Last January, Valentine Holmes and Christian Wade decided to tackle something new. Holmes could have signed a million-dollar rugby league contract in Australia. Wade might have been playing for England at the ongoing World Rugby Cup.
And yet, against the basic instincts of human nature, these star wingers both left financial stability and the passionate support of tens of thousands of fans when they stepped on the field at IMG Academy in Bradenton, Florida, with the improbable hope of making a National Football League roster.
How improbable? Ten months later, they’re pulling down $8,000 a week in the anonymity of NFL practice squads. If you wanted more proof of just how hard it is to make it in American football, those scenarios alone should lend some proof.
… “Not too much bothers me,” Williams tells CNBC Make It. “So even in the worst situations, I’m pretty calm and collected.”
Staying calm has been key for Williams, who has been in the public eye for her tennis skills since childhood. Now 39, Williams is a five-time Wimbledon champion and an Olympic gold medalist who has been playing professional tennis for 25 years.
The Liverpool midfielder is known for his incredible stamina, and says that disagreeing with a sports scientist has been key to him maintaining his levels
For the Nebraska women’s basketball team, even the best players are going to spend a decent amount of time on the bench.
Each season is a little different, but an ideal style for Husker coach Amy Williams is to have 10 players play double-figure minutes per game, using different weapons on offense and playing high-possession games.
And Williams tells the players if they’re playing as hard as they need to, especially on defense and rebounding, they’re going to be so tired that they need to come to the bench for a rest.
… Vint comes to USA Volleyball with more than 20 years of experience working with some of the world’s most successful Olympic and professional sport organizations and athletes, helping them achieve their dreams. He spent 10 years at the United States Olympic and Paralympic Committee (USOPC), first as a senior sport technologist from 2005-09 before being promoted to director of high performance from 2009-12. Vint served as senior director of competitive analysis, research and innovation for the USOPC from 2012-15.
During Vint’s time with the USOPC, he worked with USA Volleyball on many levels. Vint developed and delivered comprehensive opponent scouting, video and analytics support for our beach volleyball teams including the two 2008 Beijing Olympic Games gold-medal winning teams of Kerri Walsh Jennings/Misty May-Treanor and Phil Dalhausser/Todd Rogers. Overall, he has been a four-time official Olympic Games delegation member from 2006 to 2012.
… His Texas Tech staff includes not only the standard three assistant coaches but also a chief of staff, an “advisor,” a director of player development and nine graduate assistants, all supported by 15 student managers. Among the full-timers are a former Big 12 head coach (Sean Sutton, son of coaching legend Eddie and formerly of Oklahoma State), the steward of a juco national champion (Mark Adams) and the coach of the Chinese national team at the 2012 Olympics (Bob Donewald). “A lot of guys make mistakes when they hire everybody you can control,” Beard says. “I’m trying to hire five or six people better than me.
