Yahoo Sports, Australian Associated Press, Murray Wenzel from
… The relentless schedule took its toll, the Opals star retiring as a 34-year-old four years ago, on the eve of what would have been a fifth Olympic Games appearance.
Things peaked in 2010 when Jackson won her second WNBA championship and was also crowned league and finals MVP.
But she said that sort of sustained good form was only possible when the unlikely combination of a broken back and the murder of her Russian team owner convinced her to skip her usual European jaunt.
Canadian soccer star Alphonso Davies says his message to young players is “just be themselves.”
“Every time they step on the field, play hard and know how to play with a smile on your face because when you play with a smile on your face, that’s when you play your best,” he told a Bayern Munich video news conference Tuesday. “Don’t worry about what’s going happen, just be in the moment, enjoy it.”
The 19-year-old from Edmonton said he welcomes being a role model to young kids and wants to put his platform to good use.
… What they all have in common is a desire to learn from the man they consider one of the greatest coaches of all time.
“I’ve always studied and admired his approach,” Vogel said. “I consider him the GOAT of NBA coaches.”
“Phil’s a great example of handling whatever comes his way,” Rivers said. “We all want the calm, and he dealt in the calm very well. But he also dealt with the storms extremely well. He got personalities and people to work together.”
Athletes may not be able to train the way they would like right now, but that doesn’t mean they can’t work out and stay fit.
It also doesn’t mean that all the work they put in before training facilities nationwide began shutting down because of the current pandemic will be gone by the time they do get back to their sports.
That was the message behind this week’s “Expert Connection” episode on the Panam Sports Channel featuring Dr. Jo Brown, a physiotherapist who has worked with elite athletes from Australia and Jamaica, and United States Olympic & Paralympic Committee strength and conditioning coach Brandon Siakel.
… Few football experts have gone deep into the many differences between German and Dutch Football, from the individual skills to the mentality and team spirit. In Germany, winning is the only thing that matters, how you achieve it is not as important, which is not the case for the Dutch. In the Netherlands, coaches can be sacked even if they win, and the story of Ajax coach Tomislav Ivić stands testimony to that. Tomislav Ivić, voted as ‘the most successful manager in history’ by La Gazetta Dello Sport (7 League titles in 5 different countries), who won the title with Ajax but was forced to leave his post right after because the fans and the club’s officials weren’t happy with ‘HOW’ he did it.
These differences in football mindsets for both countries have logically led to more continental and international titles for Germany, but more skillful players and football legends for Netherlands, and it all starts at first with scouting for 6 year-olds.
EXOS had another great year of combine training. Between the 95 athletes who went to the combine, they snagged over 200 performances in the top 15. Their hard work began to pay off in round one of the 2020 NFL draft, and they made up 43% of first-round picks.
No. 2 pick Chase Young, defensive lineman, and No. 3 pick Jeff Okudah, a defensive back, both represented Ohio State in the top 5, picked by the Washington Redskins and the Detroit Lions respectively. Andrew Thomas, a defensive lineman from Georgia, found a new home with the New York Giants with their No. 4 pick. To round out the top 10, Derrick Brown, a defensive lineman from Auburn, went to the North Carolina Panthers just before the Jacksonville Jaguars picked Florida defensive back C.J. Henderson.
Chelsea Lane, Hawks VP of Athletic Performance & Sports Medicine, discusses how she is maintaining athletic development, mitigating the effects of isolation and monitoring the team during the NBA hiatus. [video, 3:10]
A wearable smart patch will deliver precision data to help people personalise their diets and reduce their risk of developing lifestyle-related chronic diseases like Type 2 diabetes.
The world-first personalised nutrition wearable being developed by Melbourne-based start-up Nutromics painlessly measures key dietary biomarkers and sends the information to an app, enabling users to precisely track how their bodies respond to different foods.
… Our skin can also tell the outside world a great deal about us as well. Moms press their hands against our foreheads to see if we have a fever. A date might see a blush rising on our cheeks during an intimate conversation. People at the gym might infer you are having a good workout from the beads of sweat on you.
But Caltech’s Wei Gao, assistant professor in the Andrew and Peggy Cherng department of Medical Engineering wants to learn even more about you from your skin, and to that end, he has developed an electronic skin, or e-skin, that is applied directly on top of your real skin. The e-skin, made from soft, flexible rubber, can be embedded with sensors that monitor information like heart rate, body temperature, levels of blood sugar and metabolic byproducts that are indicators of health, and even the nerve signals that control our muscles. It does so without the need for a battery, as it runs solely on biofuel cells powered by one of the body’s own waste products.
Oh, that the science could give us some peace of mind as the coronavirus pandemic wreaks havoc on the world (let alone our soccer-loving hearts).
UEFA medical chief Tim Meyer says a return of the 2018-19 season is “definitely possible,” one day after FIFA’s medical chief Michel D’Hooghe claimed games should not return until September.
Traditional scouting is gone. During a global pandemic, there are no games for talent identifiers to watch — outside of Belarus, that is. And whenever games do return, they will presumably be played in empty stadiums, with nowhere for outside employees from potential buyer-clubs to sit.
Of course, certain analytically minded decision-makers across the sports world have been trying to do away with “traditional” scouting for a while. As former Oakland A’s general manager Billy Beane told his scouts in Michael Lewis’ “Moneyball,” “We’re not selling jeans here.” While Beane was focused on how past production might predict future results, his scouts cared more about what kind of body a player had or how his swing looked. Like any attempt at gut-level prediction, the field of scouting is riddled with psychological biases: scouts tend to stick to whatever their first impression of a player is, and they view new players through the lens of guys they’ve scouted in the past.
The 2020 NFL draft’s wide receiver class has been widely hailed as perhaps the best in over a decade. Playmaker Score, which is Football Outsiders’ statistical system for projecting college wide receivers to the next level, agrees that there are several promising prospects in this year’s class. However, Playmaker Score is only lukewarm about much of the depth available at the top of the draft. While the very top prospects look to be quite excellent, many of the receivers slated to go in the second half of the first round are not any stronger than the first-round wide receivers of drafts past.
Daishen Nix, the 15th-ranked player in the 2020 class, has joined fellow five-stars Jalen Green (No. 3) and Isaiah Todd (No. 11) in opting to forego college in favor of the NBA G League’s new professional pathway program.
Why it matters: This signals the NBA’s intention to more forcefully take the reins on developing its own future talent, while shining a spotlight on the rapidly maturing G League.