Roger Federer’s decision to forgo playing tournament tennis for the remainder of 2020 immediately raises the possibility that the all-time leading men’s Grand Slam singles champion will not improve on that 20 title count.
But hold the sympathy cards and floral arrangements. We were at this same juncture in 2016, for similar knee injury reasons, only to witness a remarkable Federer resurgence in 2017. That year, Federer won two majors on a 52-5 record and capped his comeback by capturing the No. 1 ranking early in 2018 after having spent five years in exile thanks to Novak Djokovic and Rafael Nadal.
“I’m not going to write him off, but this is concerning,” ESPN analyst Brad Gilbert said of Federer’s decision, taken due to a “setback” in his recovery from right knee surgery in February. “Thirty-nine ain’t what it used to be, that’s for sure [Federer will be that age in August]. But if tennis gets going again, he’ll probably be unseeded for the Australian Open in ’21 because he played so little early this year. And that could mean trouble.”
Set to begin on Wednesday, this year’s draft will last only five rounds, putting Erla squarely on the bubble of a player who might or might not be selected, a scenario that is playing out in the rankings. At MLB.com, the right-handed starter is the No. 91 overall prospect, while at Baseball America, the 6-foot-4, 217-pounder is listed at No. 170.
It can all lead to plenty of uncertainty heading into the draft.
“Obviously, it’s tough because with the draft there’s not as many picks because it’s reduced to only five rounds,” Erla said. “But I feel like with what I did for the first four weeks of the season, it put me in a really good spot to where I don’t need to really worry that much about what goes on. And I’m pretty laid back, so it’s a whatever-happens-happens type of thing. I’m not fretting over it very much. I’ve put myself in the best situation possible.”
Jake Guentzel’s roller-coaster season is about to take another unlikely turn: postseason participant.
The Penguins All-Star forward has joined a handful of teammates on the ice as part of Phase 2 of the NHL’s Return to Play program and figures to be ready when Pittsburgh faces Montreal in the opening round of the playoffs sometime this summer.
Guentzel’s breakout year appeared to be over when he took an awkward spill on Dec. 30 following his 20th goal of the season. He crashed into the end boards a split-second after collecting his 200th career point when he accidentally tripped over the stick of Senators defenseman Thomas Chabot.
In an exclusive interview with Sky Sports, Gabriel Jesus explains how he transformed his lifestyle with the help of a personal performance coach in the hope of maximising his potential at Manchester City.
The Philadelphia Eagles are looking to be a younger, faster, and healthier team during the upcoming 2020 NFL season.
Howie Roseman has taken more steps to ensure a healthy and productive season and the Eagles have made changes to their sports medicine/performance staff, per Tim McManus of ESPN.com, by adding Eddie Grayer as an assistant strength coach and parting with assistant athletic trainers Micah Gerhart and Mark Lewis.
The Daily Tar Heel student newspaper, Hunter Nelson from
… “It’s given us the opportunity to heal, get fit, and also develop our technical platform with wall drills and one-on-one work,” Dorrance said. “Our goal is to still be better than we were before all of this.”
After an extended postseason run last fall, one benefit Dorrance noticed was that some of the players were using the hiatus to recover from lingering injuries, while others were getting settled after concluding a busy schedule representing their national teams. Dorrance was also proud of the team’s commitment to academic excellence, as Dorrance said the team finished with an average GPA of over 3.4, the highest he’s ever seen as a coach.
Penn State is using technology to move forward in recruiting by creating virtual combines for football prospects.
Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the NCAA Division I Council created a dead period in recruiting that prevents programs from evaluating recruits in person through July 31. With no way to see prospects at camps on campus or evaluate them at their high schools, Penn State’s staff decided to take matters into their own hands.
The Nittany Lions created virtual combines to have something to evaluate for the current class, as well as underclassmen. In a normal recruiting calendar, college camps and combines are crucial parts of the process for underclassmen to gain exposure and for late bloomers to be seen by college coaches.
