… Even among astronauts who are highly prescreened for their ability to handle stress, conflict is both frequent and inevitable. “It happens on every single space mission,” Amanda Ripley told me. “Every single one.”
Ripley is the author of the new book, High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. Her reporting spanned astronauts and gang members to married couples and politicians, so I invited her to join me for a recent episode of “How To!” , to talk about strategies for turning “high conflict” — the kind that devolves into “me versus you” or “us versus them” — into productive conflict.
On May 5, 2019, Stephanie Bruce won the USATF Half Marathon Championship by 21 seconds with a time of 1:10:43. The following day, she asked her coach, Ben Rosario, for permission to compete in a 5000-meter track race on May 16th. Ben gave her his blessing, and 10 days later Steph set a new personal best and an NAZ Elite team record (since broken) for 5000 meters, clocking 15:17.76. Afterward, she said to Ben, “When you’re fit, you’re fit!”
Ben likes to share this story as a way to make the point that optimal fitness for any given race distance isn’t so different from optimal fitness for any other distance, and that optimal training for any given race distance, therefore, isn’t very different from optimal training for any other distance. Running is running, after all, and, as Steph put it, when you’re fit you’re fit.
The San Diego Union-Tribune, Alexandra Mendoza from
The Nonprofit Chicano Federation and the San Diego Loyal professional soccer team joined forces to bring soccer to underserved communities around the county.
As part of this partnership, both groups will organize soccer clinics and camps, in addition to planning to build community futsal courts in different parts of San Diego, said Nancy Maldonado, CEO of Chicano Federation. Futsal courts are smaller than soccer fields and are generally hard surfaces.
“We are proud to call the Loyal a San Diego soccer team, and we are even more proud of the entire team commitment to social justice, equality and investing in San Diego’s under-resourced communities,” said Maldonado during a news conference at the Chula Vista Elite Athlete Training Center earlier this week.
… Getting to know the players on that personal level is one way Sirianni has challenged coordinators Shane Steichen, Jonathan Gannon and Michael Clay—all, like Sirianni, under 40 years old—over the last four months. Another is drilling down on how each player learns.
And when I asked Sirianni how the players who show up Monday (and the Eagles are expecting a good percentage to come in for the start of Phase II) will see his background as a teacher, that’s where he pointed.
“We’re just trying at all times to find creative ways to hit every player’s brain right,” he says. “Some guys are going to learn through walkthroughs. Some guys are going to learn through a video playbook. Some guys are going to learn through a cheat sheet, which is kind of a lesser version of the playbook. Some guys are going to learn through the installs that we’ve taped and they’re going to be able to rewatch. We have different avenues that we try to teach guys with, we do voiceovers do with some things.
… What was it about Liverpool? Why were ‘geese’ and ‘shipyards’ in his team talks? And why did he keep Gary Neville on for so many years? Sir Alex Ferguson explains his management secrets…
You used to always mention ‘shipyards’ in your team talks. Why was being grounded so important?
The players I had to deal with then were probably not from the working class that I was from. So I had to try and instil that part in them – that working hard is a real talent.
Carlos Cuesta is a 25-year-old who holds the Uefa Pro Licence, speaks six languages and already has Atletico Madrid, Juventus and Arsenal on a glittering CV.
His official title with the Gunners is assistant to manager Mikel Arteta (along with Steve Round, Albert Stuivenberg, Miguel Molina and Andreas Georgson) but he could more specifically be called their Individual Development Coach.
This is a big area of focus in football at the moment – which is why TGG is holding a full-day webinar on Individual Development next month.
… “We founded DeltaTrainer to make one-to-one expert personal training truly accessible and affordable for anyone, particularly those people who have repeatedly tried and failed to reach their goals,” said Matt Spettel, founder and CEO, DeltaTrainer. “Personal training is the best way to get results, but it’s expensive and trainers often have limited time and resources. With DeltaTrainer, a real fitness expert holds clients accountable and makes goals easier to meet with custom workouts and nutrition plans, ongoing motivation, and constant contact, because your stats and your program are always on your wrist.”
