… Some of the questions that the USA Basketball coaches — Popovich’s staff also includes Golden State coach Steve Kerr and Villanova’s Jay Wright — and staff are currently mulling included these, as [Lloyd] Pierce recalled Sunday in Miami before his Hawks faced the Heat:
“Who do you wait for? Who’s worth waiting for? How long do you wait? How do you manage your roster because we’re going to play four or five games in July in Vegas, kind of a mini-bubble of teams and just kind of keep everything there? And how do you manage a roster, knowing there may be some pretty important guys potentially that may still be playing. And then, what do you do in the event of some random emergency when you have to leave on the 19th for Tokyo?”
It appears, with less than five months to go, the Tokyo Olympics will happen.
Organizers continue to insist the Games that were postponed last year, are on, despite lingering uncertainty.
Tokyo and other parts of Japan remain under a state of emergency because of the Coronavirus. And with the pandemic still not under control in many parts of the world, questions remain about whether Japan should host the global sporting event.
For aspiring Olympians, it’s the latest challenge as they try to focus on a goal that’s been a moving target for nearly a year.
Behavioral Scientist, Philipe Bujold and Madhuri Karak from
… Improving the adoption rates for new farming technologies has been a challenge since the onset of agricultural extension training programs in the ’50s. Strategies for designing effective change are still far too reliant on traditional levers like material incentives (“pay them”), rules and regulations (“stop them”), and information (“tell them”). In Colombia’s Norte de Santander department, where Pablo lives and farms, these strategies don’t work at the scale needed for meaningful change. While they might reach some farmers already eager to adopt new practices, many more are reluctant to approach outsider NGOs or adopt the latest technological innovations.
Instead of relying on these traditional levers of behavior change, the organization Rare has developed Lands for Life, a program focused on changing the social norms around farming. While that might sound simple, in this high-stakes context, changing farmers’ norms and behavior is anything but. We, a behavior scientist and a cultural anthropologist, respectively, are part of the project’s team. We’ve been working to leverage a growing group of norm bearers into spreading the adoption of sustainable practices through words and actions. Based on our results, we believe that snowballing early success stories into community-level norms could be a useful tool to help promote positive behavioral changes in other information-ambiguous, high-stakes environments.
… In Spain, elite sport has been greatly influenced by the work of Paco Seirul.lo at Futbol Club Barcelona, where he emphasises that performance specificity comes from practising the sport rather than spending time in the weight room. Numerous team sports in Spain approach strength training from a progression in specificity within the sport’s characteristics and needs, while leaders from other geographies might base their work on other strength development approaches, such as strength manifestations (e.g., hypertrophy, power, etc.). Perhaps the correct approach is neither one nor the other, but to use what is most appropriate at each moment depending on the goals and the needs of the team and the player. Having members of the staff who work under the same standard can be a limiting factor for progress.
As part of addressing diversity, it could also be considered whether a specialist (focused on the efficiency of the task) or a generalist (focused on a broader vision and progress) is needed. On a personal note, being a specialist-generalist stood me in good stead when I served as a performance director with my recent teams. It enabled me to pursue more diverse approaches to performance questions. I have been able to conduct high level conversations with subject specialists and, whenever I didn’t know something, I’d know who to ask and I could either provide my athletes with solutions or at least let them know where to look for that information. I sincerely believe this has enabled me to explore more diverse thinking and, consequently, more innovative performance solutions.
The highly complex, smoothly integrated mind and body systems humans enjoy evolved in tune to the approximately 24-hour period that encompasses day and night. We are fine-tuned down to the molecular level to operate in time with this daily, or circadian, rhythm, with even cellular functions being timed according to this cycle. Disrupting the circadian rhythm can have serious health consequences, impacting cognitive functioning and mood, as well as increasing the risk of a wide range of diseases and chronic health conditions. Fortunately, resetting your circadian rhythm can be a fairly simple process. Learn how to reset your circadian rhythm to help improve your day-to-day health.
Firstbeat Sports’ advanced performance analytics for training and recovery are now visible inside the gpexe wearable tracking platform thanks to a new API integration between the two athlete monitoring solutions.
Gpexe uses a GPS device to track movement, speed, and position of athletes. The direct integration of Firstbeat’s comprehensive internal load and recovery data into the gpexe software will complement the Italian company’s external load data as coach and athlete can view and compare both data sets in the same platform.
Teams using both the gpexe and Firstbeat Sports solutions for athlete monitoring will now be able to complete the training picture by seamlessly integrating Firstbeat data to the gpexe web app or Cloud browser – reducing workload and increasing access to actionable insights.
Standing outside of Northwestern’s 450,000-square football facility on the shores of Lake Michigan, you’d think the Avengers headquarters-like monstrosity housed Iron Man, Captain America and others, not a program that’s itching to break into the realm of the elites.
If you’re not building, you’re sinking in college football and Northwestern coach Pat Fitzgerald believes his team finally has the space to compete.
“We’ve been able to accomplish a lot with a little. And now to be able to have a lot, I think the sky is the limit for our program,” Fitzgerald told 247Sports in June 2018, a few months prior to winning the first of two Big Ten division titles over his next three seasons.
University of Colorado Boulder, CU Boulder Today from
Where do bodily tissues get their strength? New CU Boulder research provides important new clues to this long-standing mystery, identifying how specialized proteins called cadherins join forces to make cells stick—and stay stuck—together.
The findings, publishing this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, could lead to more life-like artificial tissues and tumor busting drugs.
“Better understanding these proteins allows for the design of more effective engineered tissues that better mimic biological materials as well as cancer therapeutics that are more efficient and target-specific,” said Connor Thompson, lead author and graduate student in the Department of Chemical & Biological Engineering.
