… Rehabilitating from injury is filled with stretches of lonely moments, the isolation of the gym replacing time on the training field, the buzz of game day and the camaraderie that comes with sharing ups and downs with teammates. In the midst of a pandemic, that loneliness was exacerbated, his time around people even more limited. For a time, it stripped Martinez of his identity, the goal scorer and former MLS MVP who could always be counted on to shoulder the attacking load.
“When you don’t play, you’re not a soccer player anymore,” he said. “When you’re a soccer player, you have everything [in] your hands. But when you’re not playing, you’re not scoring goals, you’re not playing games, you’re not on TV, you just become a normal person. I think sometimes people forget about that.”
The time away did allow Martinez to gain some perspective. He was able to spend more time with family and friends, and even took some trips to Georgia’s Lake Lanier. Martinez has long been a live-for-today type, but the here and now takes on even more importance, albeit with a twist.
… “Even just being in the academy and going to training in a Liverpool shirt was special. I’m so grateful that I got the opportunity to do that and experience my childhood dream,” Charles told BBC Sport.
“There’s pictures of me as a kid at Anfield in my kit so when I stop and think about it, it’s special that I got to do that as a player.
“It was a difficult decision to leave as it was all I had ever known but it was the right time to progress in my career and challenge myself.”
As Kawhi Leonard makes his way back from a foot injury and ramps up for the postseason, the LA Clippers are being cautious and maintaining a minutes restriction on their All-Star.
Clippers coach Ty Lue said he has had to adjust his rotations with Leonard not yet cleared to play an entire quarter. Leonard had 15 points, eight rebounds and six assists in 30 minutes during a 118-94 victory over the Los Angeles Lakers at Staples Center.
“Right now, Kawhi just can’t play a full quarter, so he can’t play the whole 12-minute stint,” Lue said when asked about his rotation having Leonard and George resting on the bench at the same time for stretches. “Without having him, it kind of messes up our rotations a little bit.
… The Blue Jays may be on the higher end of the spectrum when it comes to injuries this season, but they’re far from alone. While the pandemic’s aftershocks are no doubt playing a role in the current outbreak, the chasm is troublingly wide between the industry’s attempts to keep players on the field and its ability to actually do so.
Take the Blue Jays for example, boasting one of the biggest, if not the biggest high-performance department in the majors. Never have they collected, processed and mined as much medical data as they do right now, and had a resource in place for any need someone may have.
Yet, how can their attempts to create a player-health Xanadu be reconciled against the results six years into the high-performance department’s existence? Are things getting worse rather than getting better?
SI.com, Fan Nation, All Clippers blog, Mason Bissada from
Toronto Raptors Head Coach Nick Nurse recently shared some of his memories from the Raptors’ 2018-19 championship run, in which Kawhi Leonard was named Finals MVP.
Nurse gave some insight as to how Leonard operates, specifically pertaining to load management. Leonard received criticism that year for taking quite a few regular-season games off for rest, but it clearly paid dividends, as he had a healthy postseason, during which he was arguably the best player in the world. But, as Nurse explains, Leonard also paced himself within each game.
College athletes whose coaches cultivated a team environment centered around care and valuing the effort athletes put into their sport — rather than emphasizing competitive success and athlete ability — were able to cope better with the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new research article published in the Journal of Sport Psychology in Action.
The sports psychology and exercise science doctoral students and professors at the University of Kansas and Fort Lewis College who authored the article surveyed about 700 athletes in the National Collegiate Athletic Association and National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics during the spring 2020 semester. Athletes who perceived a more “caring and task-involving climate” on their teams “indicated they were able to express more positive thoughts related to their ability to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic and use the time away for productive activities,” the article said.
These athletes fared better than those whose coaches fostered what’s known in sports psychology research as an “ego-involving climate,” in which coaches recognize athletes for their competitive performance, reinforce rivalries between teammates and punish mistakes more often, the article said. When the coronavirus pandemic caused the cancellation of college sports events and practices, some of these athletes felt they were “dropped” by their coaches because they were no longer contributing athletically to their teams, the article said.
