… “I was focusing on myself last year and what I needed to do to be my best, and being a part of the WNBA in a year of craziness was not good for me,” Cambage told CBS Sports.
“I took a second to take a step back and focused on me, and work out what I needed to do for my body, mind and spirit. I improved my game a lot on and off the court, like mentally. I feel like I’m a lot stronger and sure of myself and what I can do and what I can bring. I had a great year, training hard and I’ve still been training hard. I’m at a point where I can’t wait to get back on the court because I just want to play now.
… “I’m not going to lie. I was sad because I was going to put on a show,” Hutcherson told The State. ”I was going to put up some big numbers.”
Instead, Hutcherson will have to wait a few weeks to showcase his skills before NFL scouts and teams. He and four other former Gamecocks — Jaycee Horn, Israel Mukuamu, Ernest Jones and Shi Smith — were selected to participate in USC’s on-campus pro day, which will be conducted March 24 like a scouting combine for NFL teams.
In Daniel Roose’s experience in athletics, he knows that every team each year takes on a different personality.
Sometimes that personality comes from the team’s leaders, sometimes from its best players and sometimes it’s a collective effort.
Starting last summer, Roose, the VCU men’s basketball team’s director of sports performance, saw in the Rams a collective, steadfast work ethic in the weight room.
“And, in training, that is the most important thing is consistency,” Roose said. “It’s not about how much we’re lifting or how hard we’re lifting or loud the music is or those kind of things.”
SI.com, Fan Nation, Dawg Daily blog, Evan Crowell from
Data has told us that sports science is an increasingly important area of football development. Part of that comes from working on the mental aspect of the athlete.
It appears that the Georgia Bulldogs strength program has ascended to another level this offseason and has the team in the best position to succeed this year through working on the mindset of the athletes while also preparing their bodies.
Scott Sinclair, head of the strength and conditioning program, has made waves since first arriving at the university three seasons ago. In their opening interviews, players repeatedly praised the department.
There are multiple ways of learning, including classical conditioning and operant conditioning. Psychologist Albert Bandura developed social learning theory, which includes that learning can be social, dynamic, and active.
A mechanism involved in that process is self-efficacy—the belief in your capacity to execute relevant tasks and accomplish your goals.
Self-efficacy can be a useful tool for emotion regulation. Recalling memories of self-efficacy reduces distress more than memories of happiness, research suggests.
The Conversation, Keith Yoder and Jean Decety from
Looking out for number one has been important for survival for as long as there have been human beings.
But self-interest isn’t the only trait that helped people win at evolution. Groups of individuals who were predisposed to cooperate, care for each other and uphold social norms of fairness tended to survive and expand relative to other groups, thereby allowing these prosocial motivations to proliferate.
So today, concern for oneself and concern for others both contribute to our sense of fairness. Together they facilitate cooperation among unrelated individuals, something ubiquitous among people but uncommon in nature.
A critical question is how people balance these two motivations when making decisions.
At first glance, Google’s new $100 Nest Hub smart display looks just like its 2018 predecessor, save for a few minor cosmetic tweaks. But come nighttime, it unleashes a whole new superpower: Google has integrated its Soli radar sensors into the Nest Hub to turn it into a futuristic sleep tracker. By combining Soli data with locally processed audio, the smart display monitors tossing and turning, breathing, snoring and coughing to generate sleep reports.
Data and insights gathered by the display can be fed into the Google Fit app for a more comprehensive picture of a consumer’s personal health. Google is also laying the groundwork for future use cases that may involve a combination of sleep and fitness data. In a hint of things to come, the company will make the Nest Hub’s sleep sensing functionality available as a free preview until next year.
Google Nest senior product manager Ashton Udall told Protocol that the company decided to integrate sleep tracking into the product because smartwatches and fitness trackers simply didn’t work for many people, if only because these devices require frequent charging. And sleep is a problem looking for a solution: One in three adults report getting not enough of it, and a whopping 50% have trouble falling asleep frequently, according to third-party research shared by Google. “A lot of people are struggling with this issue,” Udall said.
If a minor league player says an umpire is acting like a robot this year, he might be right.
Computer umpires for balls and strikes are coming to a low-level minor league but are a while away from the big leagues.
Major League Baseball plans to use Automated Ball-Strike technology (ABS) in eight of nine ballparks at the Low-A Southeast League, which starts play May 4 across Florida as minor league baseball resumes after a one-year break caused by the coronavirus pandemic.
… In January, i-BrainTech scored second place in the Israeli branch of the Startup World Cup 2021, an annual international competition that recognizes promising companies from around the world where participants compete for a chance to win $1 million. The contest is backed by Pegasus Tech, a Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm, and recently made its debut in Israel with Tech It Forward.
