… Bowden, a junior receiver, had only three catches for 18 yards. But with less than 7 minutes remaining and the score 24-0, something unexpected happened. A spark. Kentucky got the ball back and Bowden took over at quarterback — not just for a snap but the entire possession — and marched the offense 84 yards down the field for a touchdown.
The late position change barely made the recaps, but to anyone watching, it felt like a path forward for a team that was otherwise circling the drain. Which brings us back to the text message. It’s from someone close to Bowden, he says. And, honestly, he believes they meant well at the time. But it touched a nerve. So while he’s comfortable showing the message to a reporter, he doesn’t want the author identified. He scribbles over the contact information just to be safe.
… Opening Day was supposed to start Saturday but of course has been delayed indefinitely. Jessica McDonald and her NC Courage team would be starting their defense of three-consecutive NWSL Shields and two-straight NWSL Championships.
McDonald, instead, is training with one teammate — fellow USWNT star Abby Dahlkemper — and wondering how much the coronavirus pandemic delay will affect her sport. She knows the league can
She says the league was well set-up for this challenge, as much as it could be, but that she can’t help thinking of the “What ifs?”
… Under normal circumstances, players have access to strength coaches, nutritionists, dining halls and some of the most advanced weight rooms in the country. Not anymore.
“Let’s just say we’re back in August. That means for five months, what kind of workouts have they been doing?” [Larry] Fedora said. “Are they at home lifting jugs of milk and water and books?”
For some, yes.
Schools like Ohio State have created multiple strength training programs — one designed for players who have access to a gym and one for guys getting by with makeshift equipment.
… During freshman year scheduling classes or just deciding what, where or when to eat will add stress to the student-athlete life. I would tell each incoming freshman classes that even though my personal freshman year is getting further and further in the past, I continue to experience a freshman year each year since. It may seem like they are the only ones feeling stress, or are homesick, or can’t focus on anything but the exam on exam days. The truth is they are not alone. That isn’t to say their stresses are not important and I don’t care; it is to say that I can help them, and please don’t keep it all bottled up inside. I was the worst at asking for help and still to this day struggle with this. I was independent since age two and I was going to figure it out on my own. I can relate, but it doesn’t make it the right path. The problem is a student-athlete is competing against an opponent and they could be utilizing their resources better. Yes, they will figure it out eventually, but when does eventually happen and what is sacrificed in the meantime?
Development, growth and saying goodbye
When senior year finally comes, student-athletes are confident and have everything figured out. They can hardly remember what it was like to be a freshman and they can’t relate to the incoming freshmen class, labeling them as ‘immature’. They are so focused on getting the best job or internship and stressing about what is best. Then they rethink that life plan, or they realize the sport they play is coming to an end, and it’s all happening too fast. A coach is there through it all.
… Fenwick was one of a handful of schools in the Chicago area that wore Jordan Brand during Smith’s senior year in 2015-16. At a Jordan Brand event, a flashy presentation where the teams’ uniforms and gear were unveiled, Chicago Bulls star Jimmy Butler played host and handled the introductions.
It was there where Smith struck up a conversation that has led to a very close friendship with the NBA all-star.
… Head of sports science Luke Dopson explained: “We have a little group on Strava and most are recording sessions on their phones or watches and report to me. I track it all and put it into a league table. It was the manager’s idea, but it’s worked really well.
“We put all the players’ running data and strength and flexibility statistics into a league table twice a week to see how they compare to everyone else and it has created a good bit of competition within the group. Last week, Patrick Schmidt was the runaway winner – he has access to a lot of green spaces in Austria.
SB Nation, Tomahawk Nation blog, Perry Kostidakis from
Over the course of a 19-year-career, Florida State director of strength and conditioning Josh Storms has seen his fair share of challenges.
From his own athletic career, one he once described as “very short, unremarkable [and] injury-plagued,” to his varied and lengthy coaching journey, the bearded-mountain of a man has always found new ways to expand his expertise, all with the goal of bettering his ability to educate.
“Over time, if you’re a good coach, you’re a really good thief,” Storms joked. “You steal everything you think is valuable, and then you start putting those pieces together, and it starts to become your own unique philosophy.”
… Sharon Kim, who teaches at Johns Hopkins University’s business school, told me she’d always noticed that some people credit their creative successes to being loners or rebels. Kim wondered whether social pariahs are actually more creative, so she decided to test the theory by inviting some volunteers to her lab to complete a couple of exercises. Before they began, Kim and her colleagues “rejected” some of the study subjects by telling them they weren’t picked to work as part of “the group.” There was no group—Kim and her team just wanted to make them feel left out. Others weren’t snubbed in the same way. Kim asked the participants to perform a pair of exercises on paper. In one, they were asked to determine what united a series of seemingly unrelated words (fish, mine, and rush, for instance—the answer is gold). In the other, they were told to draw an alien from a planet very unlike our own.
