… The team’s fearless leader who often believes it’s possible to come back from any deficit, no matter how little time remains, is not known for passing on an opportunity to play when healthy.
The idea of a healthy Lillard sitting out a minute, let alone a game, is tough to imagine. But Lillard said that he has a watchdog, of sorts, in CJ McCollum, who will help him help himself.
After Thursday’s win, Lillard said McCollum approached him and said: “Great first half, but in the second half, don’t make me have to come to your house and tell you you’re not playing tonight because we got to be smart.”
Khalida Popal’s story is one of courage, strength and scant reliance on men. “If we wait for men to open the doors of opportunity – it will take forever,” laughs the former Afghanistan football captain, as she joins Telegraph Sport on International Women’s Day to share her story.
Born in Kabul, Afghanistan, Popal recalls her childhood as education-focused and optimistic. “Growing up I never lacked opportunity,” she says. “My grandparents were both engineers, my mother was a school teacher, and my father worked in the military services. Education and sport were a big part of my life. The Afghanistan I was born in was very different to the one it became.”
… The Canes have been playing at least a game every other day since Feb. 11. It was a stretch of 13 games in 22 days, one game every 1.69 days. It was a frantic pace, one of the densest stretches of the season, and everyone’s body – even those of us who were simply covering these games – had settled into a rhythm.
Saturday, the body said, should be a gameday. But it wasn’t, and that was a welcome reprieve, especially to the mind.
“It was like Groundhog Day. Prepare, play, prepare, play. And we were on the road forever, too. … It’s just tough, I guess is the way I’d put it, mentally,” head coach Rod Brind’Amour said. “Guys being able to go home, be with their families and have a normal routine for a couple of days is probably what they needed.”
Let’s begin by defining something — @ the time of writing this FUTRSPRT has not confirmed that Major League Baseball will be indeed blocking out catcher’s signals during broadcasts.
NFL hopefuls are leveraging AI to enhance their performance ahead of the looming 2021 draft.
For the past several months, coaches at EXOS training camp in Phoenix have used skeletal tracking software by Intel in a move that gives coaches and players ways to judge an athlete’s performance other than with their naked eyes. The platform, dubbed “3D Athlete Tracking,” displays data on an athlete’s speed, stride length and velocity along with joint angles and other metrics.
The information can be used to help players shave seconds off their sprint times or learn about unintentional body movements that hurt their performance. The training camp revealed news of the pilot Thursday, a day before the start of college pro days, which take place at various campuses through April 9. The predraft events are held annually for NFL hopefuls to show scouts what they bring to the table
Noah Basketball was an idea that started in a driveway. Now, more than 2/3 of the NBA uses its data and analytics to help players improve their shot.
Noahlytics will give players and coaches data in real-time and coach users through speakers.
Noah CEO John Carter says all this is done through, you guessed it, technology, “It’s a combination of cameras, sensors, computers, and speakers.”
The system has a sensor that sits above the rim and tracks the shot depth, left, right of each shot and its arc. There’s more to basketball than just shooting a ball, physics has a lot to do with it. How high and at what degree the trajectory of the arc is, will give you that perfect shot.
COVID-19 can be diagnosed in 55 minutes or less with the help of programmed magnetic nanobeads and a diagnostic tool that plugs into an off-the-shelf cellphone, according to Rice University engineers.
The Rice lab of mechanical engineer Peter Lillehoj has developed a stamp-sized microfluidic chip that measures the concentration of SARS-CoV-2 nucleocapsid (N) protein in blood serum from a standard finger prick. The nanobeads bind to SARS-CoV-2 N protein, a biomarker for COVID-19, in the chip and transport it to an electrochemical sensor that detects minute amounts of the biomarker.
As wearable devices become more widespread and Internet-of-Things (IoT) capability becomes expected by consumers, the need for ultra-low power is more important than ever. By leveraging ultra-low power solutions such as ultra-low-power processors, manufacturers can create more sustainable and more intelligent endpoint devices to meet consumers’ demands. Here are some of the significant benefits that ultra-low-power wearables offer consumers, manufacturers, and our environment.
Players in the NCAA tournament will be sporting some flashy new tech to monitor COVID contact tracing during the Big Dance.
It’s called SafeZone and is a creation from the company Kinexon. Pre-pandemic, their devices were used to monitor a player’s load management and could give health and fitness metrics to teams. It was being utilized by the NBA, NFL, and collegiate teams.
