“I walk in there, and [Bayern manager] Hansi Flick was the assistant for Germany [in 2014], then you have half the players on Bayern who’ve won the World Cup, whether it was with France or Germany. And they’re like, ‘Hey Chris, congrats on making your debut for the U.S.’”
“‘Why thank you!’… It’s so crazy,” he said.
“A lot of the guys congratulated me, and the coaches as well,” Richards continued. “Being able to make your full debut only at 20, that’s something that not a lot of people do. So they congratulated me and they thought it was big as well.”
… After successfully finishing the 2019-20 season in a bubble environment at the Walt Disney World Resort in Orlando, Florida, the league — with the exception of the Toronto Raptors — is returning to home markets to begin this season. Over the past two weeks, players and coaches spoke about the challenges they face in playing a season as the COVID-19 pandemic surges across the United States.
… “I may never get back to being No 1 in the world, but I want to do everything that I did when I was No. 1 in the world to give myself the best chance to see what I can achieve,” Murray told former WTA player Daniela Hantuchova in an interview with the Roland Garros website. “It was incredibly professional, I worked hard, I ate properly, slept well. That’s kind of what started the latest kind of mentality.”
ESPN, Women's College Basketball, Mechelle Voepel from
UConn women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma, whose No. 3 Huskies are set to start their delayed season Saturday, said Thursday that he worries about the mental readiness of his team and thinks most coaches nationwide feel the same.
“I think the mental part is what’s the worst part about it right now,” Auriemma said of the effects of COVID-19 on college athletics. “I don’t know where anybody is mentally. Not just our team, I mean any team. I can’t imagine that any coaches are sitting out there saying, ‘My team’s in a great place mentally.’
“The ability to focus and concentrate on the task at hand has been very, very, very difficult. Maybe all the interruptions, maybe all the uncertainty, maybe being cooped up for all these weeks and months. They talk about cabin fever that people have. I gotta believe that college basketball, college sports — these kids are all suffering from COVID fever. They don’t actually have the virus, but they’ve got all the things that the virus does to people. Maybe we just need a game.”
Harvard announced Friday that it will not allow student-athletes living off campus to participate in athletics training on-campus next semester, marking the University’s latest effort to regulate life on campus during the coronavirus crisis.
Director of Athletics Erin McDermott wrote in an email to Harvard coaches Friday that the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Pandemic Planning and Response Group — chaired by FAS Dean Claudine Gay and comprised of a variety of FAS officials including McDermott — made the decision in order to prioritize on campus students’ ability to use University spaces.
“The rationale is to prioritize students in-residence for any auxiliary spaces,” McDermott wrote. “The in-residence students are being asked to comply with a much stricter compact and the access to other spaces is to provide outlets and additional services to them specifically.”
The Washington Post, Geoffrey A. Fowler and Heather Kelly from
The Halo Band asks you to strip down and strap on a microphone so that it can make 3-D scans of your body fat and monitor your tone of voice. After all that, it still isn’t very helpful.
… After stepping down as the co-chair of Disney Media Networks last year, Ben Sherwood wasn’t hurting for opportunities in Hollywood. But the longtime executive decided to tackle a project near and dear to his heart: coaching youth sports — with a tech and entertainment twist.
That’s how Mojo, his new startup, was born in October 2019. Set to launch early next year, the Mojo app aims to become the mobile “one-stop coach-in-a-box” for millions of kids and families involved in youth sports. Mojo plans to host a number of high-quality lessons across several sports and age ranges, so that if you’re looking to teach your 8-year-old some basketball skills, and also help your 14-year-old make her high school hoops team, both can receive age-appropriate lessons.
Computer scientists have developed an entirely new way of interacting with video content that adapts to, and is controlled by, your body movement.
Fitness videos and other instructional content that aims to teach viewers new martial arts skills, exercises or yoga positions have been popular since VHS in the 80s and are abundant on Internet platforms like YouTube.
