Candid interviews with Celtics are sometimes shown on the video board during timeouts at TD Garden. At one recent game, players were naming celebrities they had been mistaken for in public. Most picked other NBA players. Some chose actors or musicians. Then the baby-faced rookie, Payton Pritchard, appeared on the screen. He was last.
“I don’t know if I’ve been mistaken for anybody,” the 6-foot-1-inch point guard said. “But when I walked into a gym sometimes, especially at Oregon, they would think that I was the manager.”
Some pro athletes would be bothered by such slights, or at least unwilling to reveal them. But Pritchard has never cared how others view his dreams. He is not here because of them.
… Boston Red Sox reliever Matt Barnes, whom Ohtani homered off of Sunday, couldn’t help but marvel at Ohtani after the game. “I personally think he’s the most physically gifted baseball player that we’ve ever seen,” Barnes said. “I don’t know that you’re ever gonna see somebody who can throw 101 and hit the ball 600 feet. So, I mean, he’s a special player. He’s incredibly talented. And hopefully he stays healthy and has a long career.”
… The Westfield native said she first considered retiring after winning gold at the 2018 Olympics in PyeongChang, but decided to play a few more years after moving to Calgary.
She targeted this year’s world championships, which were scheduled to be held this month, as her farewell. But the tournament was postponed, for the second year in a row, due to safety concerns associated with COVID-19. Re-scheduled for August, Bellamy knew that the team would also be getting ready for the 2022 Olympics scheduled for just six months later, and that it was time to hang up the skates.
Jameson Taillon awoke in the recovery room of the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York on Aug. 14, 2019. His right arm lay propped up on a pillow and wrapped in medical gauze from his right wrist to above his elbow. He’d arrived there to have a strained flexor tendon repaired. But when Dr. David Altchek entered the room to go over the operation results, he explained he also found damage to Taillon’s right ulnar collateral ligament. Taillon learned he was now a member of the small group of pitchers to have two Tommy John surgeries.
As Taillon absorbed the news, his overriding emotion was, surprisingly, relief. He finally knew what was wrong. He’d felt pain in his throwing arm since early in spring training with the Pittsburgh Pirates. His elbow throbbed the day following starts. His bullpen sessions between appearances were low-intensity affairs in which he was unable to work on building skills due to discomfort. He just hoped to be healthy enough to make his next start.
Having now had his UCL reconstructed twice, he vowed to do something dramatic: Taillon was going to change the way he threw. All the muscle memory he’d built? All those mechanical cues he was taught and earnestly followed? He was going to discard it all and start from scratch. He was going to rebuild and rewire his delivery.
With the football season wrapped-up, prospects, whether they have aspirations of a college scholarship or hearing their name called on draft night, are turning their attention to speed. It is no secret that one of the best ways to improve your stock as a prospect is by improving your time in the 40-yard dash. While most coaches know a good time when they see one, many struggle to actually make their athletes faster.
I was in that same boat, but I wanted more. I wanted ways to analyze the data from my athletes and make better training decisions from that data. After taking a deep dive into the times of NFL draftees over the last five years, I have found a few trends that can hopefully help guide you on your quest for improved speed. After reading, you will have a better understanding of the intricacies of this highly valued sprint and be better able to help your athletes achieve their speed goals.
The windowless bunker that doubles as the Presbyterian College football staff meeting room appears decorated from the Shawshank Collection. The gray concrete walls lack any color or adornment, other than a depth chart that lacks names.
Kevin Kelley, the most colorful new coach in all of college football, struggles with the setting. “Psychologically, if you study it,” he says, with a shrug, “gray is the worst.”
Kelley arrived at tiny Presbyterian last week as the coach who’ll be studied more than any in college football. He was hired after his high school coaching career earned national acclaim for philosophies that included almost always onside kicking and essentially never punting. There’s nothing gray about him or his methods.
Objectives To determine if running biomechanics and bone mineral density (BMD) were independently associated with bone stress injury (BSI) in a cohort of National Collegiate Athletic Association Division I cross country runners.
Methods This was a prospective, observational study of 54 healthy collegiate cross country runners over three consecutive seasons. Whole body kinematics, ground reaction forces (GRFs) and BMD measures were collected during the preseason over 3 years via motion capture on an instrumented treadmill and total body densitometer scans. All medically diagnosed BSIs up to 12 months following preseason data collection were recorded. Generalised estimating equations were used to identify independent risk factors of BSI.
