics. However, printing different material classes to create electronic devices was, up to now, a complex fabrication challenge in itself, because different print methods were developed specifically for various material classes. The researchers’ alternative approach claims to surpass some of these traditional hurdles.
… Fast Company: What’s the biggest change you’ve seen in retail during your 13 years as Nike’s CEO?
Mark Parker: Retail has really become more of a two-way dialogue. Instead of just selling products, we’re actually interacting, communicating, gaining knowledge, and then using that to create even richer experiences. The speed at which we do that, it’s always been there on the product side. But we’re applying that to the whole consumer experience, whether it’s on mobile or in a large-scale showcase-format store like Nike House of Innovation.
FC: How does something like Nike Fit, which is an app that scans your foot to size your shoe, sit within this retail model?
MP: Half the population is in footwear that is the wrong size. This scanning technology allows us to go right from measurements on the foot to an accurate sizing in the store.
As college teams collect more and more data to improve performance, a player may be asked to swallow an electronic pill to monitor body temperature or wear goggles that track eye movement.
… “We have added a new piece of technology called the InBody because we need to be able to take a closer look at body measurements,” said Dr. Greg Stewart, W. Kennon McWilliams Professor in Sports Medicine at Tulane, who oversees all medical aspects of the NFL Player Care Foundation Healthy Body and Mind Screening program. “We can obtain a detailed analysis of body composition and then use that as we begin to look at things like cholesterol, hypertension, diabetes and the other items that we are already testing.”
The InBody is an advanced body composition analyzer that provides a detailed breakdown of weight in terms of muscle, fat and body water through weight measurement and the use of an eight-point tactile electrode and a patent thumb electrode.
“This new technology gives us almost a gold standard and allows us a chance to look at where their obesity is located within their body. It looks at the amount of skeletal muscle by extremity, total body fat in the torso and each of the extremities. We know abdominal fat is bad and that’s what we look at from the standpoint of long-term metabolic problems,” said Stewart.
In recent years, the handling of concussions has become one of the recurring topics across the biggest sports across the globe.
Be it contact sports which revolve around tackling — such as American football, soccer or rugby — to the combat sports of boxing and MMA all the way through to the supposedly genteel game of cricket, each has had to reckon with the difficulties of an injury you cannot see.
So we asked reporters from across ESPN about the challenges their sports have faced and are still facing, and what protocols are in place in each.
Recent research on concussions has revealed that certain sports pose a particular danger to brain development and health. However, much of this research and discussion has focused on American football and has not made an active effort to equally test the effects that contact sports have on female athletes, despite some of the highest rates of concussions being reported from female soccer players. A new study launching in the Boston area and work being done by current and former members of the U.S. National Women’s Soccer team (USWNT) is making strides to close the gap in this research.
According to Traci Snedden from USA Today, “Federally-funded research had no mandate to include women in their recruitment plans” for studies on concussions. The rates and effects of concussions in females therefore have been studied less than those of male athletes. This is dangerous considering that recent research has shown the legitimate threat that female soccer players face. At the collegiate level, women’s soccer has the second-highest rate of reported Sports Related Concussions, according to a 2014 study by a team of researchers from Vanderbilt University, the Datalys Center for Sports Injury Research and Prevention, University of Rochester and Michigan State University. These rates are even more startling in high school athletes, as Snedden cites a study done at Northeastern University which found that female soccer players sustain concussions at a rate of three times more than male players.
… In this episode, we highlight NUTRITION and hydration as key building blocks for high performance, starring Philadelphia Union midfielder Haris Medunjanin.
The Bosnian veteran explains his dietary habits and their impact on his play, while Kellsey Frank, the Union’s sports dietitian, and Garrison Draper, Philly’s performance director, explain the principles and techniques that guide their efforts to fuel the players for maximum competitive output. [video, 4:53]
… a new study from the United Kingdom’s University of Lincoln suggests that protein shakes are no more effective at rebuilding muscle and boosting recovery than high-carbohydrate drinks, like sports drinks.
Indeed, the British researchers say that neither whey protein-based shakes nor milk-based shakes enhanced muscle recovery or eased soreness compared to a carbohydrate-only drink.
No matter what the rest of September and all of October bring for these Yankees, this already will go down as one of the nuttier seasons for a franchise not immune to nuttiness.
Thursday stands as a strong candidate for Top Five Crazy.
A getaway doubleheader in Motown resulted in three players getting away from the field, leaving this road trip early, to address new injuries.
Well, two of those injuries counted as new to the Yankees, the other new only to the public. Which means the Yankees had best be right on letting J.A. Happ pitch through his left biceps tendinitis.
Although the Orioles fired 25 members of their scouting, development and front office staffs in the past month, first-year executive vice president/general manager Mike Elias has reiterated multiple hires would be made to replace those lost and redesign the organization’s operations structure.
The first hire came Monday, with the Orioles announcing Matt Blood as their director of player development amid a bevy of changes within their baseball operations department. Blood joined the Texas Rangers in November as their director of player development before becoming their director of baseball innovation last month. He spent the previous three years as the director of USA Baseball’s 18 and Under National Team Program and seven years before that as an area scout for the St. Louis Cardinals.
… This decade belonged to shooters, and these 10 were the very best. Although there’s still no perfect metric to quantify shooting skill, the top shooters in the game are able to combine volume and efficiency in ways normal NBA players can’t. These aren’t simply the guys with the highest 3P%, eFG% or TS%. They created and converted thousands of difficult shots from all over the court at high rates.
In a decade obsessed with shooting efficiency, these fellas reformed the ways we look at scoring in pro basketball.
As NHL teams move toward paying their stars more money and relying on young players to fill the gaps, hockey’s middle class is being squeezed out. Veterans like 2018 Washington Capitals playoff hero Devante Smith-Pelly are finding it increasingly difficult to land guaranteed contracts and are often forced to go to training camp on professional tryout agreements, which cover potential injuries at camp and not much else.
… This spring, we pegged the A’s as an 83-win team, FanGraphs made an 85-win call, and Las Vegas placed the club’s over-under win total at 83.5. The A’s are on track for another 97-win season. How are they again exceeding expectations? It’s a formula similar to last year’s — with a few different players leading the charge and a new unconventional strategy.
The A’s have already changed baseball once: In the early 2000s, they helped accelerate the embrace of analytics in baseball by exploiting market inefficiencies. And now, they’re arguably at the forefront of major shifts in the sport once again. Last season, they got ahead of other teams in keeping balls off the ground on offense and leaned on a strong bullpen that combined for the second-most innings in the majors. This year, the A’s again have a strong bullpen and an offensive lineup with one of the lowest ground-ball rates in baseball.
The A’s position players are again excellent, ranking fifth in the majors in wins above replacement1 and offensive efficiency (107 weighted runs created plus)2 entering Wednesday. The team has already set a franchise record for home runs in a season, but they’re also fourth in baseball in defensive efficiency, which is the share of balls put in play by opponents that are turned into outs.