“Charly, this kid is a phenomenon. You’ve got to watch him.”
I was in Uruguay, in Montevideo, after visits to Paraguay and Brazil. I was talking to Horacio Gaggioli, an Argentinian agent who was also an expert in youth football. He had contacted me because he wanted to bring a young player to my attention.
That young player was Lionel Messi.
I thought he was talking about a player of 17 or 18 years of age. But no, this kid was 13.
“I’m not going to watch him,” I told Horacio. “It is just too difficult to sign someone that young.”
Mitch Haniger believes he’s rooted out the cause for the injuries that have kept him out of Major League action for more than 600 days, and he’s spent the past year tailoring a training plan to combat them. The result has Haniger saying that his swing in the best spot its ever been.
Movement imbalances, Haniger says, played a significant part in the endless setbacks he experienced since being initially sidelined with a ruptured testicle in June 2019. That’s what led him to Austin Einhorn and the Apiros training facility near the Bay Area. And anyone who follows Haniger on social media has gotten a glimpse at his specialized rehab.
“We do some things that are, for lack of better words, a little crazy, but definitely not unsafe by any means,” Haniger said. “And it’s been fun.”
United States Women’s National Team star Lynn Williams has had her fair share of serious conversations about race with her teammates over the past year. Through partnerships with other organizations, the North Carolina Courage forward is committed to bettering herself and educating those around her on the topic of discrimination, activism and education. Through the Black Women in Sport Foundation, she has been able to use her platform to facilitate these conversations to soccer fans nationwide, and has even bigger plans to expand the organization’s reach in 2021.
Williams spoke with Yahoo Sports about how to handle uncomfortable conversations about race, being an example to young, Black women athletes and upcoming projects with the Black Women in Sport Foundation.
… On Monday, Andreescu showed off the powerful strokes, gritty demeanor and match smarts that carried her to a Grand Slam title as a teen with a victory over Serena Williams in the final at Flushing Meadows in September 2019. A month later, Andreescu tore the meniscus in her left knee and was gone from the tour.
“She has a bright future. She’s really young; rather incredibly mature. I’ve always said I think her light burns brightly,” said Williams, whose quest for a 24th major title began with a 6-1, 6-1 win over Laura Siegemund. “She really has a great game to continue to win more Grand Slams.”
There are other returns worth celebrating as the 2021 Grand Slam season gets started, including that of another Canadian woman: Rebecca Marino, Andreescu’s frequent practice partner and dinner companion in Australia.
When videos surfaced of Kyrie Irving — the enigmatic Brooklyn Nets guard who delights and infuriates fans in equal measure — walking the edge of the court in Boston holding a burning smudge stick in his hand, the kinds of responses you’d expect filled social media. People made jokes about Irving cleansing the bad vibes from his old team’s arena, while NBA League Pass subscriber types who previously rolled their eyes at Irving’s flat-earth theorizing dismissed it as Kyrie being Kyrie.
Ariana Lenarsky, a professional tarot reader and NBA obsessive, recognized something deeper than a great meme.
“He is using the sage to connect to honor his mother and his heritage — the Standing Rock Sioux, the tribe his mother was born into before she was adopted,” she speculated. “The ritual of saging is a well-known one amidst Native tribes, and perfectly in line with him integrating his heritage into his daily life.” The context behind Kyrie’s use of sage certainly challenges how rituals of contemporary athletic performance —playoff beards, lucky numbers, winning shoes — are often framed as silly or merely fashionable. And while no NBA players have reached out to Lenarsky yet, she sees more athletes turning to spiritual practice to help their game, and lives, improve.
Professional athletes are always trying to get a leg up on the competition, whether it’s through new training methods or obsessively analyzing their opponents’ tendencies on video. Yet for all their faith in science, athletes are notoriously superstitious.
National Institutes of Health (NIH), News Releases from
Conditions such as loud noise and few trees in neighborhoods seem to affect how much sleep adolescents get, according to a study in the journal Sleep. In a second study, researchers measured young people’s brainwaves to observe the troublesome effects of sleep loss on memory and cognitive function.
The findings were reported by two scientific teams funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), part of the National Institutes of Health.
According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention(link is external), about six out of 10 (57.8%) middle school students and seven out of 10 (72.7%) high school students in the United States do not get the recommended amount of sleep on school nights, increasing their risk for future chronic disease development. Studies have shown a link between insufficient sleep and a higher risk of obesity, diabetes, depression, anxiety, and increased risk-taking behaviors in adolescents.
