In the space of just a couple weeks, Richie Ledezma has seen quite the rise in his career trajectory.
The 20-year-old US men’s national team prospect is currently playing his club soccer for Dutch side PSV Eindhoven, where he worked his way through the ranks to make his first-team debut on November 1 and picked up an assist. Now, Ledezma is hoping that Monday’s friendly for the USMNT against Panama will be the opportunity to make his debut on the international level, after receiving his first career call-up from coach Gregg Berhalter into senior camp.
“I’m still trying to take it all in,” Ledezma told reporters on a Sunday video call. “Honestly, it’s a dream come true. I’m only 20 years old, making that transition from America to Europe, it’s not an easy thing to do, especially living on your own for many years. Obviously it’s emotional to me and emotional to my family and we’re still all trying to take it in.”
… An unprecedented and drawn-out NBA draft process during the coronavirus pandemic meant waiting longer than any prospects ever had. Still, Jones used the extra time to get healthy and boost his stock before Wednesday’s NBA draft.
“It has been pretty crazy,” Jones said. “It’s been almost seven months trying to prepare for the draft. But I feel like going through it all, having this much time to focus on myself and get better on all the areas I want to improve on and need to improve on has been really good.
He was 24, believed he was going to be the best pitcher in the world and wanted to show that baseball isn’t necessarily something you’re born to do. You can train yourself to be great.
… That national uneasiness with talking about race has certainly made it harder to talk about race on the more micro level within American women’s soccer. Williams pointed at the clearly disparate level of Black players in NWSL versus the WNBA – something like nearly 80% Black players in the WNBA, to NWSL’s under 20%.
“I think that, unlike the WNBA, when they want to mobilize everyone is just kind of onboard and they don’t have to convince their teammates that this is an issue,” said Williams. “Whereas because the Black [NWSL] voice I think is smaller – not in loudness but just in size – that it was really hard, or it’s really hard to convince people who don’t believe that this is a real issue that’s going on.”
Williams hopes the BWPC can be the backup that Black voices need in NWSL.
… “He’s a special athlete and quarterback,” Bills coach Sean McDermott said. “Just the speed and quickness element is off the charts. … When you watch it on film and on TV, quite honestly, you can see the difference. And we’re talking elite athletes that are around him. He’s not running around average athletes out there. He’s running around great athletes and he looks different even than those athletes.”
Though Devan McConnell was the New Jersey Devils’ director of performance science and reconditioning, his new job with the Arizona Coyotes is a step up from that title.
McConnell, announced Thursday as the Coyotes’ high performance director, will have a critical role within the club’s hockey operations department. It involves maximizing performance, minimizing injury risk, optimizing fitness and nutrition levels and putting together training regimens for the Coyotes and AHL Tucson Roadrunners players and prospects.
He’ll get to implement his vision and philosophy in a position of leadership, overseeing such team departments as strength and conditioning. The job is a new position to the club, created by Armstrong, who said the Coyotes will be more focused on improving the team through sports science.
We are pleased to share the work of Adam Virgile and his review of Dr. Declan Connolly’s research on the Top 100 Jump Heights from a NCAA Division 1 database which includes 300+ athletes and over 3,000 jumps. These CMJ’s were completed using “hands on hips” – also known as CMJ-NAS or CMJ Akimbo; which is considered the gold-standard to assess variations in loading patterns & outputs.
In February, when temperatures at home in Carbondale, Illinois, regularly dip below 30 degrees, Deanna Price packs her bags and heads to the Elite Athlete Training Center in Chula Vista, California.
A main draw, of course, is the climate: a pleasant 67 degrees or so, offering an optimal training environment all winter long. Another benefit is TrackMan, the high-technology analytical program that helped Price win the country’s first-ever world championships medal in hammer throw — a gold — at last year’s event in Doha, Qatar.
“It’s very, very cool — they do a camera in the back (of the throwing circle) and a camera in the front, and they have the TrackMan (device) right there on the side,” said Price, a 2016 Olympian.
“Every time you throw, it hooks up directly to the computer. Whenever you take a throw, you walk over and see the metrics and then look at your video and it shows your release angle. … It’s just very, very cool.”
Canadian Sport Institute Pacific (CSI Pacific) is partnering with the University of Toronto’s Department of Computer Science Innovation Lab (DCSIL) in order to leverage some of the world’s top undergraduate and graduate students in the fields of data analytics, computer science and kinesiology. These students will be working on complex sports problems to provide efficiency in daily training workflow and reveal insights in order to enhance performance.
The experiential DCSIL program focuses on bringing entrepreneurial startup education to University of Toronto students. It is taught by serial entrepreneur Professor Mario Grech and industry expert Sessional Instructor Julian Nadeau. It is also completed in collaboration with the program’s industry partners, who will provide real world challenges, subject matter expertise and mentorship.
CSI Pacific’s role in this partnership will be to donate data along with their sport partners, as well as to provide subject expertise. This work will be supported by the team in CSI Pacific’s Biomechanics & Performance Analysis led by Dr. Ming-Chang Tsai.
