AJC.com, Atlanta Journal Constitution, Sarah K. Spencer from
… “It’s pretty hectic, and the adjustment was a little crazy,” Reddish said. “But that was one of the biggest things I picked up on, how long the season was. I had to really take care of my body, eat the right things, stuff like that. … My entire life, I could pretty much just get up and go. And just play. But it’s a really long season. The games are long, you’ve got back-to-backs, you’re going from Miami to L.A., L.A. to Minnesota, it’s craziness. But it’s fun, once you get used to it, once you figure out your routine.”
With the season on hiatus, the 6-foot-8 wing has been staying in his Atlanta apartment and working out using the equipment he has on hand and, of course, running hills with his 7-month-old dog Storm to get some cardio in there (“She’s a handful,” Reddish added). On Monday, he made his first trip to the Hawks’ practice facility, which recently reopened now that shelter-in-place restrictions have eased.
The pitcher many scouts think has the highest upside in the 2020 MLB draft has been seen by most big league organizations for just three innings. And those innings were nearly a year ago, when he was part of the 2021 draft class, so some scouts weren’t even paying attention to him.
His spring high school season was canceled before it even started. But he’s been rising on some draft boards because he has impressed in Zoom interviews and has been posting videos on social media that show big league-caliber stuff coming out of the hand of a 17-year-old. He hit 98.5 mph last week and delivers some of the advanced pitch data that clubs covet, which he’s been measuring in a warehouse in Pennsylvania while getting remote training from a top independent facility over the internet. Still, scouts aren’t allowed to watch or talk to him in person.
With all that, he might be one of the top 10 picks on the night of June 10, and he will certainly be among the first 37 selections. At a time when little seems normal in the world, this is the setting for the rise of the MLB draft’s mystery man, Nick Bitsko.
How does Sunday start? Before lockdown I’d have a bit of a lie-in after Saturday’s match, then arrive at the Lyon training ground at 10am-ish for breakfast and a warm down.
And during lockdown? I’m back at home in Liverpool with my mum, who is a key worker healthcare assistant, enjoying some home comforts and trying to improve my French with Duolingo. I’m not brilliant, but my French teammates have made a big effort to learn more English, so I’m trying to push on. I did try to teach them a few Scouse phrases, but no one understood me.
… ESPN: I have to ask you about this return to training facilities that’s gonna be happening within the next couple of weeks. What are your expectations for that? It’s voluntary for the players. Very small groups of guys can be there at the same time. You can’t be on the ice, right?
Brind’Amour: Right. Well, the league sent out a pretty intense protocol, and I’m like, how are we going to do that? How are you going to manage that and figure that out? Bring in people to monitor the people coming in the door. And just to me, it’s just a lot. And as a group we’re trying to figure that out. It’s going to be interesting, obviously. But the stuff you have to do, the times, they are what they are. Trying to navigate, it sounds really like there’s really nothing the coaches can do, so it’s up to the players to figure out how they’re gonna go for a while.
I think really what we need, to be quite honest, is some dates. We need some dates as far as, OK, training camp’s going to start on this date. Do you really want guys coming in? If we’re talking July 15 as a training camp, we’re not even in June yet. You know, you’ve gotta remember, for me, the bigger issue is guys away from their families and stuff like, I mean, that’s to me the biggest issue here.
