Micah Potter may be as useful off the court as he is on it this season for the University of Wisconsin men’s basketball team.
A well-documented struggle to become eligible to play early in the 2019-20 campaign, only to be told no over and over by the NCAA, was a frustrating ordeal for Potter. He’d get his hopes up with each appeal that the next game could be his chance to make his debut with the Badgers, but the Ohio State transfer ultimately was forced to wait until last December to play.
“I’ve had lots of experience not knowing what’s going to happen,” Potter said.
The senior forward knows how to deal with uncertainty. That could make Potter a go-to resource for his teammates during a campaign in which UW’s most unpredictable opponent will be COVID-19.
… “I get a chance to run a team, lo and behold we start winning,” Brailsford said, telling the story of his early Sky years. “You realize pretty early into this that, hmmm, this isn’t maybe the most exciting way to win. But you’re winning nonetheless, and you get caught between, Hell, should we keep on winning, or should we change the way we do it?
“Push comes to shove, it’s very difficult not to keep on winning. Now, looking forward, the experiences of this year, in particular, have made me think, actually if I’m going to continue doing this, I’d like nothing more than to have a team and help create a team where the riders ride … where they really race.”
In a sport outrun by the change of glaciers, the forced re-shuffle of just about everything in 2020 offered an opportunity for self-examination. It was a forced experiment.
The parents of some of America’s top men’s and women’s basketball players have formed a new organization that aims to build a national network that empowers parents across the country and helps educate them about the culture and climate of the sport and their role within it, while also advocating for the rights of college basketball players at all levels.
The College Basketball Parents Association (CBPA), announced on Tuesday morning by its organizers, is a group that also hopes to have a significant voice within a sport that’s now considering the implications of COVID-19, mental health, and name, image and likeness rules, among other developments.
The parents of Gonzaga’s Jalen Suggs, Duke’s Jalen Johnson and Arkansas’ Moses Moody — all projected first-round picks on ESPN’s latest NBA mock draft — are members of the group’s leadership committee.
University of Colorado Boulder, CU Boulder Today from
Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder are developing a wearable electronic device that’s “really wearable”—a stretchy and fully-recyclable circuit board that’s inspired by, and sticks onto, human skin.
The team, led by Jianliang Xiao and Wei Zhang, describes its new “electronic skin” in a paper published today in the journal Science Advances. The device can heal itself, much like real skin. It also reliably performs a range of sensory tasks, from measuring the body temperature of users to tracking their daily step counts.
And it’s reconfigurable, meaning that the device can be shaped to fit anywhere on your body.
“If you want to wear this like a watch, you can put it around your wrist,” said Xiao, an associate professor in the Paul M. Rady Department of Mechanical Engineering at CU Boulder. “If you want to wear this like a necklace, you can put it on your neck.”
The Motley Fool (Australia), James Mickleboro from
… This morning Catapult announced the acquisition of subscription online sport learning platform, Science for Sport. … The release explains that the platform empowers athletes and teams with easy to consume answers to their performance-related questions, addressing key sports issues such as athlete agility, mitigation of soft tissue injuries, and enhanced recovery methods.
arXiv, Computer Science > Human-Computer Interaction; Chao Ying Qin, Marios Constantinides, Luca Maria Aiello, Daniele Quercia from
Affective sharing within groups strengthens coordination and empathy, leads to better health outcomes, and increases productivity and performance. Existing tools for affective sharing face one main challenge: creating a representation of collective emotional states that is relatable and universally accessible. To overcome this challenge, we propose HeartBees, a bio-feedback system for visualizing collective emotional states, which maps a multi-dimensional emotion model into a metaphorical visualization of flocks of birds. Grounded on Affective Computing literature and physiological sensing, we mapped physiological indicators that could be obtained from wearable devices into a multi-dimensional emotion model, which, in turn, our HeartBees can make use of. We evaluated our nature-inspired interactive system with 353 online participants, whose responses showed good consensus in the way they subjectively perceived the visualizations. Last, we discuss practical applications of HeartBees. [full text pdf download]
Using heart rate variability (HRV) data, wrist-worn health trackers can provide a range of predictive cardiovascular health metrics, according to a new study published in The Lancet.
The study, which was funded by Fitbit and used its smartwatches, looked at how devices continuously gathering data from the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous system could derive and describe diverse measures of cardiac autonomic function among users.
In early July, 22 NBA teams descended on Disney World in central Florida to take part in a once-in-a-lifetime experiment. More than 300 athletes boarded a series of repurposed Mickey Mouse tour buses and were scattered among three different hotels—the Gran Destino, the Yacht Club, and the Grand Floridian—each designed to cater to the needs and wishes of the kinds of people who travel vast distances for the immersive family fun of the Magic Kingdom.
It was a strange time for the NBA to be restarting. The George Floyd protests were still going strong across the country, and a lot of people—including players—were questioning whether we even needed basketball. I flew into Orlando on July 12 from New York, a city that, at the time, appeared to be on its way to successfully containing the spread of the virus. I was there to cover the NBA for Bleacher Report and Turner Sports, and was one of the few media members granted “Tier 1” clearance, meaning we were to be tested every single day and, once we completed a seven-day quarantine, were allowed to inhabit the same spaces as the players themselves.
The Professional Footballers’ Association (PFA) are increasingly concerned by the prospect of hidden mental health issues within the game after identifying a decline of more than 25% in members accessing the organisation’s counselling services during the coronavirus pandemic.
Professionals in Nutrition for Exercise and Sport from
IMG (International Management Group) Academy describes itself as the world’s largest and most advanced multi-sport training and educational institution. It is located in Bradenton, Florida. IMG offers strength & conditioning, mental conditioning, nutrition, leadership coaching, athletic training, and some of the highest levels of sports coaching in the country. American football, for example, has coaches with multiple years of professional experience coaching or playing in the National Football League, which gives the athletes next-level insight into their development and understanding the nuances of the game. As the sports nutritionist, Shawn Pitcher MS RD communicates daily with the coaches and athletic performance staff.
Jurgen Klopp is here to talk facts. Not about another manager, like Rafa Benitez in 2009. But about the Premier League, the ridiculous schedule and the ramifications.
To talk about the fact that Joe Gomez has had surgery on his knee, a victim of a ferociously intense schedule. To talk about how television broadcasters need to use their brains, and why the PFA are letting players down in the three-versus-five substitutions debate.
There are times when Klopp flashes his trademark smile as he sits at the club’s new Kirkby training centre. But November has not been kind to Liverpool’s manager. On the 11th, news reached him of Gomez’s injury. On the 13th came Mohamed Salah’s positive coronavirus test. On the 15th, Jordan Henderson was forced off at half-time for England against Belgium.
Sir Arthur Eddington, an English astrophysicist, told a short story involving a scientist studying fish by pulling them up with nets. After checking all the fish hauled up, the scientist concludes that there is a minimum size of fish in the sea. But the fish seen were determined by the size of the holes in the net, the smaller ones having slipped through, unmeasurable. The instrument you use affects what you see. Or as Richard Hamming puts it: “You get what you measure.”
This analogy provides a nice concrete example of a phenomena that affects us routinely in more subtle ways. What and how we choose to measure affects the conclusions we draw.
Attendees to the 2020 virtual Wyscout Forum had the benefit of learning from Atlanta United’s Head of Technical Recruitment and Analysis, Lucy Rushton, and how her team uses data to complement the subjective scouting process and bring additional rigor to the different stages of the clubs scouting workflow. [video, 28:12]
