… “If he gets better than what he is right now, it is going to be a long season next year for whoever is guarding him.” Chris Chiozza famously said. “It is totally different when you see him scoring 40 points on TV than when you see him score 40 points on you, it is a lot different.”
“How does Kevin look when he comes back?,” Sean Marks asked rhetorically. “I can tell you now he looks pretty darn good.”
But that was based on the March version of Kevin Durant. In recent days, we’ve seen video here and there of the Nets, including Durant, working out at The Academy in Los Angeles, along with other current and former NBA players.
… One of the best parts about being with Sue during those weeks— besides falling madly in love—was that I got to piggyback on her schedule.
When Sue trained, I trained; what she ate—more vegetables, less sugar and carbs—I ate. I hadn’t been eating enough, which had impacted my ability to train and kept me hovering at 70 percent effort and engagement. Sue’s fitness and nutrition schedules not only gave me a sense of strength and stability that helped me power up to 100 percent; they also made Sue and I feel as if we were in this together.
At the beginning of the 2017 season, after six months on the new regimen, I was so fit and healthy my entire physique had changed.
It’s been some 13 months since Zack Steffen took the field for the US men’s national team, and an eventful 13 months at that.
The Manchester City goalkeeper made the most of a year-long loan stint in the Bundesliga with Fortuna Dusseldorf, working through a nagging knee problem and eventually earning enough trust from Pep Guardiola to become City’s first-team No. 2 behind Ederson at the start of the current campaign. He’s earned a couple of starts in EFL Cup action thus far and is eagerly soaking up knowledge in his world-class surroundings at the English giants.
“The talent they have at that club, just to be in training with those guys every day, it’s making me better,” Steffen told reporters in a Tuesday conference call, extolling the benefits he’s gained from working under Cityzens goalkeeping coaches Xabier Mancisidor and Richard Wright.
… On the family’s backyard court, LaMelo measured himself against his older brothers and their friends. On the AAU circuit and in high school, he competed alongside them. They confounded opponents with an unconventional, fast-paced system that deemphasized defense and encouraged shooting early and often.
Those experiences helped mold LaMelo into a high-risk, high-upside prospect who could go as early as No. 1 overall in next week’s NBA draft. For better or worse, the 6-foot-7 point guard is unafraid of any opponent and unwaveringly confident in his own ability.
“I don’t want to be a player that’s just drafted and is a role player in the NBA,” LaMelo told Yahoo Sports’ Krysten Peek last December. “I want to keep rising from there and be one of the best to ever play the game.”
Even elite athletes find it difficult to stick to a training plan year-round. In almost every training plan is a scheduled break of two to three weeks to reset. In the grand scheme of an entire year, three weeks might seem like nothing, but it turns out that in that time, especially in the case of highly trained runners, fitness can deteriorate quickly. Here’s a look at how that happens.
For eight seasons, Dr Robin Thorpe held a position that Manchester United had not had before and have not had since – Head of Recovery and Regeneration.
In fact, no other English team has had this role either, making Thorpe something of a trailblazer. With clubs facing unprecedented fixture congestion as a result of the coronavirus pandemic, perhaps they’ll now reconsider that.
Thorpe now works as a High Performance Consultant with NBA and MLB teams in the United States, having left United after a decade in 2019. He told TGG about his work at Old Trafford and how the Red Devils reached ‘sports science utopia.’
Newly published research co-led by Jonathan Reeder, a new member of the Phil and Penny Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact, provides a preview of health monitoring devices and tools for fundamental brain research he is now pursuing at the UO.
In a new paper, completed during his postdoctoral work at Northwestern University, his team detailed advances in a soft, bandage-like patch lined with tiny channels and electronic sensors that collect and analyze sweat for health monitoring purposes. The paper published online Oct. 26 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In his new lab, work will continue on advancing the type of soft, biointegrated devices that was detailed in the paper, said Reeder, who joined the UO in September. He also has his sights set on an implant to mute pain following surgical repairs.
Sensors that monitor a patient’s condition during and after medical procedures can be expensive, uncomfortable and even dangerous. Now, an international team of researchers has designed a highly sensitive flexible gas sensor that can be implanted in the body — and, after it’s no longer needed, safely biodegrade into materials that are absorbed by the body.