Female soccer has seen a substantial rise in participation, as well as increased financial support from governing bodies over the last decade. Thus, there is an onus on researchers and medical departments to develop a better understanding of the physical characteristics and demands, and the health and performance needs of female soccer players. In this review, we discuss the current research, as well as the knowledge gaps, of six major topics: physical demands, talent identification, body composition, injury risk and prevention, health and nutrition. Data on female talent identification are scarce, and future studies need to elucidate the influence of relative age and maturation selection across age groups. Regarding the physical demands, more research is needed on the pattern of high-intensity sprinting during matches and the contribution of soccer-specific movements. Injuries are not uncommon in female soccer players, but targeting intrinsically modifiable factors with injury prevention programmes can reduce injury rates. The anthropometric and physical characteristics of female players are heterogeneous and setting specific targets should be discouraged in youth and sub-elite players. Menstrual cycle phase may influence performance and injury risk; however, there are few studies in soccer players. Nutrition plays a critical role in health and performance and ensuring adequate energy intake remains a priority. Despite recent progress, there is considerably less research in female than male soccer players. Many gaps in our understanding of how best to develop and manage the health and performance of female soccer players remain. [full text]
… My frequent collaborator, Angela Duckworth, and I often take the same approach. I’ve copied and pasted her strategy of handling work calls while she walks to the office, and she’s emulated my practice of drafting emails from preexisting templates.
In mentoring students, though, we’ve both been surprised by how often a simple suggestion—“Did you think about asking your friend who’s acing this class how she studies?”—leads to a blank stare. Of course, we know that some copying and pasting occurs naturally. Each year I do an exercise with my Wharton MBA students where 95 percent receive an email before class instructing them to clap when I show a picture of our dean, but 5 percent are left out for fun. Most students who were left off my e-list inevitably copy their clapping classmates. And when Kassie lived in close quarters with vegetarians, she realized she could and should imitate their approach if she wanted to change her diet. But Angela and I suspected that many people never wake up to the opportunity to deliberately emulate their peers. After all, while Kassie was thrown together with some vegetarians for a week and it changed her life, it had never previously occurred to her to go looking for them.
This may well be thanks to something social psychologists Lee Ross, David Greene, and Pamela House first pointed out in 1977 in a now famous paper on what they dubbed the “false consensus effect.”
Playermaker, a world leader in football performance tracking, is proud to announce that its award-winning technology is the first foot-mounted wearable device accepted into FIFA’s Innovation Programme. The ground-breaking technology provides in-depth analysis and monitoring of key player performance indicators via foot-to-ball interactions. Acceptance into the programme provides a future pathway for the technology to be integrated and accessible to all FIFA teams as part of the FIFA Quality Programme for EPTS (Electronic Performance Tracking Systems).
A wide variety of portable and wearable electronics have become a large part of our daily lives, so a group of Stanford University researchers wondered if these could be powered by harvesting electricity from the waste heat that exists all around us.
Further inspiration came from a desire to ultimately fabricate energy converting devices from the same materials as the active devices themselves, so they can blend in as an integral part of the total system.
EyeBall, a product aimed at improving visibility in the recruitment process for overseas high school basketball players, was the big winner at the BU Spark! Demo Day April 30, capturing the Judges Choice Award. Demo Day is a biannual event where students showcase the innovative projects they’ve been working on throughout the semester.
Students can choose to pursue one of two pathways at BU Spark! the University’s technology incubator and experiential learning lab for student-led computational and data-drive projects, and both offer course credit: Innovation Fellows work on original projects—like EyeBall—while X-Lab participants help outside organizations improve existing products.
… Dr Chris Elliott, Co-Founder and chief regulatory officer at Switzerland-based Leman Micro Devices (LMD), says: “Medical devices are very expensive and people don’t sell very many of them, which is why they’re so expensive, and so the vicious circle goes on. At the same time, consumer electronics are getting phenomenally powerful and cost next to nothing.
“We asked, could we break that vicious circle, could we make something that sells in high volumes to consumers, and therefore be made very cheaply?”
To this end LMD has developed and released the V-Sensor which it claims is the only health sensor that measures five vital signs – blood pressure, blood oxygen, respiration rate, pulse rate, and body temperature – to medical accuracy, completely cuff-less and calibration free, with no other devices needed.
… The post-pandemic restart will also look quite different on the field as baseball experiments with different rule changes at every level, as well as in the independent Atlantic League, as part of an ultimate goal of finding ways to improve the sport. Strikeouts are up, contact is down, games are longer than ever and MLB is aiming to do something about it.
Former Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox front-office exec Theo Epstein has been charged with overseeing the experiments for MLB. He will be analyzing the data and watching games closely.
“There’s a whole team at MLB that is thinking through how to collect the right kind of data, how to analyze the data and dissect it in ways that will allow us to understand the impacts of the rule changes,” Epstein said recently in a phone interview. “We also want to understand how they interrelate to one another and make sure we’re avoiding unintended consequences.”
In any given NFL draft, it’s never too long before analysts and experts swoop in with terms such as “steal” and “reach,” two of the most liberally used words of draft season. Whenever a player is selected earlier than his big board ranking would imply, he is labeled a reach. Whenever a player stays on the board for longer than expected, he is crowned as a steal when he finally hears his name called.
These so-called steals and reaches often dominate the conversation about the draft, and they often heavily influence draft grades. The question, of course, is how much stock should we put into these two words?
