… Little did Suzanne Brigit Bird from Long Island know just how far she’d go on a basketball court. Baby Bird played AAU ball — shown in the photo below at a girls 11-and-under national championship in 1992, just three years before the UConn women would win their first national championship.
Bird has always been a steady, consistent player on the court, but like Seattle teammate Breanna Stewart, tends to come up big when the game is on the line.
Just days before Bird and the Storm completed a sweep of the Las Vegas Aces in the WNBA Finals on Oct. 6, UConn coach Geno Auriemma said no one was better prepared.
“Sue’s been training for these moments every single day since her rookie year,” Auriemma said during a Zoom media call. “Some people don’t have the stamina to be able to do that. They don’t have the discipline to do that.”
Before Chase Claypool scored four touchdowns in a single football game, he scored 10.
And he probably would have scored more in that game if Khul Sanghera hadn’t limited his touches.
“He didn’t touch the ball a lot, but when he did, he made the best of it,” said Sanghera, who coached Claypool for six seasons in the community football league in Abbotsford, British Columbia. “He gave everything, every drop of Chase that game. That was special.”
To keep other players — and their parents — happy, Sanghera had to walk a fine line between managing and developing the Pittsburgh Steelers’ future second-round pick and showing good sportsmanship to his own team and opponents.
But when the 10-year-old Claypool got the ball in his hands, things just happened. He couldn’t help it.
With the future of professional women’s hockey in flux, a trio of Canadians are set to strap on their skates to compete in CBC’s Battle of the Blades.
Meghan Agosta, Jennifer Botterill and Jessica Campbell will make their figure skating debuts next Thursday when the sixth season of the show premieres.
While toe picks and twirls have proven challenging in training, the women’s hockey troika hopes swapping hockey skates for figures skates brings attention to their primary sport.
… A 2015 study indicated that 38% of elite or highly-trained athletes showed signs of obstructive sleep apnea, defining themselves as snorers, while 8% reported apneic episodes. Fragmented sleep, as experienced in sleep apnea, means affected individuals regularly transition between a deeper sleep and lighter sleep. Jane Wrigglesworth, a sleep consultant with How to Sleep Well, explains that this means individuals rarely spend enough time in the deep restorative stages of sleep, resulting in compromised athletic recovery capacity, slower reaction times and inadequate time to complete critical sleep tasks.
Along with proper nutrition and a competent training plan, recovery rounds out three of the most important elements for athletic success. While nutrition and training are done in the waking hours, much of recovery is done during sleep. During this time, the brain releases a flood of hormones, including testosterone and growth hormone – the latter which helps repair and build structures within the body – and also activates the parasympathetic nervous system. During sleep, the immune system releases cytokines to help the body fight inflammation and the digestion system and associated organs are hard at work regulating insulin levels and blood glucose levels. The cognitive benefits of sleep are massive: memory consolidation, improvement in learning, emotional regulation and enhancement in procedural skills. In essence, there is not a system or process in the body or brain that is not impacted by sleep, and they all get a reboot during these critical hours. And if that isn’t enough, the research is clear: under-slept individuals are not as successful.
Injuries, specially muscle injuries, are a great concern in sports as they represent the main cause of interruption for athletes. Moreover, in the case of team sports such as football, these injuries do not just represent a limitation on the athletes’ performance, but they can negatively impact the whole team as a result of the reduced availability of injured players in the team’s tactical planning, and they can also affect the club’s economy (with an estimated average cost of €500,000 per player for each month of absence).1 Thus, the average absence due to muscle injury is 16 days with an injury load (days of absence/hours of exposure) of 43 days per 1000 hours of sports training for football players in elite European teams.2 Therefore, muscle injury prevention is key for elite teams.
The hands-on approach based on evidence, which consists in combining high-quality scientific evidence with hands-on experience, is considered a gold standard to optimize the results in high performance.3 Because of that, professional teams should combine scientific knowledge with the experience of coaches, doctors, the coaching staff, and the players to prevent injuries. Usually, professionals resort to strategies based on exercising to prevent muscle injuries.4 In 2015, Alan McCall and Gregory Dupont, among other experts, summarized the existing preventive exercises in scientific literature, concluding that the most commonly used strategies based on exercising included eccentric and balance/proprioception exercises, although the scientific evidence that supports these strategies was weak and little recommended.4 However, since McCall et al. published their work in 2015, research and the interest of professionals in injury prevention has increased in the past 5 years, so it is appropriate to update such work.
… In 1988, the University of California sociologist Harry Edwards published an indictment of the “single-minded pursuit of sports” in Black communities. The “tragic” overemphasis on athletics at the expense of school and family, he wrote in Ebony magazine, was leaving “thousands and thousands of Black youths in obsessive pursuit of sports goals foredoomed to elude the vast and overwhelming majority of them.” In a plea to his fellow Black people, Edwards declared, “We can simply no longer permit many among our most competitive and gifted youths to sacrifice a wealth of human potential on the altar of athletic aspiration.”
Thirty years later, in a twist worthy of a Jordan Peele movie, Fairfield County has come to resemble Compton in the monomaniacal focus on sports. “There’s no more school,” a parent from the town of Darien told me flatly. (She, like Sloane and several other parents, did not want to be identified for privacy and recruitment reasons.) “There’s no more church. No more friends. We gave it all up for squash.”