However, these traditional forms of instructional videos can lead to frustration, and even the potential for physical strain, as novice viewers, or those with limited physical mobility, struggle to keep up and mimic the movements of the expert instructors.
Now an international team of researchers from Lancaster University, Stanford University and FXPAL, have created a solution that dynamically adapts to mirror the position of the viewer’s body and matches the speed of video playback to the viewer’s movements.
Advanced capabilities in noninvasive, in situ monitoring of sweating rate and sweat electrolyte losses could enable real-time personalized fluid-electrolyte intake recommendations. Established sweat analysis techniques using absorbent patches require post-collection harvesting and benchtop analysis of sweat and are thus impractical for ambulatory use. Here, we introduce a skin-interfaced wearable microfluidic device and smartphone image processing platform that enable analysis of regional sweating rate and sweat chloride concentration ([Cl−]). Systematic studies (n = 312 athletes) establish significant correlations for regional sweating rate and sweat [Cl−] in a controlled environment and during competitive sports under varying environmental conditions. The regional sweating rate and sweat [Cl−] results serve as inputs to algorithms implemented on a smartphone software application that predicts whole-body sweating rate and sweat [Cl−]. This low-cost wearable sensing approach could improve the accessibility of physiological insights available to sports scientists, practitioners, and athletes to inform hydration strategies in real-world ambulatory settings. [full text]
In 1906, the rules of American college football were overhauled. The comprehensive rewrite was the consequence of immense public outcry: too many players were dying on the field. Anti-football sentiment that had been bubbling over since the 1890s hit a furious boil in 1905, with newspapers tolling the deaths: 45 players dead over the first five years of the century, 18 that year alone, and serious injuries skyrocketing. President Theodore Roosevelt called representatives of Yale, Harvard and Princeton to the White House and threatened to ban the game unless they cleaned it up.
Roosevelt was hardly puritanical on the matter of violent sport; he was a devoted fan of football precisely for its physical risk. “I believe in rough games and in rough, manly sports,” he reportedly said only a couple of years earlier. “I do not feel any particular sympathy for the person who gets battered about a good deal so long as it is not fatal.” Yet the mounting public pressure meant his hand was finally forced. The rule changes included outlawing the flying wedge, a notorious formation in which a glut of players essentially attempted to mow down the defence, and the institution of the forward pass.
It’s an instructive anecdote as the revelations mount up about the devastating toll that contact sports – American football included – are having on the brains and bodies of players around the world.
… It has now been demonstrated that there can be flexibility in carbohydrate intake. It is a concept called adaptation, with an individual variability that allows making “tailoring” for each athlete. Thus, in certain periods of the season, there are footballers who choose the strategy of eating very healthy, with more nuts, avocado, or tuna, which are foods with fewer carbohydrates. The goal is to make an adaptation so that, at times of great exertion when carbohydrates are required, they are introduced back into the diet.
These diet periodisation strategies, not always eating the same, allow athletes to eat the necessary carbohydrates on the day of a key match or a day of greater intensity in the training session, while the rest of the week, they can choose a diet with other types of food.
USA Today Sports, TouchdownWire blog, Dan Hatman from
In this special article for Touchdown Wire, guest columnist Dan Hatman takes his years of NFL experience and gets macro on how teams should find general managers, goes deep on how best to refine the process and names more than a few of the best candidates out there.
Each winter MLS commissioner Don Garber meets with reporters to sum up the state of the league. In normal times the address is an overly rosy mix of rainbows and butterflies.
These aren’t normal times. But the commissioner put a positive spin on the season just the same.
“We’re the only league in the world to play in a bubble and continue in our markets with a regular season and then complete a postseason in our local markets,” Garber said last week. “It was an outstanding, remarkable undertaking.”
McLaren Global Sport Solutions (MGSS) published an analysis of existing research and best practices to help inform the most appropriate and effective approach to administer the UCCMS in Canada.