… “I felt like they tried to push him too hard,” Travis Outlaw said on the “Talkin’ Blazers” podcast. “I really thought, like, let him feel his way out first and then you feed him.”
Another teammate, Channing Frye, saw both sides of it.
“But, you know, when you pick somebody number one, right away you’re trying to show like, ‘This is why we picked him,’” Frye said. “I was kind of like, give him that Joel Przybilla role first and then he would have blossomed into something good, but they sped his process up.”
CBC Sports (Canada), The Canadian Press, Neil Davidson from
… Lawrence, who gets the occasional run in, is eating healthy. Her boyfriend studied nutrition.
PSG has given her an indoor workout regimen, as has the Canadian national team. Canada has also organized webinar sessions so she can work out with teammates and the national team strength and conditioning coach.
“I think it’s great for motivation and to see that we’re all in the same position in different parts of the world,” she said. “[After] getting the news of the Olympics being postponed, collectively we’re still working towards a goal and that’s the [Tokyo] competition — but also our personal development every day. So that’s been really nice to get that support.”
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FILE – In this Tuesday, July 2, 2019 file photo, England’s Beth Mead controls the ball during the Women’s World Cup semifinal soccer match between England and the United States, at the Stade de Lyon outside Lyon, France. For England striker Beth Mead, the postponement of the Olympics until 2021 gives her a better chance of making the British squad for the Tokyo Games after damaging a medial collateral ligament in mid-February while playing for Arsenal. (AP Photo/Laurent Cipriani, File)
Beth Mead was running around a park when she spotted Arsenal teammates at a distance.
“All we can do is wave at the other side,” Mead said in an interview with The Associated Press. “It’s hard. But we are so excited to see each other.”
Such are the necessities of social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic. There is no approaching teammates you are used to spending so much time with, so often meeting for coffee and lunch away from games and training sessions.
“It’s the same with everybody not being able to see their families,” Mead said. “This is our football family. So it’s been tough.”
… “What changed for me this year is that I was able to train through the summer, skiing in South America,” [Federica Brignone] said. “For the past two years, that didn’t happen due to injuries, so I was lacking time on snow. I would get to races and was expected to pull a rabbit out of a hat, but it doesn’t work like this.”
Brignone worked together with her staff, putting her faith in coaches Gianluca Rulfi, Daniele Simoncelli, Marcello Tavola and her brother, Davide Brignone. “We have a fantastic team, and we are having a lot of fun,” she said. Brignone also credits her teammates, Goggia and Bassino, for raising the bar and pushing each other.
Another game changer for Brignone was the work she did on herself, on a personal level, away from the slope. Instrumental to this has been Davide Brignone, who challenged his sister by saying, “If you want to win in ski racing, you have to see yourself as a winner every day.”
U.S. Soccer’s Development Academy, billed as a pathway to professional soccer for the nation’s top youth players, appears poised to cancel the remainder of the 2019-20 season and possibly all future seasons — a move that could have a profound effect, both logistical and economic, on the sport in San Diego and elsewhere.
Rumors of the DA’s imminent demise began swirling late last week and intensified over the weekend, as parents, players and clubs scrambled to make contingency plans. A request for comment Monday from U.S. Soccer was ignored, which some might interpret as further indication that its primary youth development program will be shuttered.
Ryan O'Hanlon, No Grass in the Clouds newsletter from
… The best summary of the youth-development literature I’ve seen comes from Sebastian Abbot’s book, The Away Game. As Abbot outlines in the book, the most important studied skill for a soccer player — the one thing that is essentially universal among all top-level players — is game intelligence, or the ability to recognize individual on-field situations and then make the right decision for how to act on them. Perhaps in concert with that and with the idea of Range is the philosophy of differential training — that it’s better to train a skill against a constantly changing set of variables rather than repeating the same task over and over again. Various studies show that skill is more quickly acquired this way. Wanna learn how to make constant contact with your 7-iron? Try one shot with your left shoe off, try the next one with your right eye closed, and keep mixing it up.
It’s not just me, the American David Leadbetter, either. There are disciples of differential training scattered all throughout European soccer. Thomas Tuchel and Jurgen Klopp both apply it in their training sessions — Klopp has put blocks of wood on the field, while Tuchel has required defenders to practice with tennis balls in their hands.
247 Sports, Spartan Tailgate blog, Stephen Brooks from
… Spartan Tailgate caught up with Mannie for an exit interview. The hourlong conversation covered why Mannie retired when he did, what’s next for him and his family, why he never left MSU, Tucker taking over as the Spartans’ head coach, his proudest achievements and much more.
Part 2 of our Q&A with Mannie, which has only been lightly edited, is below. Click here for Part 1.
ST: And what about Jason Novak? What can you tell us about him and what he’ll be bringing to that position?
KM: He’s gonna be absolutely outstanding. He’s got some NFL experience. He was, I believe, 11 years as an assistant with the Titans in the strength area. Been to several colleges; I know Baylor’s one, most recently CMU. I knew him during his CMU years — matter of fact, I had him down to speak at our clinic a couple years back. So I’ve gotten to know him over the last few years a lot better. I was real elated when he got the job. I remember I met him on his interview day, and we had a nice conversation then.
More and more clubs are appointing individual coaches but why are they doing it and what do these coaches do? Adam Bate speaks to those doing the job to find out what it entails and discovers a story involving Sir Alex Ferguson and the Albert Einstein of football…
To be human is to get defensive. When we’ve been questioned or criticized at work, it’s fair to say that almost all of us — save for, perhaps, the Dalai Lama and other equanimous souls — have gotten irritated, retreated into silence, or said something cutting in response. And because it is so normal to get defensive, we tend to write it off as no big deal. Jim Tamm, however, begs to differ.