Researchers at Columbia University have developed a microscopic implantable chip for physiological monitoring. It has a total volume of less than 0.1 mm3. To put that in perspective, the chip is as small as a dust mite, and can only be viewed using a microscope. The goal of this research was to create devices that can be injected using a standard hypodermic needle, and which then beam their readings wirelessly to external displays such as patient monitors and smartphones . The Columbia team used externally applied ultrasound through a conventional ultrasound imager to power and communicate with their implant.
PepsiCo Health & Nutrition Sciences (H&NS) has unveiled a website that offers internal education to healthcare professionals. The hub will serve as a resource hub to aid healthcare professionals in all areas of practice and help them continue to empower individuals to make healthier choices.
When Inter Miami players walk into the cafeteria at the club’s training facility, they find a wide array of healthy options; from acai bowls to avocado toast to grilled fish to quinoa, all carefully planned and prepared by a team dietitian and executive chef.
When Inter Miami chief soccer officer Chris Henderson played for the Miami Fusion 20 years ago, he and his teammates ate wings and fries at Hooters after practice.
“We didn’t have a team chef, but every player had a discount card at Hooters because they were a team sponsor,” Henderson said, laughing, “We had some good team lunches at Hooters. We would pretty much come in, train, shower and go find lunch somewhere.
S06E03: On this episode, we discuss Women’s football and the lack of representation both on and off the pitch. We look to highlight the issues and ways our guests work to combat this. [video, 54:28]
Based in Oslo, Vålerenga are one of the biggest clubs in Norway. Historically, they have 5 league titles and 4 Norwegian Cup titles to their name. However, the last time they won any silverware was 13 years ago and the last time they won the Eliteserien was way back in 2004. The last decade has been fairly rough. From 2011-2019 they failed to even finish higher than 6th in the league, which was not a good record for a club of their size.
The signs are that a new wave of talented players is ready to propel Vålerenga back to the top again. Experienced manager Dag Eilev Fagermo was appointed ahead of the 2020 season and he led them to a third-place finish and a bronze medal spot. This was their highest league position since 2010 and this summer, as a result, they will be entering European qualifiers for the first time in over a decade. The real questions now are what exactly has Fagermo done to turn their fortunes around and what do they need to do in order to reach the next step of ultimately winning another Eliteserien title?
… Injuries are the story of the year. We’re fired up about LeBron James beating Stephen Curry in the play-in game, but there’s no happy reason the Lakers and Warriors are the West’s seventh and eighth seeds. They are great teams in their primes humbled by injuries to LeBron, Davis, and Klay Thompson.
Last season, the NBA blew off the science that says injury rates skyrocket when games are scheduled more than two or three a week. The bubble featured far denser scheduling, and injured Goran Dragic, Bam Adebayo, Ben Simmons, Jaren Jackson Jr., Zach Collins, Marvin Bagley III, Jonathan Isaac, Domantas Sabonis, CJ McCollum, Damian Lillard, Russell Westbrook, Patrick Beverley, Bojan Bogdanovic, Ed Davis, Aaron Gordon, Michael Carter-Williams, and many others.
This season, the NBA doubled down, blew off LeBron when he said he needed a later start date, blew off De’Aaron Fox when he said an All-Star game would be stupid, and blew off a good swath of the published research on the importance of sleep, practice, or preventative health in creating the most dense schedule in recent memory. They had time for a safe 50-game season, and scheduled 72 … plus this week’s play-in tournament.
Karl Tuyls, a former RoboCup participant and local chair of the 2D simulation league (2013), recently published an article along with his colleagues at DeepMind called Game plan: what AI can do for football, and what football can do for AI.
President of the RoboCup Federation, Peter Stone, discussed the project with Karl:
Peter Stone: What is your football analytics project all about?
Karl Tuyls: The long-term vision in this project is to advance research in multi-agent decision-making by building an automated video assistant coach for real-world soccer (or football), that can help coaches and teams in analyzing games, making tactical choices in a match (e.g. in set pieces situations), improve their overall game-play, and even assist with in-game analysis and decision-making. Next to that one can also think additionally of human factors like injury prediction and the search for new players. For this we are blending research from game theory, vision and machine learning. So far our work has focused on game-theoretic analysis of set pieces and on trajectory predictions of players and ball with the purpose to allow for counterfactual reasoning (what happens if player X moves in direction Y, for example).