International Journal of Sport Nutrition and Exercise Metabolism from
The authors aimed to quantify (a) the periodization of physical loading and daily carbohydrate (CHO) intake across an in-season weekly microcycle of Australian Football and (b) the quantity and source of CHO consumed during game play and training. Physical loading (via global positioning system technology) and daily CHO intake (via a combination of 24-hr recall, food diaries, and remote food photographic method) were assessed in 42 professional male players during two weekly microcycles comprising a home and away fixture. The players also reported the source and quantity of CHO consumed during all games (n = 22 games) and on the training session completed 4 days before each game (n = 22 sessions). The total distance was greater (p < .05) on game day (GD; 13 km) versus all training days. The total distance differed between training days, where GD-2 (8 km) was higher than GD-1, GD-3, and GD-4 (3.5, 0, and 7 km, respectively). The daily CHO intake was also different between training days, with reported intakes of 1.8, 1.4, 2.5, and 4.5 g/kg body mass on GD-4, GD-3, GD-2, and GD-1, respectively. The CHO intake was greater (p < .05) during games (59 ± 19 g) compared with training (1 ± 1 g), where in the former, 75% of the CHO consumed was from fluids as opposed to gels. Although the data suggest that Australian Football players practice elements of CHO periodization, the low absolute CHO intakes likely represent considerable underreporting in this population. Even when accounting for potential underreporting, the data also suggest Australian Football players underconsume CHO in relation to the physical demands of training and competition. [full text]
… “Our number one priority throughout this spring has been the safety and well-being of our student-athletes, and that will remain the top priority,” NDSU coach Matt Entz said last week, echoing a sentiment across college athletics.
“Many of our players have found creative ways to stay active from remote locations, but they also miss being with teammates and having more structure and ability for complete workouts.”
The schools that are ready to allow campus workouts again and those that aren’t vary across the nation, so only some will re-open facilities on Monday. It’s an important step for any plan, but the way schools will get back to playing football this fall is still developing.
… “Without question, the thing that immediately comes to mind is you’ve got to be very careful to manage work loads, or you’re going to have a heightened risk for injury,” said Kirk McCullough, a Sporting Kansas City team physician and long-standing NFL musculoskeletal subcommittee member. “I would not say this is an inevitable freight train coming that can’t be stopped, but the concern is legitimate. I think the saying goes: ‘Those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.’”
The history: 2011.
The potential lockout year.
The NFL missed its entire offseason — 18 weeks — as owners and players negotiated a new collective bargaining agreement. Just two days after a deal was announced, training camp began.
… As professional sport becomes ever bigger business, the pressure on its participants increases exponentially. Sport follows a binary narrative – creating heroes or villains – and the result can be paralysing. “Our brains are built for survival,” says Snape, “so often our primitive instinct is to protect our self-esteem rather than take a risk and go for glory.”
In other words, set yourself the goal of perfection and you’ll worry more about the consequences of falling short. “Perfectionism can be good for driving your work ethic and your attention to detail. But it can also cause stress, procrastination and even avoidance – because you’re afraid of not achieving it. The really great sportspeople have the courage to throw themselves into any endeavour with 100% commitment, knowing that it’s going to be imperfect.”
A large software project is above all a social exercise in which technical experts try to reach good decisions together, for instance on github pull requests. But communication is difficult, in particular between diverging points of view. It is easy to underestimate how much well-intended persons can misunderstand each-other and get hurt, in open source as elsewhere. Knowing why there are communication challenges can help, as well as applying a few simple rules.
The first challenge is to understand the other’s point of view: the different parties see the problem differently.
Superhydrophilic zwitterionic polymers are a class of nonfouling materials capable of effectively resisting any nonspecific interactions with biological systems. We designed here a functional zwitterionic polymer that achieves a trade-off between nonspecific interactions providing the nonfouling property and a specific interaction for bioactive functionality. Built from phosphoserine, an immune-signaling molecule in nature, this zwitterionic polymer exhibits both nonfouling and immunomodulatory properties. Its conjugation to uricase is shown to proactively eradicate all unwanted immune response, outperforming the zwitterionic polymers. On the other hand, this polymer could significantly prolong the half-life of protein drugs in vivo, overcoming the innate drawback of phosphoserine in inducing accelerated clearance. Our demonstration of a nonfouling zwitterionic material with built-in immunomodulatory functionality provides new insights into the fundamental design of biomaterials, as well as far-reaching implications for broad applications such as drug delivery, implants, and cell therapy. [full text]
… Towards the end of her training in emergency medicine at Brown University, Rhode Island, Dr Alyson McGregor was asked what her “specialism” would be.