The club’s Youth Development Program is busy assessing more than 700 area players to find those who could play in MLS Next, the league’s new system of youth leagues.
Google Health encompasses the various teams at Google working on helping people “live their healthiest life.” The latest effort lets you measure your heart and respiratory rate using the Google Fit app and cameras on an Android phone.
To measure the number of breaths you take per minute, Google Fit is using your Android device’s front-facing camera. The phone needs to be leaned on a “stable surface so that you can comfortably see yourself from the waist up.” It needs to have a clear, unobstructed view of your head and upper torso.
Users are then taken to a fullscreen UI with a live feed marking your face and chest, while instructions above tell you to breathe normally and “Hold still” as a circular indicator notes progress. Once complete, “Your results” appear on the next screen, with the recently revamped Google Fit Home feed featuring a new card that shows average RPM over the course of the past week. A ‘plus’ button in the top-right corner lets you start another session.
… Boiling the multitude of data points produced in a match to a single probability of success or failure will depend upon the aspects of the game studied and the model, or algorithm, used by the club, which in Arsenal’s case is done through an in-house data company, so even other analysts don’t know exactly how they work.
However, these numbers may give a coach a sense of how the team is performing overall, how close they are to getting a result, which could be of value,
‘Arteta was splitting performances and results,’ added [Chris] Cushion, who is the director of sport integration at the University of Loughborough. ‘The data he was picking showed performances are better than results, so the results should change.’
A new kind of wearable health device would deliver real-time medical data to those with eye or mouth diseases, according to Huanyu “Larry” Cheng, Dorothy Quiggle Career Development Professor in the Penn State Department of Engineering Science and Mechanics (ESM).
Cheng recently published a paper in Microsystems & Nanoengineering on new micro- and nano-device technology that could revolutionize how certain health conditions are monitored and treated.
“We sought to create a device that collects both small and large substances of biofluids such as tears and saliva, which can be analyzed for certain conditions on a rapid, continuous basis, rather than waiting on test results from samples in a lab,” he said.
A new technique developed by Brown University researchers reveals the forces involved at the cellular level during biological tissue formation and growth processes. The technique could be useful in better understanding how these processes work, and in studying how they may respond to environmental toxins or drug therapies.
As described in the journal Biomaterials, the technique makes use of cell-sized spheres made from a highly compliant polymer material, which can be placed in laboratory cultures of tissue-forming cells. As the tissue-formation process unfolds, microscope imaging of the spheres, which are stained with fluorescent dye, reveals the extent to which they are deformed by the pressure of surrounding cells. A computational algorithm then uses that deformation to calculate the forces at work in that cellular microenvironment.
Kicking off our monthly challenges for 2021, we focused on all things related to top flight football in England. The data set contained information relating to both the men’s and women’s games, part of our ongoing commitment to showcasing diversity in sports.
As always the #SportsVizSunday community rose to the challenge, with 17 vizzes created. In addition to our usual end of month Twitter Moment, rounding up all the entries, here’s a more detailed look at the vizzes with some personal reflections on a few of the design choices that really made some on them pop.
Blowing the whistle to introduce the challenge, I created this alternative presentation of the Premier League table, inspired by a tweet by Tom Worville of The Athletic. The aim of the design was to focus on the range of points achieved by teams, highlighting it’s tight at the top and the fight for Europe, but at the moment relegation is very much threatening only a handful of clubs.
… Is it too simplistic to think the Klopp system which teams find impossible to deal with is equally hard to perform beyond a couple of seasons? That the physical toll of his famous Gegenpress is too hard to maintain for longer?
Klopp was not the first manager to look to press opponents high in the opposition half, Arrigo Sacchi did so with AC Milan and Pep Guardiola at Barcelona, if not quite with the ubiquitous zeal of Klopp’s Liverpool.
Guardiola was of course influenced by Marcelo Bielsa whose teams have generally tended to fade in the last third of seasons.
Jurgen Klopp has said Liverpool are struggling with physical and mental fatigue this season because they have not had a “two-week break” like Premier League leaders Manchester City.
Reigning champions Liverpool face City at Anfield on Sunday having fallen seven points behind Pep Guardiola’s team following Wednesday’s 1-0 home defeat against Brighton.
Liverpool manager Klopp claimed after the loss to Graham Potter’s team that his players were mentally drained, but City have shown no sign of lethargy during a 13-game winning streak that stretches back to mid-December.