The alternate site is returning to Major League Baseball in 2021. The Triple-A season will be delayed at least one month, reports ESPN’s Jeff Passan, and MLB will send reserve players to the alternate site early in the regular season. The number of players allowed at the alternate site this year is unclear at this point, though Passan says it figures to be two dozen or so.
Last season, the minor-league season was canceled and MLB clubs stashed extra players at the alternate site and only players at the alternate site could be called up to the big leagues. Most were injury replacements and spare players, though many teams also sent top prospects to the alternate site. Alternate site teams did not play each other. They were instead limited to workouts and intrasquad games.
Pushing the Triple-A season back accomplishes a few things. First and foremost, it gives players and staff (and fans) more time to receive the COVID-19 vaccination before beginning the season. It also allows more time for the infection rate to drop across the country as more people get vaccinated. Long story short, delaying the season makes everyone safer.
Performance measures such as strength, jump height/length, and change of direction (CoD) time during anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) rehabilitation have been used to determine readiness to return to play and identify those who may be at risk of rerupture. However, athletes may reach these criteria despite ongoing biomechanical deficits when performing these tests. Combining return-to-play criteria with an assessment of movement through 3-dimensional (3D) biomechanics in male field sports athletes to identify risk factors for ACL rerupture has not been explored previously. Purpose:
To prospectively examine differences in strength, jump, and CoD performance and movement using 3D biomechanics in a cohort of male athletes playing level 1 sports (ie, multidirectional field sports that involve landing, pivoting, or CoD) between those who reinjured the reconstructed ACL (RI group) and those with no reinjury (NRI group) after 2 years of follow-up and to examine the ability of these differences to predict reinjury. Study Design:
Cohort study; Level of evidence, 2. Methods:
After primary ACL reconstruction (ACLR), 1045 male athletes were recruited and underwent testing 9 months after surgery including isokinetic strength, jump, and CoD performance measures as well as patient-reported outcomes and 3D biomechanical analyses. Participants were followed up after 2 years regarding ACL reinjury status. Differences were determined between the RI and NRI groups in patient-reported outcomes, performance measures, and 3D biomechanics on the ACLR side and symmetry between limbs. The ability of these measures to predict ACL reinjury was determined through logistic regression. Results:
No differences were identified in strength and performance measures on the ACLR side or in symmetry. Biomechanical analysis indicated differences on the ACLR side primarily in the sagittal plane for the double-leg drop jump (effect size, 0.59-0.64) and greater asymmetry primarily in the frontal plane during unplanned CoD (effect size, 0.61-0.69) in the RI group. While these biomechanical test results were different between groups, multivariate regression modeling demonstrated limited ability (area under the curve, 0.67 and 0.75, respectively) to prospectively predict ACL reinjury. Conclusion:
Commonly reported return-to-play strength, jump, and timed CoD performance measures did not differ between the RI and NRI groups. Differences in movement based on biomechanical measures during double-leg drop jump and unplanned CoD were identified, although they had limited ability to predict reinjury. Targeting these variables during rehabilitation may reduce reinjury risk in male athletes returning to level 1 sports after ACLR.
Having as much information as possible about how a pass is made has obvious utilities for both opposition and recruitment analysis. Going beyond the start and end location, knowing which foot and what height the pass is played at adds important context and creates a clearer picture of the game being played. To give you an idea of what’s possible with this information, we’re going to look at passing trends on both a team and player level in the ‘Big 5’ leagues.
PLOS One; Vincent Gesbert, Fabienne Crettaz von Roten, Denis Hauw from
This two-part study examined the perceptions of talented Swiss soccer players about their talent development environment. The first study presented the translation and validation of the Talent Development Environment Questionnaire (TDEQ) into French using a recommended methodology for translating and culturally adapting questionnaires. Two hundred and three Swiss athletes (M = 16.99 years old) responded to the 25 items of the TDEQ-5. One item was excluded due to low factor loadings, and the descriptive statistics showed that the re-specified TDEQ-5 instrument had acceptable global model fit according to the thresholds in the literature (χ2 (df = 17) = 484.62, p<0.001, CFI = 0.91, TLI = 0.90, RMSEA = 0.07, SRMR = 0.06). This adaptation is thus valid for assessing the effectiveness of talent development processes. For the second study, a holistic design was used to examine the perceptions of a set of players embedded in a top-level Swiss soccer academy (i.e., 64 elite soccer players from 14 to 18 years old) by using the TDEQ-5. The results showed some relative strengths (i.e., F1-Long-Term Focus for the M15 and M16 age-groups) and weaknesses (i.e., F2-Alignment of Expectations for the M17 and M18 age -groups and F3-Communication for M17). They also highlighted that the talent pathways of these Swiss soccer players could not be summarized by a single type of transition toward a professional team. Rather, there were context-specific requirements, such as the critical period between the M15-M16 and M17-M18 age-groups, suggesting that when the players first entered their TDE they experienced a set of affordances to develop and flourish, which thereafter were perceived as less rich and/or abundant. These results offer a starting point for optimizing talent pathways.
In an offseason full of uncertainty for the San Francisco 49ers, one thing that’s known for sure is that their top priority is retaining star left tackle Trent Williams.
The Niners want Williams. And Williams, who is set to become an unrestricted free agent on March 17, has made it clear he’d like to stay. Seems easy enough, right?
As is often the case when it comes to matters of multimillions, it’s not so simple. With a chance to see just how much he could garner on the open market for the first time in his career, Williams is likely to test the waters.
“San Francisco would be the leading candidate regardless,” Williams said in January. “So even if it does make it to free agency, it won’t be because I’m trying to go somewhere else. It may be simply because I want to see my value. It’s been 11 years in this league, and I have yet to see a franchise left tackle go to the open market. I think it would be interesting to kind of see what [my] value holds.”