“When the pandemic hit, we looked at that device, and wanted to take it down to its simplest for,” details Kinexon North America Executive Vice President Jim Garofalo, “Instead of worrying where an athlete was on the court, how fast he was going, we focused on sensor-to-sensor communication to tell how close to another individual, or for how long, and when that interaction took place.”
Matt Olson and Matt Chapman each hit a towering home run in his first at-bat Sunday. Watching, A’s reliever Jake Diekman drew a connection.
“They were in there (pregame) doing simulation stuff,” Diekman said, “and then 30 minutes later — whack.”
The A’s are trying out a virtual reality tool that allows hitters to simulate live at-bats against pitchers, manager Bob Melvin said Sunday. Some MLB teams and players have embraced the practice in recent years. The Dodgers and Mets reportedly were using the technology in 2019 and the Cardinals’ Paul Goldschmidt last season. Melvin said it’s brand new to the A’s.
“Some of the other teams are using it extensively,” Melvin said. “So, just trying to keep up technology-wise.”
“In terms of truly documented transmission between athletes during participation, I’m not aware of anything,” says Dr. Drew Watson, lead author on three University of Wisconsin studies that investigated COVID-19 risks in sports, and senior author on three other UW studies on the mental-health effects of sports shutdowns (all referenced below).
“I know researchers who are struggling to find even a single case among outdoor-sports participants, in particular.”
… With all the coverage and media attention given to these athletes, people seem to forget that while they may be amazing at the sport they play, these players are still college students.
One person who has experienced this firsthand is creator of the mental health podcast Shark Theory, Baylor Barbee. Barbee graduated from Baylor University with his masters in 2006 after playing wide receiver for the Baylor football team from 2000 to 2004. Barbee said he always took pride in his work as a student but realized others had their own opinions about him.
“When people see you as an athlete, they automatically just assume that you’re a slacker in the classroom,” Barbee said. “They automatically just assume that you’re not going to carry your weight in a group project and automatically assume that you just get a free ride, and you have it easy because you have access to tutors and resources, not realizing all that you have to do in your day just to get to the student part.”
Last week Jay Socik got a new job. As head of recruitment analysis at Luton Town, he will take responsibility for providing the manager, Nathan Jones, and his team with the data to sign the players to help continue the Championship club’s impressive, thrifty rise up the football pyramid. It has also meant a change to his Twitter account; a new, clean-shaven profile picture and the use of his real name.
It was through Twitter, as @blades_analytic, that the Sheffield United fan Socik made his name in football. It was also how he became a leading example of why the popularisation of analytics – the interpretation of data on every pass, shot and tackle on a football field – is transforming the game inside and out.
“I suppose I’m from this generation of Twitter scouts,” Socik says. “We came from having social media platforms where we voiced opinions or wrote scout reports or did statistical analysis. Everyone knows it’s been changing for years, from the stories of Brentford and Liverpool, but even at a lower level now there’s so much tactical writing, scouting reports, graphs. It’s just taken off on a whole new level.”
Come Opening Day, when a manager takes the slow walk to the mound to pull his starting pitcher, will it be because of a gut feeling about his ace or what the analytics show about the batter matchup? Or, will it be because Artificial Intelligence told him to do so?
“I’m telling you AI will be working in real-time and… will come up with insights that will knock our socks off—on injuries, on recruitment, on game tactics,” said Roger Mitchell, a venture capital investor and owner of Albachiara, an Italy-based digital change consultancy specializing sports and media. “It is total game theory.”
You may not see a robot between the Gatorade jug and a bag of sunflower seeds in dugouts, but major sports teams in Europe and the U.S. are starting to embrace AI as the next step in the Moneyball approach to team management. Liverpool FC has a theoretical physicist and an astrophysicist on staff doing research on game management—and their findings are credited with defensive formations that slashed goals allowed last year. At the end of 2020, rival Manchester City started a contest with Google to crowd-source AI strategies and then hired its own lead AI scientist, Laurie Shaw, an astrophysicist who taught at Harvard and designed trading systems for a hedge fund. In his spare time, Shaw writes data-driven blog posts about player formations and what age goal-scorers peak. Stateside, at least one Major League Baseball club is testing AI, as are teams in the NFL, NBA and Major League Soccer.