Results Univariably, step rate, centre of mass vertical excursion, peak vertical GRF and vertical GRF impulse were associated with BSI incidence. After adjusting for history of BSI and sex in a multivariable model, a higher step rate was independently associated with a decreased risk of BSI. BSI risk decreased by 5% (relative risk (RR): 0.95; 95% CI 0.91 to 0.98) with each one step/min increase in step rate. BMD z-score was not a statistically significant risk predictor in the final multivariable model (RR: 0.93, 95% CI 0.85 to 1.03). No other biomechanical variables were found to be associated with BSI risk.
Conclusion Low step rate is an important risk factor for BSI among collegiate cross country runners and should be considered when developing comprehensive programmes to mitigate BSI risk in distance runners.
The Nobel-winning psychologist on applying his ideas to organisations, why we’re not equipped to grasp the spread of a virus, and the massive disruption that’s just round the corner
Daniel Kahneman, 87, was awarded the Nobel prize in economics in 2002 for his work on the psychology of judgment and decision-making. His first book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, a worldwide bestseller, set out his revolutionary ideas about human error and bias and how those traits might be recognised and mitigated. A new book, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment, written with Olivier Sibony and Cass R Sunstein, applies those ideas to organisations. This interview took place last week by Zoom with Kahneman at his home in New York.
A new neural network architecture designed by artificial intelligence researchers at DarwinAI and the University of Waterloo will make it possible to perform image segmentation on computing devices with low-power and -compute capacity.
Segmentation is the process of determining the boundaries and areas of objects in images. We humans perform segmentation without conscious effort, but it remains a key challenge for machine learning systems. It is vital to the functionality of mobile robots, self-driving cars, and other artificial intelligence systems that must interact and navigate the real world.
Arsene Wenger’s proposed changes to the offside law split opinion last year but few are better qualified than the former Arsenal manager to comment on innovation in football.
In fact, Wenger, a pioneering influence in the Premier League who transformed physical training and preparation following his appointment as Arsenal manager in 1996, now makes a living out of it as head of global football development for FIFA.
Wenger recently predicted neuroscience will be the sport’s next area of evolution, saying training the brain could help players make better decisions on the pitch, and he sees similar potential in performance analysis technology made by Playermaker.
The sports equipment company GRIND was created by 26-year-old Thomas Fields, who also appeared on the May 7 episode of “Shark Tank.”
Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban and businesswoman Barbara Corcoran contributed a combined $250,000 for 25% of the company, which makes basketball shooting machines.
Erika Lu, Forrester Cole, Tali Dekel, Andrew Zisserman, William T. Freeman, Michael Rubinstein from
We pose a novel problem: automatically associating subjects in videos with ‘effects’ related to them in the scene. Given an input video (top) and rough masks of subjects of interest (middle), our method estimates an omnimatte – an alpha matte and foreground color that includes the subject itself along with all scene elements associated with it (bottom). The associated elements can be other objects attached to the subject or moving with it, or complex effects such as shadows, reflections, smoke, or ripples the subject creates in water.
… On April 5, a federal rule went into effect that requires health care providers to give patients like Ramsey electronic access to their health information without delay upon request, at no cost. Many patients may now find their doctors’ clinical notes, test results and other medical data posted to their electronic portal as soon as they are available.
Advocates herald the rule as a long-awaited opportunity for patients to control their data and health.
“This levels the playing field,” said Jan Walker, co-founder of OpenNotes, a group that has pushed for providers to share notes with patients. “A decade ago, the medical record belonged to the physician.”
SportsPro Media, Omar Chaudhuri and Ben Marlow from
As its inaugural season prepared for its final ball, the organisers of the Indian Premier League (IPL) could barely believe their luck. In front of a full stadium, with a billion-dollar TV deal to live up to, the final was as close as could possibly be. It was fairytale, you-couldn’t-script-it sport, and while the maiden champion was yet to be determined, the competition’s fate certainly was: within ten months the IPL’s media rights deal would grow by 80 per cent, and within ten years a further 158 per cent.
These moments create the narratives that make sport so compelling and attract the attention and passion of so many fans. Yet an irony of unscriptable sporting moments – including that of the IPL finale – is that they can be influenced. Rights holders can increase the likelihood that their sporting product will capture the attention of fans through ensuring it delivers in three key areas:
By the numbers: The league-wide offensive rating (points produced per 100 possessions) was 112.3 this season, which broke the previous record for the third straight year.