In a study, the researchers reported they designed a flexible and implantable sensor that can monitor various forms of nitric oxide (NO) and nitrogen dioxide (NO2) gas in the body. Monitoring these types of gases is important because they can play either a beneficial or, sometimes, harmful role in human health, according to Huanyu “Larry” Cheng, Dorothy Quiggle Career Development Professor in the Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics and an affiliate of the Institute for Computational and Data Sciences.
Rochester Institute of Technology has canceled all winter sports, including men’s and women’s hockey, for the 2020-21 season due to what it says are “ongoing health and safety concerns related to the COVID-19 pandemic.”
In addition to hockey – RIT’s only D-I sports – wrestling and men’s and women’s basketball, swimming and diving, and indoor track and field are canceled.
“This was a very difficult decision and we understand the disappointment this brings to our student-athletes and coaches,” said RIT president David Munson in a statement Monday afternoon. “But given the rise in COVID-19 in our community, as well as across the nation and globe, this is the right thing to do for athletes and community safety.”
An overloaded soccer calendar is endangering players’ health and the problem will get worse as next year’s European Championship approaches, Germany coach Joachim Löw said Tuesday.
Clubs around Europe are regularly playing twice a week after the coronavirus pandemic delayed the start of the season. Most European national teams have scheduled friendlies for this week, too, packing three games into the current international break.
Löw added his criticism of the pandemic-affected schedule to that voiced by coaches such as Liverpool’s Jürgen Klopp and Manchester City’s Pep Guardiola.
As the Kansas City metro reports skyrocketing COVID-19 cases and record hospitalizations, health officials are warning school districts against a particularly risky activity: indoor sports.
The Jackson, Johnson and Wyandotte county health departments all recently announced their recommendation against winter sports, held inside, where the virus can more easily spread. In particular, they warn against wrestling and basketball, where social distancing is impossible. Clay County is expected to issue its guidance this week.
“We know that many of our districts are returning most of their students to in-person learning modes. The risk of infections is higher with in-person learning. Athletics and extracurricular activities increase the risk even more when there is excessive exhalation, close physical contact and a lack of masks,” said Sanmi Areola, Johnson County public health director.
The NHL is considering a temporary realignment of its teams for the 2020-21 season due to COVID-19 travel restrictions, according to commissioner Gary Bettman.
Bettman said Tuesday that restrictions on travel across the Canadian border, as well as “limitations in terms of quarantining when you go from certain states to other states” within the United States, could mean the NHL creates a more regionalized alignment for its upcoming season.
“As it relates to the travel issue, which is obviously the great unknown, we may have to temporarily realign to deal with geography, because having some of our teams travel from Florida to California may not make sense.
Just months prior to winning their first World Series in 32 years, the Los Angeles Dodgers—via Elysian Park Ventures, the team’s venture capital arm—invested in the sports science company BreakAway Data. Formed in partnership with Gains Group, the software and service provider helps collegiate teams and pro sports properties better understand their athletes through data in order to personalize player development.
While BreakAway is relatively new in name and as a commercial product (though the company did inherit some Gains Group clients), the processes and concepts behind the platform have “pretty much existed within the Dodgers organization” since president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman joined the club in 2014, said Dave Anderson (chief digital officer, Gains Group). The players play the games, so it would be misleading to suggest performance science is the catalyst for the Dodgers success over the last six seasons. But Brandon McDaniel (director of player performance, Dodgers) said, “It’s undeniable the processes in place have helped players from other organizations [like Justin Turner] come in and vastly improve facets of their game and prospects—or even non-prospects we’ve drafted [guys like Tony Gonsolin, Dustin May, Gavin Lux and Will Smith]—turn themselves into big leaguers very quickly.” All five players mentioned were key contributors on the World Series championship team.
The NBA’s board of governors unanimously approved Tuesday the financial terms and other parameters that were negotiated between the league and its players. Those talks were completed late Monday night, when the league and National Basketball Players Association announced they are in agreement on a revised collective bargaining agreement for this coming season — setting the stage for a frenzied few weeks before games resume.
Teams will play a 72-game schedule, which will be revealed in the coming weeks. The league said a new system will be used to ensure that the split of basketball-related income continues, one of the biggest deals that had to be worked out with the union because the current agreement between the sides had a great deal of language that needed reworking because of the coronavirus pandemic.