The rejects, it turned out, were better at both exercises. For the alien task, the nonrejected participants drew standard, cartoonish Martians. But the rejected participants drew aliens that looked radically different from humans—they had all of their appendages sticking out of one side of their body, or their eyes below their nose. The outcasts’ drawings were more creative, as rated by three independent judges.
There are numerous things to dislike about going to the doctor: Paying a copay, sitting in the waiting room, out-of-date magazines, sick people coughing without covering their mouths. For many, though, the worst thing about a doctor’s visit is getting stuck with a needle. Blood tests are a tried-and-true way of evaluating what is going on with your body, but the discomfort is unavoidable. Or maybe not, say Caltech scientists.
In a new paper published in Nature Biotechnology, researchers led by Wei Gao, assistant professor of medical engineering, describe a mass-producible wearable sensor that can monitor levels of metabolites and nutrients in a person’s blood by analyzing their sweat. Previously developed sweat sensors mostly target compounds that appear in high concentrations, such as electrolytes, glucose, and lactate. Gao’s sweat sensor is more sensitive than current devices and can detect sweat compounds of much lower concentrations, in addition to being easier to manufacture, the researchers say.
The development of such sensors would allow doctors to continuously monitor the condition of patients with illnesses like cardiovascular disease, diabetes, or kidney disease, all of which result in abnormal levels of nutrients or metabolites in the bloodstream. Patients would benefit from having their physician better informed of their condition, while also avoiding invasive and painful encounters with hypodermic needles.
NHL players are creatures of habit, living a regimented life of training, nutrition, rest and recovery. Their bodies are machines built to withstand an 82-game regular-season grind and whatever postseason action their team earns beyond it.
What Gary Roberts fears is that these machines aren’t built for several months of home confinement, off the ice and on the couch.
“You have your whole summer. Everybody goes to the gym. Everybody prepares to play. Now you’re in a situation where probably over a third of the NHL doesn’t have the equipment they need to keep up with their fitness. And so that third of the NHL is, in my opinion, being put at risk when they go back and play,” said Roberts, a 21-year NHL veteran who is now a renowned trainer to stars like Connor McDavid and Steven Stamkos.
“Well, if they do go back and play,” he corrected himself. “Our whole world is dealing with a terrible threat right now.”
… While some Houston Dynamo players seek out more specific details on food ideas, recipes and portions, most are just looking for a basic structure (how many meals?) and format (what should the meals look like?). That way each player can then personalize their plan based on their own personal food preferences and cooking strategies.
“If you can guide them and provide a framework as to what a meal should look like so they’re including as much of the good-quality foods, they’ll be less hungry every day and therefore less apt to snack and over-indulge on non-healthy foods,” says Singer who works at Houston’s Memorial Hermann IRONMAN Sports Medicine Institute with junior high, high school and collegiate athletes.
I often wonder what changes in body composition occur over the course of a career for collegiate football players. Although the question is simple, getting data to answer the question is a little harder. In an attempt to examine this question, I was able to acquire body composition data from over 700 collegiate male football athletes from five different NCAA Division I Universities, whose programs had utilized dual X-ray absorptiometry (DXA), which is considered to be the “gold standard” for measuring body composition. These athletes were scanned multiple times during their collegiate careers. In total, over 2,500 scans were analyzed in this group of collegiate football players. Even though college athletes can range in age from 17 to 24 years of age, I restricted the analysis to only include scans from athletes’ ages 18 to 22 years old, due to the low number of scans in 17, 23 and 24-year-olds. It is important to point out that not every athlete had a scan at the same point in time, but we will account for this in the analysis. To help you look at the data in the figures below, I have used a letter system to indicate differences. If data points share the same letter (i.e., a, b, c, d) they are not significantly different. However, if data points do not share the same letter then those data points are significantly different from each other.
Luck matters more than you think, both in life and in soccer. There have been countless investigations into the role of fortune in football. German researchers found that luck was the most important factor in deciding which team won a given match, while a bunch of other findings, summarized in the book “The Numbers Game,” suggest that the underdog is likely to win way more often in soccer — just south of 50% of the time — than in any of the other major sports.
In a 2018 study, another German researcher, Martin Lames, discovered that 47% of the goals scored across a pair of Bundesliga and Premier League seasons contained some element of luck. Maybe more staggering, the first goal in the match — arguably the most important goal — was most likely to be affected by chance.