After switching coaches, training partners, sponsors, events, and her home base, Aisha Praught Leer, a Jamaican national record holder, has flourished.
When Aisha Praught Leer spoke with her current coach, Joe Bosshard, for the first time, he gave it to her straight. As a steeplechaser, she couldn’t hang on in the last kilometer of the 3,000-meter race.
“You can take that one way, like, this guy doesn’t think I’m very good,” Praught Leer says. “Or, this guy thinks I’m very good, but could be better and he wants to take a chance on me.”
It was 2017 and Praught Leer, now 30, wasn’t just looking for a new coach as she moved on from the Oregon Track Club. She and her husband, Will Leer, were looking for friends. A place that felt more like home than Eugene did. They were looking for more than training schedules and track access, but also a sturdy support system and community.
Unlike fellow off-season acquisition Rich Hill, new Minnesota Twins’ third baseman Josh Donaldson’s injury track record isn’t eye-popping. There are no quasi-experimental surgeries, no double-digit trips to the injured list, and no potential career-defining injuries.
After Martin Frk set a record for the hardest shot in professional hockey at the AHL All-Star skills competition, others recount what it’s like to be on the other end of his 109.2 mph blast.
ince the start of the season, Jude Bellingham has emerged as one of the best young prospects in English football. Despite only being 16-years-old, Bellingham has made 25 appearances in the Championship for Birmingham City, smashing a plethora of records in the process.
Unsurprisingly, his performances have attracted the attention of European giants such as Manchester United, Liverpool, Borussia Dortmund and Bayern Munich with the transfer speculation intensifying during the January window. It is widely reported that Man United have launched a £30 million bid for Bellingham which is an astonishing amount of money for a 16-year-old who only sat his GCSE exams last summer.
The schoolboy is now faced with the age old conundrum: does he stay at Birmingham City, gaining first team experience, or does he move to a European giant and inevitably miss out on heaps of game time?
New United States Women’s National Team general manager Kate Markgraf is finally settled in enough at Soccer House to start implementing some of her big ideas, and she got a major initiative underway this January. Three of the age groups that had January camps — the senior team, Under-20s and Under-17s — took the opportunity to get together in Florida instead of training separately.
While the USWNT has teams in every age group from Under-14 up to the first team, the U-17s and U-20s are considered especially critical to the health of the program. Those squads play in youth World Cups, and as a result, their results are closely correlated to the future of the senior team.
“The vision from Kate is that she wants us to be more integrated,” U-17 coach Tracey Kevins told SB Nation. “She wants us to have opportunities to collaborate and share ideas across age groups. You’ll see more camps where the timings or the venues are similar.”
… When asked about the ideal pathway for elite players looking to secure a spot in the U.S. Youth National Team program, Lindsey stated that the top priority for players should be to focus on their own improvement and love of the game, rather than what club or league they are playing in.
A study by the University of Bath says the emphasis on performance data is producing mechanical players and taking away instinct, emotion and unpredictability from the sport
There’s a lot going on as a single fertilized egg cell transforms into a full-blown organism. Cells are dividing, moving and committing to specific roles; tissues and organs are forming in precise places at precise times; and molecular signals are flying everywhere.
“Fundamentally, it’s a deeply multi-scale problem,” says Ottoline Leyser, a developmental biologist with the Sainsbury Laboratory at the University of Cambridge in the UK. “I like to tell my classes that everybody used to be one cell, and maybe one of the greatest achievements of our lives is getting to the point where we’re a whole organism.”
Leyser is one of the leaders of a growing movement in developmental biology that seeks to tackle that complexity head-on by studying the developing organism as an integrated whole. “Systems developmental biology,” as it’s coming to be known, is just starting to yield results. But it offers the promise of a richer, more holistic understanding of the intricacies of development.
High up above the ice at the New Jersey Devils’ Prudential Center, 16 small silver boxes have been affixed to the rafters. Each is adorned with a large yellow sticker featuring all-caps letters in bold: NOT A STEP. A crossed-out shoe print punctuates that command. A pair of antennas flank both sides of the boxes, which house infrared cameras and have protruding lenses pointing down toward the rink 110 feet below.
On the ice, nearly two dozen NHL employees—with a wide range of hockey ability—are preparing for a friendly scrimmage. Equipment managers slip small electronic devices, about the size of a boxcutter, into pouches between the shoulder blades on the back of every player’s jersey. Every puck also features a microchip embedded in its core, with six light emitters on the top and six more on the bottom, all painted black to hide their existence from all but the closest scrutiny.
On the catwalks, Keith Horstman, the NHL’s VP of technology, explained what was happening below as he gave SportTechie a behind-the-scenes tour of the league’s new tracking system. Developed by SMT, the technology is being installed in all 32 NHL arenas, including the two venues that the New York Islanders call home. During games, the central system will send out radio pings to the puck and player devices, which will reply by emitting pulses of infrared light. The infrared cameras can sense and triangulate those signals, locating the players and puck in three-dimensional space and transmitting that data nearly in real-time.
RFocus asks a simple question: What if instead of just antennas and transmitters on access points and mobile devices, we put the things just about everywhere? You know, just totally slather the walls with the stuff? The new “smart surface” from MIT’s CSAIL uses in excess of 3,000 antennas to boost signal strength by nearly 10x.
The department issued a paper today showcasing the technology, which is relatively cheap, with each antenna running a few cents. Better still, it’s low power, either reflecting a signal or allowing it through, depending on the software controller. CSAIL envisions a future where RFocus is used in homes and warehouses to boost signals for the Internet of Things and various network-connected devices.
… [Sean] Springs is bringing his drive for impact back to his alma mater, where he is collaborating with university researchers within the College of Engineering to change the game, and science, affecting how we better protect ourselves from concussion and impacts that affect our everyday lives.
Springs is the founder and chief executive of Windpact, a technology and applied science company focused on the analysis, design and implementation of impact protection solutions. The company developed a new impact-mitigating technology and maintains a database of characterized foam materials.
The human brain’s ability to recall a single movement is significantly affected by the characteristics of previous actions it was learned with, a new study has shown.
Research led by the University of Plymouth explored how distinct prior actions affected a person’s ability to perform certain simple movements, corresponding to, for example, reaching to catch a ball or drinking a cup of coffee.
It showed that prior visual and physical motions exert different influences on the effectiveness of a particular action, but that the strength of influence depends on their similarity to the condition in which it was learned.
Many nutrition practitioners attempt to educate their athletes on better nutritional behaviours with the aim of improving health and enhancing athletic performance. However, the number of studies that have critically evaluated these interventions to understand their effectiveness on actually improving behaviours, health, and performance is questionable.
If an education intervention has not been assessed for success, then it is difficult for practitioners working with athletes to accurately say that what they are currently delivering is the right approach. The aim of this review was to identify the correct methods, timings, and approaches successfully to embed a nutrition education in athletes.
The New York Red Bulls named Kevin Thelwell as the club’s head of sport, hoping the former Wolverhampton Wanderers FC sporting director can work his magic in MLS as well.
This is a newly created position with the Red Bulls.
Do the Toronto Raptors that we see today, the 36-14, second-place in the Eastern Conference, winners-of-11-straight Toronto Raptors, look like the team head coach Nick Nurse envisioned he’d have when this championship defence began three months and a bit ago?
“Sure,” Nurse said, grinning, before his team pulverized the Chicago Bulls on Sunday afternoon, 129-102. “Exactly what I envisioned at the start of the season.”