“You are expected to have a niche so my answer was, ‘Well, I like women’s health,’” says McGregor. “From that, people thought, ‘Oh, she’s into obstetrics/gynaecology.’” So on busy shifts in the emergency department of Rhode Island Hospital, the state’s major trauma centre, the newly qualified McGregor became everyone’s go-to doctor for pelvic examinations because this was believed to be her special interest. “I laugh about it now, but it’s when I started to realise that there’s this assumption that women’s health is wrapped up in their reproduction. Women were men with ‘boobs and tubes’.”
But McGregor was interested in far more than that. By women’s health she meant the health of the whole woman, whose female chromosomes exist in every cell and influence every bodily function. She was interested in how these differences – in hormones, in tissue, in systems and structures – impact every disease and the way it should be treated. Cardiovascular health provided her route in.
Force majeure clauses were once just formalities in contracts when scheduling college football games. Then Hurricane Katrina in August 2005 forced the cancellation of several games and called for a greater inclusion of words like “acts of God” and “natural disasters” to help nix the deal in unexpected circumstances.
Many administrators are now curious if they’re protected from potential coronavirus cancellations this season. Scrapping the nonconference schedule would leave Central Michigan football without an expected $2.15 million ($1.3 million from Nebraska, $850,000 from Northwestern). Group of Five teams fall back on these game guarantees to keep their athletic departments afloat.
If only certain schools cancel games, the financial impact is determined by the wording of force majeure clauses. But a global pandemic is not specifically stated in most of these contracts between schools.
Barcelona will cut their scouting department in half as part of a major restructuring operation, various club sources have confirmed to ESPN.
The department employs around 40 members of staff, with only 15 to 20 expected to survive the cull as Barca look to streamline how they source players from around the world.
… [Andrei] Svechnikov cuts behind the net and then stops abruptly. He shifts his momentum and reverses course and all eyes — from the scrambling defense to the nearly 14,000 fans in the PNC Arena in Raleigh — shift with him. With his feet still moving, he shifts the puck onto its side, slips his stick underneath it, and cradles it on his blade until he spots a window in the top of the net, next to Rittich’s head. It’s enough space to make history. Like a postal worker jamming the last letter of the day through a mail slot, Svechnikov stuffs the puck into the net. It’s not the smoothest finish, but it doesn’t matter.
For the first time in National Hockey League history, a high wrap, lacrosse-style goal has been scored, and it happens so quickly that initially only Svechnikov realizes the significance. As he glides across the ice, he invokes one of his signature celebrations, an overhead first pump, one leg hitched up into the air, before his teammates mob him. Brian Gibbons, a hockey journeyman who is more than a decade older than Svechnikov, is the first to reach him. He grabs the teen by his collar and shakes him enthusiastically, if not a little mercilessly, as the rest of the Hurricanes join the celebration. For just a moment, everyone forgets about the game. It seemingly doesn’t matter that Svechnikov’s game-tying goal ends Rittich’s shutout, or that there’s still ten minutes left to play. The focus is solely on Svechnikov, who is not only the first player born in the 2000s to score in the NHL, but now the record holder for first lacrosse-style goal in NHL history.
Leave it to baseball: Somehow the biggest impediment to starting the 2020 season isn’t the deadly pandemic swirling around us, but rather dollars and cents. Several MLB proposals to cut player salaries were rejected by the players’ association, with both players and agents blasting the owners’ plans as yet another breach of trust in a relationship full of them. A counterproposal was filed by the union Sunday afternoon, which — according to ESPN’s Jeff Passan — is expected to be rejected by the league, though it might be a path to an eventual agreement.
The crux of the argument is around how much of a salary hit players should take to offset the lost revenue not only from playing an abbreviated season with fewer games but also from having to play without fans in the stands — a major source of league revenue — when games do start. In March, the players came to what they believed was a firm agreement to prorate their salaries relative to how much of a full 162-game schedule is played (so, 50 percent of a full salary in an 81-game season, and so forth). The owners have claimed that agreement didn’t cover the eventuality of playing games without fans, and that they have the right to negotiate further salary reductions to offset the reduction in revenue.