The Spanish coach has led ten teams in Spain, including three in La Liga, over a 23-year career in the dugout. He has managed in the later stages of European competitions, led clubs to promotion and won the Spanish Cup. It is fair to say he has seen a lot.
But in 2014, a young academic-turned-entrepreneur showed Marcelino, then head coach of Villarreal CF, something he hadn’t seen before—something new in the world of soccer analysis.
“He saw it and said in Spanish ‘esta es la bomba’—‘this is the bomb.’ He loved it,” Ruben Saavedra, the CEO and cofounder of Metrica Sports, tells me in an interview. “Then I had to start my presentation for a third time for the sporting director. They wanted to sign, and the company wasn’t even founded.”
Villarreal became Metrica’s first client, and not long after, FC Barcelona, one of the world’s most valuable clubs, became its second.
The commercial market is saturated with technologies that claim to collect proficient, free-living sleep measurements despite a severe lack of independent third-party evaluations. Therefore, the present study evaluated the accuracy of various commercial sleep technologies during in-home sleeping conditions. Materials and Methods
Data collection spanned 98 separate nights of ad libitum sleep from five healthy adults. Prior to bedtime, participants utilized nine popular sleep devices while concurrently wearing a previously validated electroencephalography (EEG)-based device. Data collected from the commercial devices were extracted for later comparison against EEG to determine degrees of accuracy. Sleep and wake summary outcomes as well as sleep staging metrics were evaluated, where available, for each device. Results
Total sleep time (TST), total wake time (TWT), and sleep efficiency (SE) were measured with greater accuracy (lower percent errors) and limited bias by Fitbit Ionic [mean absolute percent error, bias (95% confidence interval); TST: 9.90%, 0.25 (−0.11, 0.61); TWT: 25.64%, −0.17 (−0.28, −0.06); SE: 3.49%, 0.65 (−0.82, 2.12)] and Oura smart ring [TST: 7.39%, 0.19 (0.04, 0.35); TWT: 36.29%, −0.18 (−0.31, −0.04); SE: 5.42%, 1.66 (0.17, 3.15)], whereas all other devices demonstrated a propensity to over or underestimate at least one if not all of the aforementioned sleep metrics. No commercial sleep technology appeared to accurately quantify sleep stages. Conclusion
Generally speaking, commercial sleep technologies displayed lower error and bias values when quantifying sleep/wake states as compared to sleep staging durations. Still, these findings revealed that there is a remarkably high degree of variability in the accuracy of commercial sleep technologies, which further emphasizes that continuous evaluations of newly developed sleep technologies are vital. End-users may then be able to determine more accurately which sleep device is most suited for their desired application(s). [full text]
Entering the wearables market, eCommerce giant Amazon has announced a health wristband that combines basic fitness tracking capabilities with premium functions like voice tone reading and body composition scanning
The wearable, the Amazon Halo Band, has all the features that have come to be expected in fitness trackers, all of which can be accessed through the Amazon Halo app. The wristband can measure the intensity and duration of wearers’ movements, and using indicators like motion, heart rate, and temperature, it can keep track of sleep time and quality, giving the night of sleep a score from 0 to 100.
Standout capabilities include tools that allow consumers to measure their body fat percentage from home as accurately as a doctor would and a feature that analyzes the energy and positivity in the wearer’s voice to determine mood and offer advice for relationship maintenance.
Also singular among fitness trackers is the Amazon Halo Labs feature, “science-backed challenges, experiments, and workouts that allow customers to discover what works best for them specifically, so they can build healthier habits.” With these “labs,” wearers can optimize their routines for their own bodies.
The Utah Jazz are nearing the end of their pre-draft preparation. The NBA Draft is set for November 18, and the team will be making the 23rd pick in the first-round — their only pick after trading their second-round selection in 2018. Despite severe alterations to the pre-draft process, vice president of basketball operations Dennis Lindsey said the Jazz are confident in their ability to find unique talent on draft night.
During a traditional offseason, the Jazz would host more than 100 players during the pre-draft process, generally in groups of six which allows the team to see players run one-on-one, two-on-two, and three-on-three drills. This year, the teams are limited to 10 in-person individual workouts, radically changing the dynamic of the evaluation window.
An NCAA official voiced concern Thursday over sports betting on the performance of individual student-athletes, and she suggested that gambling regulators consider restrictions on such wagers to protect the integrity of the games.
Speaking at the Sports Betting USA 2020 online seminar, Naima Stevenson-Starks, the NCAA’s vice president for law, policy and governance, expressed concern about so-called proposition bets involving college athletes.
This type of bet concerns whether a given player will or won’t surpass a certain threshold during a game, like whether a quarterback will throw 3 touchdowns or whether a running back will rush for 100 yards.
… This is because England players are protected by the FIFA club protection programme, which offers insurance for injuries sustained in friendlies, matches and training sessions.
FIFA will pay until Gomez returns to fitness, with the maximum cover being for a period of 365 days and to a total of £6.75m.