The day after the Eagles lost to the Seattle Seahawks in the first round of the playoffs, Howie Roseman jotted down the three core traits his team would seek during the offseason.
The first trait was speed. Above all else, the team that ranked 22nd in team speed by Next Gen Stats in 2019 had to get faster. The two fastest teams in the NFL last season, the 49ers and the Chiefs, both made it to the Super Bowl.
Henry Ruggs III may not have run the fastest 40-yard dash in the history of the NFL combine, but he did set the mark for the fastest 10-yard split (first 10 yards of the sprint) among the top runners in the history of the event.
Among the ten top 40-times in the history of the combine, no player has been quicker to the 10-yard mark than Ruggs.
“Ruggs had a 1.43-second 10-yard split, the best acceleration in the class,” ESPN’s Paul Gutierrez wrote this week. “[Ruggs] has also hit 23 mph at Alabama on the Catapult tracking system, faster than any pro player ran at any point during the 2019 season, per NFL Next Gen Stats.”
The renovated home of three-time Olympic javelin thrower Kara Winger now has all the training amenities she needs, including cable.
No premium channels available on this cable, though. It’s just a basic wire she and her husband installed in the backyard to help her work on her technique. She throws a metal pipe along the angled cable to simulate javelin tosses.
Suzy Petty says she wishes England Hockey would have treated her “more like a human” when she was unexpectedly dropped from their central programme last November. Petty, 28, has 51 caps for England and Great Britain, and in the 18 months leading up to her dismissal had featured at the World Cup and Commonwealth Games, where she helped the team win a bronze medal.
Throughout that time, and since the age of 17, Petty struggled with an eating disorder, something which she had made public on social media last October.
Jason Novak was less than a year into a new job and it was a good one.
He was the head of physical conditioning at prestigious IMG Academy in Florida. And then new Michigan State football coach Mel Tucker offered to bring him to East Lansing as the program’s head strength and conditioning coach in February.
“Getting to actually sit down and talk with him and hear his vision of the program and where he wants it to go and the belief system that he has – I mean it was one of those deals where it’s like ‘where do I sign right now?’” Novak recalled last week. “I got so excited in talking to him.”
Victory Press; Melissa Burgess, Kirsten Whelan, Zoë Hayden from
… The Victory Press spoke to several former NWHL players representing four of the league’s teams about the working conditions they experienced during their time in the league through the 2018-19 season. Their combined experiences paint a picture of a league that struggled to meet its workers’ basic needs. We are preserving these players’ anonymity, and we have also been purposefully vague about details of certain incidents (such as when and where they occurred, and other specificities) in order to aid in that goal.
“It’s important for people to just learn exactly what everyone kind of lived through. I know that a lot of the national team players get backlash that they’re just complaining, or they have really high standards or they’re high-maintenance. But there’s kind of two parts to it,” said a former Boston Pride player. “I think it’s great that there is a way for women to play hockey after college, but I think there needs to be a longer, greater objective here of having the right resources, infrastructure, support, and just overall treatment and transparency ― communication, everything.”
Many of the nation’s high school football coaches are endorsing USA Football’s Football Development Model for youth leagues nationwide.
The National High School Football Coaches Alliance, comprised of high school coaching associations across 41 states, has approved the model that aligns with the American Development Model designed by the U.S. Olympic & Paralympic Committee (USOPC).
Major League Soccer has broadened its youth soccer platform by inviting 65 top-tier youth soccer clubs from around the country to join their elite soccer development program. Real Salt Lake will be one of 95 clubs within the league.
The program will transform youth soccer development in the United States and Canada and will include over 8,000 youth soccer players competing in a year-round competition.
Rachel Daly, the England and Houston Dash defender, has lifted the lid on what individual training in America’s National Women’s Soccer League is like, but admits she does not expect to play team football for a while as clubs in different parts of the country deal with varying lockdown measures. … Daly has been at the Houston Sports Park training ground three times a week throughout lockdown, after she was given special dispensation from the city’s chief medical officer to receive one-on-one physiotherapy treatment for an injury picked up at the SheBelieves Cup while on duty with England in March. She told Telegraph Sport receiving the news last week that her team could return on an individual basis was a welcome surprise, but comes with “strict”, unfamiliar rules to adhere to social-distancing guidelines.
BJSM blog; Matthew Tuttle, Steve Short and Paul Marshall from
The National Basketball Association (NBA) is a high-intensity sport, with substantial challenges from the length and physical demands of the season, travel demands, time zone changes, irregular sleep patterns, and professional (i.e. media, sponsor) demands (table 1). Within this context there are challenges for decisions around the appropriate scheduling of recovery, training, injury prevention, and rehabilitation sessions. Physical qualities such as aerobic capacity, lower extremity strength and power, are important for modifying the performance, fatigue, and injury risk of NBA athletes. These qualities are developed in the off-season and maintained during the season for optimal athlete performance. This editorial aims to overview the primary challenges for scheduling exercise in the NBA season, and provide practical advice to assist practitioners in this environment.
It was a shift that began long before the pandemic: Tech companies, health providers, and patients alike were increasingly looking to remote devices like miniature electrocardiograms and blood pressure cuffs connected to the internet that let clinicians keep tabs on care from afar.
Now, with virtual care emerging as a safer alternative to in-person care, remote heart monitoring tools may be having a breakout moment.
The devices could prove useful during the pandemic for a range of reasons, from their ability to catch undiagnosed heart abnormalities in patients missing routine medical appointments, to their usefulness in gauging Covid-19 patients’ responses to experimental medications that impact the heart.
Washington Capitals owner Ted Leonsis believes sports are a “communal resource.” Even as the coronavirus pandemic shutters arenas and postpones games and creates a murky uncertainty about the future of sports, Leonsis believes the community will have access to that resource again.
“I’m not buying, in any way, that we won’t be able to eat in restaurants before a game at Capital One Arena and all be together,” he said recently, during a web chat with The Economic Club of Washington. “It’s just a matter of what time frame that has to happen in.”
Frontiers in Sports and Active Living journal from
College students are required to manage a variety of stressors related to academic, social, and financial commitments. In addition to the burdens facing most college students, collegiate athletes must devote a substantial amount of time to improving their sporting abilities. The strength and conditioning professional sees the athlete on nearly a daily basis and is able to recognize the changes in performance and behavior an athlete may exhibit as a result of these stressors. As such, the strength and conditioning professional may serve an integral role in the monitoring of these stressors and may be able to alter training programs to improve both performance and wellness. The purpose of this paper is to discuss stressors experienced by collegiate athletes, developing an early detection system through monitoring techniques that identify the detrimental effects of stress, and discuss appropriate stress management strategies for this population. [full text]
… One major change will see the remainder of the campaign played out behind closed doors – a fact that would put a significant dampener on celebrations of Liverpool’s first title in 30 years.
But Lee Richardson has explained that he is working with the players to help them focus solely on the things they can control during this trying period of inactivity.
… Though squad rotation is almost inevitable during any condensed period of games, when a coach has more substitutions, they can theoretically start their preferred XI more often knowing there is more leeway to lessen players’ workload with later substitutions.
“What we don’t want to have happen is injuries in the first several games, because now you’re really in trouble,” Porter said. “That’s why I believe we need four weeks, minimum — usually we get six [in preseason]. Typically at four weeks, our players are at about 60 to 70 minutes, so even in four weeks we’re going to have to push it a little bit and that’s why we’re trying to get our guys at level higher than a normal offseason when they come in and get six weeks.”