Hoffenheim have long been synonymous with innovation. Along with fellow Bundesliga club Borussia Dortmund, they introduced the world to the Footbonaut, a high-tech training tool that fires balls at players in rapid succession in order to test and hone their skills.
Unlike Dortmund, Hoffenheim went further by investing in the Helix too – a gaming resource that tests the cognitive skills of players within an immersive environment. This is a club that even trained its goalkeepers using 3D glasses to help heighten their senses.
Everyone in football, it seems, is fascinated by their ideas.
“Sometimes we feel more like a museum than a research laboratory,” Professor Jan Mayer tells Sky Sports. “A lot of people look and want to see what we are doing next.”
Researchers at Tufts University’s School of Engineering have developed biomaterial-based inks that respond to and quantify chemicals released from the body (e.g. in sweat and potentially other biofluids) or in the surrounding environment by changing color. The inks can be screen printed onto textiles such as clothes, shoes, or even face masks in complex patterns and at high resolution, providing a detailed map of human response or exposure. The advance in wearable sensing, reported in Advanced Materials, could simultaneously detect and quantify a wide range of biological conditions, molecules and, possibly, pathogens over the surface of the body using conventional garments and uniforms.
Constantly wiping sweat from our brows isn’t anyone’s idea of a summer highlight. But the warm-weather annoyance and exercise byproduct could offer a goldmine of data about your body. A new device designed by North Carolina State University (NCSU) engineers has the potential to transform this sun-induced saline solution into a powerful diagnostic tool for everything from dehydration to cystic fibrosis.
Using a low-powered, paper-based design, a team of engineers has created a wearable device designed to continuously analyze the biological make-up of a person’s sweat for 10-days at a time. While similar devices stop working after becoming too saturated with sweat, the plant-like capillary action of this device wicks excessive moisture from it and allows it to operate continuously.
Painless, needle-free, and continuous glucose monitoring sensors are needed to enhance the life quality of diabetic patients. To that extent, we propose a first-of-its-kind, highly sensitive, noninvasive continuous glycemic monitoring wearable multisensor system. The proposed sensors are validated on serum, animal tissues, and animal models of diabetes and in a clinical setting. The noninvasive measurement results during human trials reported high correlation (>0.9) between the system’s physical parameters and blood glucose levels, without any time lag. The accurate real-time responses of the sensors are attributed to their unique vasculature anatomy–inspired tunable electromagnetic topologies. These wearable apparels wirelessly sense hypo- to hyperglycemic variations with high fidelity. These components are designed to simultaneously target multiple body locations, which opens the door for the development of a closed-loop artificial pancreas. [full text]
The Premier League will return after a 100-day stoppage on June 17, cramming the remaining 92 games of the season into just five-and-a-half weeks.
A deluge of football may be welcomed by fans starved of live action for three months.
But it is expected to take a heavy toll on players hit by the combination of a long layoff, little contact training, fixture congestion and less hands-on treatment.
“We are expecting more injuries at this time,” Newcastle club doctor Paul Catterson told the BBC.
NBA team personnel are expected to be asked to submit personal medical histories to a panel of physicians who would review the individual risk of serious illness due to any spread of the coronavirus in the NBA’s bubble environment in Orlando, Florida, sources told ESPN.
It is unclear what authority, if any, that panel might have in prohibiting any personnel from attending the league’s restart — or placing limitations upon them — but there is some anxiety about such limitations among teams, sources said.
One significant factor in establishing risk for health complications due to the coronavirus is advanced age. That leaves three head coaches among those in the 22-team July restart — San Antonio’s Gregg Popovich (71), Houston’s Mike D’Antoni (69) and New Orleans’ Alvin Gentry (65) — perhaps vulnerable to recommendations of those evaluations, sources said.
… Is there a way we can measure which leagues are producing players who, when they join a Premier League club, go on to regularly play minutes for them?
One of the things we’ve been working on is a model to assess success in transfers. Our hypothesis is that players who are playing well remain in the team. Of course there are other reasons, such as injury, why a player may not feature but in general a manager will select the best players available to him.
We, therefore, have created a model whereby we look at the league players have come from and the number of minutes they average per season after signing for a club.