The platform was originally used for medical purposes, explains Ashley Rose, marketing strategist at i-BrainTech. “The technology was actually first invented and utilized to help brain injury victims regain motor control. Dr. Konstantin subsequently determined a need for this technology in other fields. He thought to apply it to the sports arena to help improve motor control even more and thus built the same technology for sports use.”
This work aimed to evaluate if a radar sensor can distinguish sleep from wakefulness in real-time. The sensor detects body movements without direct physical contact with the subject, and can be embedded in the roof of a hospital room for completely unobtrusive monitoring. We conducted simultaneous recordings with polysomnography, actigraphy, and radar, on two groups: healthy young adults (n=12, four nights per participant), and patients referred to a sleep exam (n=28, one night per participant). We developed models for sleep/wake classification based on principles commonly used by actigraphy, including real-time models, and tested them on both datasets. We estimated a set of commonly reported sleep parameters from this data, including total-sleep-time, sleep-onset-latency, sleep-efficiency, and wake-after-sleep-onset, and evaluated the inter-method reliability of these estimates. Classification results were on-par with, or exceeding, those often seen for actigraphy. For real-time models in healthy young adults, accuracies were above 92%, sensitivities above 95%, specificities above 83%, and all Cohen’s kappa values were above 0.81 compared to polysomnography. For patients referred to a sleep exam, accuracies were above 81%, sensitivities about 89%, specificities above 53% and Cohen’s kappa values above 0.44. Sleep variable estimates showed no significant inter-method bias, but the limits of agreement were quite wide for the group of patients referred to a sleep exam. Our results indicate that the radar has the potential to offer the benefits of contact-free real-time monitoring of sleep, both for in-patients and for ambulatory home monitoring.
Washington Post; Rick Maese, Emily Giambalvo and Artur Galocha from
Sixty-seven games spread across six arenas. Hundreds of players, coaches and officials scattered across a half-dozen hotels. And 68 teams, all isolated from one another every second of the day — except for those 40 minutes on the game clock.
The coronavirus lurks around every corner at this year’s unprecedented NCAA men’s basketball tournament, and officials know that just a couple of positive tests — never mind the possibility of a larger outbreak — can doom the whole thing.
“When you condense 14 sites into one and bring 68 teams together to play 67 games in three weeks, it’s a logistical challenge,” said Dan Gavitt, the NCAA’s senior vice president of basketball. “But it’s an exciting one, and one that we’ve embraced.”
USA Today Opinion, Artur Davis and James Davis from
On Thursday, March Madness returns — a small but real step toward making America normal again. This same month, the U.S. Supreme Court will hear arguments in a case that could serve as a catalyst to reshape college sports.
The legal question in the court’s case sounds abstract: Did the superpower that runs college athletics, the NCAA, violate federal law by restricting benefits for college athletes?
But the two of us, an ex-Alabama politician who practices employment rights law and a public affairs consultant with Georgia roots, know the hardship of college athletes, especially in the South (where college sports dominate the pros in so many ways). Many students struggle to afford a plane ticket home while making plenty of money for their colleges and their coaches. They should be allowed to benefit financially from their association with sports and position themselves for future success.
Clemson is facing legal pressure from two separate groups of its own athletes who claim that the university’s athletic department is discriminating against both male and female athletes in different ways.
An attorney representing a group of female athletes sent a letter Monday to Clemson President Jim Clements saying that if the school does not make plans to provide more financial aid for its female athletes, they intend to file a class action lawsuit.
Last week, a different attorney representing a group of male track athletes from the school sent a letter to Clements saying that they intend to file a lawsuit if the school doesn’t reverse course on its plan to discontinue the cross country and track and field programs after this school year.
The Guardian; Nathan Kalman-Lamb, Derek Silva, and Johanna Mellis from
On 30 January, Rutgers basketball player Geo Baker wrote on Instagram in response to a post by US college sports’ governing body, the NCAA: “I have to sign a paper that says my name and likeness belongs to the school. Modern day slavery. u realize we are playing in a pandemic being told to stay away from everyone we love just for y’all entertainment but i can’t sell my own jersey with my last name on it to help my future financially. That makes sense to u?” In invoking “slavery” and linking it to both the denial of economic rights for US college athletes – or, to call them what they really are, campus athletic workers – and the ongoing requirement of play during a pandemic, Baker highlights one of the ugliest dimensions of the college sport industrial complex: the disproportionately racialized nature of its exploitative dynamics.
This week marks the start of the biggest event on the college sports calendar, the NCAA Basketball Tournament. And for those unfamiliar with the absurdist world of US college sports, it is big business. Like, really big business, particularly in the elite Power Five conferences. How big? In the 2018-2019 academic year, the 65 Power Five universities generated $8.3bn through athletics. Yet, aside from scholarships, players don’t see any of that money directly. If players did receive a share, economist David Berri has calculated that men’s basketball players at an elite Power Five school like Duke would receive between $145,000 and $4.13m per year. And,