Former judge Tamm spent 25 years working through other interpersonal conflicts, including mediating more than 1,000 employment disputes, and he currently trains consultants to teach collaboration skills. So what does defensiveness have to do with collaboration? Tamm has come to believe that defensiveness is the major obstacle that prevents people from working well together. “There is nothing that will help you become more effective at building collaboration than better managing your own defensiveness,” he says in an interview.
… 2) What goes into producing Firstbeat’s heart rate analytics?
Our analytics are research led and tested in the lab to ensure they are showing what we claim! The background calculations use a combination of HRV, neural network models, and individual scaling to create a digital picture of an individual’s unique physiology.
3) Firstbeat prides itself on bringing laboratory accurate results to the field. How is this possible and why is it useful for athletes and coaches?
It’s possible thanks to the advanced analytics we use. As mentioned above, the neural network modelling opens up a whole new world of possibilities in terms of what we can calculate. To achieve lab accuracy, you’re normally testing under controlled conditions in a laboratory. This can be both time consuming and expensive, as well as somewhat detached from the actual sport (depending on the specific event). By making this information field accessible, we’re giving coaches and athletes data that is trustworthy and reliable.
Teamworks, an athlete engagement platform that grew up in the college sports space and has since expanded to the professional ranks, announced yesterday that it has raised $25 million in Series C funding led by Delta-v Capital.
The big picture: The round also includes participation from new investors Afia Capital, a private investment platform backed by pro athletes, and Stadia Ventures, a global sports innovation hub.
… Next Gen Stats gives teams data to analyze trends and player performance. Partnered with Zebra Sports, Next Gen Stats provides on-field player-tracking and captures data like location, speed, distance traveled and acceleration.
On the latest Next Pats Podcast, Phil Perry talks with VP of Zebra Sports John Pollard about the future of Next Gen Stats and how it already has changed the game. [audio, 40:43]
At the MLB Players Association’s executive board meeting two years ago outside Dallas, Dave Winfield noticed an unusual piece of equipment in the corner of the room. A black metallic handle extended from a long blue arm that was attached to a bulky gray stanchion. Winfield, the Hall of Famer turned union advisor, first thought it might be an automated boom mic to record the session.
No, he was told, the device was a new technology for training. Winfield looked closer and grasped the handle. Exercise equipment typically isolates muscles and operates along a fixed path, but this device glided across different planes. “I moved it through a few of the motions and felt the resistance,” Winfield recalls, “and I said, ‘I know what you have here.’ ”
Since 2015, Proteus Motion has been making these machines while trying to create a new category of sports training that uses 3D resistance and software to collect troves of data. Instead of measuring athleticism in terms of bench presses and squats, the Proteus System allows athletes to execute their on-field motions in the gym, including swinging a bat, pitching a baseball, rowing, and swinging a golf club or tennis racquet. The software tracks every movement and applies machine learning to guide users toward better efficiency of motion.
Background: In the last two decades, infrared thermography (IRT) has been applied in quarantine stations for the screening of patients with suspected infectious disease. However, the fever-based screening procedure employing IRT suffers from low sensitivity, because monitoring body temperature alone is insufficient for detecting infected patients. To overcome the drawbacks of fever-based screening, this study aims to develop and evaluate a multiple vital sign (i.e., body temperature, heart rate and respiration rate) measurement system using RGB-thermal image sensors. Methods: The RGB camera measures blood volume pulse (BVP) through variations in the light absorption from human facial areas. IRT is used to estimate the respiration rate by measuring the change in temperature near the nostrils or mouth accompanying respiration. To enable a stable and reliable system, the following image and signal processing methods were proposed and implemented: (1) an RGB-thermal image fusion approach to achieve highly reliable facial region-of-interest tracking, (2) a heart rate estimation method including a tapered window for reducing noise caused by the face tracker, reconstruction of a BVP signal with three RGB channels to optimize a linear function, thereby improving the signal-to-noise ratio and multiple signal classification (MUSIC) algorithm for estimating the pseudo-spectrum from limited time-domain BVP signals within 15 s and (3) a respiration rate estimation method implementing nasal or oral breathing signal selection based on signal quality index for stable measurement and MUSIC algorithm for rapid measurement. We tested the system on 22 healthy subjects and 28 patients with seasonal influenza, using the support vector machine (SVM) classification method. Results: The body temperature, heart rate and respiration rate measured in a non-contact manner were highly similarity to those measured via contact-type reference devices (i.e., thermometer, ECG and respiration belt), with Pearson correlation coefficients of 0.71, 0.87 and 0.87, respectively. Moreover, the optimized SVM model with three vital signs yielded sensitivity and specificity values of 85.7% and 90.1%, respectively. Conclusion: For contactless vital sign measurement, the system achieved a performance similar to that of the reference devices. The multiple vital sign-based screening achieved higher sensitivity than fever-based screening. Thus, this system represents a promising alternative for further quarantine procedures to prevent the spread of infectious diseases.
They are Major League baseball owners in their 70s and 80s, team presidents in their 60s, general managers in their 50s, scouts in their 40s, stadium ushers in their 30s and players in their 20s.
They are the guinea pigs.
Well, to be technical, research participants.
Major League Baseball team employees have become the largest industry to participate in a nationwide study that will test about 10,000 people for coronavirus antibodies, enabling researchers to understand how widespread COVID-19 is across the United States. It is unclear, however, exactly how many MLB players are participating.