Heat acclimation is associated with plasma volume (PV) expansion that occurs within the first week of exposure. However, prolonged effects on hemoglobin mass (Hbmass) are unclear as intervention periods in previous studies have not allowed sufficient time for erythropoiesis to manifest. Therefore, Hbmass, intravascular volumes, and blood volume (BV)-regulating hormones were assessed with 5½ weeks of exercise-heat acclimation (HEAT) or matched training in cold conditions (CON) in 21 male cyclists [(mean ± SD) age: 38 ± 9 years, body weight: 80.4 ± 7.9 kg, VO2peak: 59.1 ± 5.2 ml/min/kg]. HEAT (n = 12) consisted of 1 h cycling at 60% VO2peak in 40°C for 5 days/week in addition to regular training, whereas CON (n = 9) trained exclusively in cold conditions (<15°C). Before and after the intervention, Hbmass and intravascular volumes were assessed by carbon monoxide rebreathing, while reticulocyte count and BV-regulating hormones were measured before, after 2 weeks and post intervention. Total training volume during the intervention was similar (p = 0.282) between HEAT (509 ± 173 min/week) and CON (576 ± 143 min/week). PV increased (p = 0.004) in both groups, by 303 ± 345 ml in HEAT and 188 ± 286 ml in CON. There was also a main effect of time (p = 0.038) for Hbmass with +34 ± 36 g in HEAT and +2 ± 33 g in CON and a tendency toward a higher increase in Hbmass in HEAT compared to CON (time × group interaction: p = 0.061). The Hbmass changes were weakly correlated to alterations in PV (r = 0.493, p = 0.023). Reticulocyte count and BV-regulating hormones remained unchanged for both groups. In conclusion, Hbmass was slightly increased following prolonged training in the heat and although the mechanistic link remains to be revealed, the increase could represent a compensatory response in erythropoiesis secondary to PV expansion. [full text]
… The absolute risk of injury on any given training day is very low (<1.0% per training day). Rather than jumping at shadows, practitioners are encouraged to think twice before doing nothing! Building robust and resilient athletes begins with a good training program. Sports medicine practitioners should have faith (1) in their ability to design training programs that develop robust athletes, and (2) that their athletes are more resilient than they realize. Finally, effective athlete management programs consider the moderators that influence players’ ability to tolerate workload. Knowledge of these moderators and how they interact with workload provides a more comprehensive athlete monitoring system than simply measuring workload in isolation.
If a soccer player was lining up for a penalty kick during a tight game, a strategic move would be to launch an unpredictable kick at the goalie to surprise them and score.
New research from UO psychologists reveals more information about when people act in unpredictable ways, behavior that can offer a strategic advantage during competitive events, like soccer games and tennis matches, as opponents attempt to predict one another’s moves.
“Competitions that require fast-based decision making are often won by the player who can choose their moves in the least predictable manner,” said UO psychology professor Ulrich Mayr, who published the paper in the journal eLife along with psychology doctoral student Atsushi Kikumoto. “But how people can consistently achieve the competitive edge of surprise has not been well understood.”
Some bacteria release a toxin that forms pores on other cells. EPFL scientists have studied the pore-forming toxin aerolysin and genetically engineered it to be used as a high-resolution sensor for biological molecules like DNA and proteins.
Digital ECG maker AliveCor is teaming up with Chinese wearable company Huami Corporation on a new effort to combine the pair’s technology into medical-grade wearables.
The end goal is to have an ECG-enabled wearable with various heart features on the market by 2020.
… The reason for all this is that Strava says that when people used their own app with sensors paired, it crashed a lot. Too much apparently. In fact, it even crashed when people didn’t use sensors, because…Strava? I don’t know. Their words, not mine:
“Supporting Bluetooth devices was causing the app to crash during recording, whether or not a sensor was connected. Disabling this feature significantly improves recording stability for all athletes. While this update will reduce crashes for millions of athletes, we understand that it will be disappointing for the athletes who do use the feature.”
… he notion of the Warriors piecing things together without Curry is a difficult one. There is an abundance of young, inexperienced players in the rotation, with coach Steve Kerr repeatedly predicting growing pains. And the club, which already faced enormous pressure to score in bunches because of how porous the Warriors’ last-ranked defense has been, now faces the added challenge of trying to score without the game-breaking player who made its offense hum.
In losing Curry, the Warriors saw their RAPTOR roster rating fall drastically from the low 1600s (in the same range as contenders like the Los Angeles Lakers, Utah Jazz and L.A. Clippers) to a paltry rating of 1415
The US men’s soccer team will be forever looking up at the world’s powers for several reasons.
The USA fell behind by 100 years, in part because of cultural forces that made Americans favor American sports. Now that soccer is relatively ingrained into mainstream America (the kid on the new drama Stumptown often wears a Portland Timbers shirt), US soccer entrepreneurs and supporters are battling to pick the right direction forward, and those battles too frequently end up in court. Americans are obsessed with the quick fix for whatever ails the men’s team, ignoring the more systemic issues beneath the surface, and the constant in-fighting imposes a somber air on a sport built on joy.
One more reason the USA always struggle: US supporters are insecure in their identities.