Background The acute:chronic workload ratio (ACWR) is commonly used to manage training load in sports, particularly to reduce injury risk. However, despite its extensive application as a prevention intervention, the effectiveness of load management using ACWR has never been evaluated in an experimental study.
Aim To evaluate the effectiveness of a load management intervention designed to reduce the prevalence of health problems among elite youth football players of both sexes.
Methods We cluster-randomised 34 elite youth football teams (16 females, 18 males) to an intervention group (18 teams) and a control group (16 teams). Intervention group coaches planned all training based on published ACWR load management principles using a commercially available athlete management system for a complete 10-month season. Control group coaches continued to plan training as normal. The prevalence of health problems was measured monthly in both groups using the Oslo Sports Trauma Research Centre Questionnaire on Health Problems.
Results The between-group difference in health problem prevalence (primary outcome) was 1.8%-points (−4.1 to 7.7 %-points; p=0.55) with no reduction in the likelihood of reporting a health problem in the intervention group (relative risk 1.01 (95% CI 0.91 to 1.12); p=0.84) compared with the control group.
Conclusions We observed no between-group difference, suggesting that this specific load management intervention was not successful in preventing health problems in elite youth footballers.
The Seattle Times, The Washington Post, Marlene Cimons from
… Until recently, [Matt] Oates had few options, one of them to give up running entirely with the hope that his knee would not further deteriorate. He couldn’t live with that. “Running is my Zen time,” he says. “I couldn’t take a ‘you can’t run again.’ “
Today, however, he says he hopes to benefit from a relatively new and innovative technique that regenerates cartilage from a sample of cells taken from his knee and grown in a lab, where they are embedded on a collagen membrane. The surgeon then implants the membrane back into the knee, where new cartilage tissue forms over time.
“It’s the first procedure that uses a patient’s own knee cartilage cells to try to regrow cartilage that has been lost or damaged,” says Seth Sherman, associate professor of orthopedic surgery at Stanford University Medical Center and chair of the Sports Medicine/Arthroscopy Committee for the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons.
Trinity College Dublin, Trinity News and Events from
Trinity researchers have undertaken the first multi-centred, international, qualitative study exploring the athlete experience (in their own words) of sporting low back pain (LBP).
LBP is common in rowers and can cause extended time out from the sport and even retirement for some athletes. Rowers from diverse settings (club and university to international standard) in two continents were included in the study.
When selecting an outfit for the day, you might turn to your phone, TV, or nearest window to check the weather. A 10-degree temperature shift could mean the difference between grabbing a light jacket or rolling up your sleeves on a nice day.
Your body is even more vigilant about regulating and tracking its internal temperature. Neuroscientist Shaun Morrison of Oregon Health & Science University explains how the body and brain regulate temperature, and what happens when things go awry.
University of Pennsylvania, Penn Medicine News from
A team led by scientists in the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania has produced a detailed picture of fuel and nutrient use by the human heart. The study, published this week in Science, was the first of its kind, involving the simultaneous sampling of blood from different parts of the circulatory system in dozens of human participants, in order to record the levels of related molecules going into and coming out of the beating heart.
The resulting data have revealed key features of fuel use in the normal heart as well as the failing heart, establishing a new framework for studying the heart in health and disease.
“Understanding, at this level of detail, how the heart handles fuel and nutrients should inform the development of future treatments for heart failure and related conditions,” said study senior author Zoltan Arany, MD, PhD, a professor of Medicine and director of the Cardiovascular Metabolism Program at Penn Medicine. “Now that we have a clear picture of how the heart fuels itself, we can set our sights on devising ways to improve heart metabolism in heart failure.”
While some college sports administrators are hoping that the large-scale financial impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic will be a one-year proposition, an NCAA senior executive says the struggles probably will linger into 2023.
Chief medical officer Brian Hainline’s cautionary predictions about the future included making no assumptions that NCAA championships — including basketball’s Final Four — will be held as currently scheduled.
He also addressed prospects relating not only to athletics but also to higher education in general. He said 20% to 30% of the NCAA’s Division III schools may close entirely.
First, there was Moneyball. Then came Moreyball. And now, there’s neither.
On Monday, the Wall Street Journal reported that Billy Beane, the subject of Michael Lewis’s 2003 book, would be leaving his position as Executive Vice President of the Oakland A’s to join up with Fenway Sports Group, the sports-investment vehicle of Boston Red Sox owner John Henry. A few days later, Daryl Morey (himself a subject of Lewis’s in the 2016 book The Undoing Project) resigned as general manager of the Houston Rockets. “Morey isn’t ruling out a future return to the NBA on the team side,” wrote ESPN’s Adrian Wojnarowski, “but he has become increasingly determined to explore what else might interest him professionally.”
The Tampa Bay Rays were built for this: incessant bullpen games and the use of an opener in this year’s Major League Baseball playoffs.
Then there’s the postseason schedule in the Petco Park bubble, with seven American League Championship Series games in seven days, followed by a two-day break, the World Series and a possible seven more games in nine days. That will come on top of five games in five days in the AL Division Series.
With more than 100 pitching injuries during the regular season, the entire combination has taxed the pitching staffs of the final four participants.