Dallas Cowboys quarterback Dak Prescott dropped back and rolled out. He handed off to running back Tony Pollard and faked a scramble. Prescott sprinted to the line of scrimmage, where the running and cutting he’d cycled through during Tuesday’s OTA practice continued unimpeded.
Progress.
“A couple of weeks ago, I may have been a little bit more timid,” Prescott said Tuesday afternoon from Dallas’ training complex, The Star, “where the last few days I was really trying to push it and trying to go further than I normally would carrying out the fake. Just for that psychological effect where it’s, ‘Hey, it’s good. You’re fine. You see you doing it.’
… Rose is older now, no longer the 26-year-old trying to negotiate his excellence against gravity and science, but the 32-year-old counted on for so much more than just a veteran presence to help steer a young group through its first playoff experience.
“I’m very fortunate to be in this position. Not only am I in the league, I’m on a great team,” Rose said.
That was in the aftermath of saving his team’s season Wednesday night, which could pale in comparison to reviving his career after all the knee surgeries and doubts about his ability to adapt and willingness to persevere.
The Philadelphia Inquirer, Jonathan Tannenwald from
Although Brenden Aaronson has been in Austria for only half a year, he has had years’ worth of development in his game.
To watch the 20-year-old Medford native play for Red Bull Salzburg this spring was to watch him grow up in real time, adding quality and sharpness levels beyond what he showed with the Union.
“In MLS, a lot of teams will sit back a little bit, but in the Austrian league you have teams that even though you’re the top team in the league, you have guys that are flying at you [in] no time,” Aaronson said. “I think the time that I’ve been here, my decision-making in the final third has just gotten quicker and faster … and I think it’s coming off really well, too.”
PR Newswire, UCLA Anderson School of Management from
… The program examines key aspects of successful sports franchises and explores how technology breakthroughs, cross-sector collaborations and innovations in entertainment and social media are reshaping the sports ecosystem.
“The sports industry is undergoing an extremely exciting moment of transformation as new opportunities emerge and true globalization is on every leader’s agenda,” said Eric Johnson, faculty director of the Center for MEMES. “This partnership between two great brands, UCLA and Real Madrid, involves elite executives coming together to learn about successful trends from the industry’s biggest movers, driving insights and thought leadership.”
Load monitoring is considered important to manage the physical training process in team sports such as Association Football. Previous studies have described the load monitoring practices of elite English football clubs and clubs with an established sports-science department. An examination of a broader international sample is currently not available. In addition, previous research has suggested factors that may improve the implementation of load monitoring practices, such as a strong club belief on the benefit of evidence-based practice (EBP) and high club financial resources. However, no study has examined yet the actual impact of these factors on the monitoring practices. Therefore, this study aims (1) to provide an overview of load monitoring practices in European elite football and (2) to provide insight into the differences in implementation between clubs by examining the impact of the club beliefs on the benefit of EBP and the club financial resources. An online survey, consisting of multiple choice and Likert scale questions, was distributed among sports-science and sports-medicine staff (n = 99, 50% response rate). Information was asked about the types of data collected, collection purposes, analysis methods, and staff involvement. The results indicated that external load data (e.g., global navigation satellite system, accelerometer…) was collected the most whilst respondents also indicated to collect internal load (e.g., heart rate, rating of perceived exertion…) and training outcome data (e.g., aerobic fitness, neuromuscular fatigue…) for multiple purposes. Considerable diversity in data analysis was observed suggesting that analysis is often limited to reporting the gathered data. Sports-science staff were responsible for data collection and analysis. Other staff were involved in data discussion to share decision-making. These practices were positively impacted by a stronger club belief on the benefit of EBP and greater financial resources. Creating an organizational culture, characterized by a strong belief on the benefit of EBP, is important to increase the impact of load monitoring. However, the actual potential may still be largely determined by financial resources. High-level clubs could therefore play a leading role in generating and sharing knowledge to improve training practices and player health. [full text]
Olympic gold medallist Curt Tomasevicz has been appointed as director of sports performance at USA Bobsled and Skeleton (USABS).
In his new role, the 40-year-old will be responsible for developing strategies to support athletes from recruitment to retirement.
He will work closely with head coaches and performance staff to draft and execute the USABS high performance plan, develop annual schedules and lead sports science, technology and research projects.
… Unconditional positive regard is a stance I take in relationship to my students. The message of unconditional positive regard is, “I care about you. You have value. You don’t have to do anything to prove it to me, and nothing’s going to change my mind.” I sometimes try to imagine myself radiating unconditional positive regard like a glow around me when I walk into a classroom. But I also actually say those words to my students in ways that fit our relationship. I make sure to tell them I care about them, regardless of what they accomplish or achieve in our academic work together. This care infuses all of my teaching choices, from personal interactions to learning design. Importantly, unconditional positive regard stands in opposition to savior mentality and deficit thinking.
Baseball is commonly considered Taiwan’s national sport, with Taiwanese players in Major League Baseball teams garnering huge followings and national pride from fans across the island. At CES 2021, Taiwanese company JingleTek put the world’s first smart baseball, STRIKE, on display, showing how sports science can help improve pitching and prepare teams for wins.
Beyond pure passion for the sport, data analytics and sensor technology can boost athletes’ performance. The information from STRIKE can shave off critical nanoseconds of hesitation and identify ways for pitchers to improve.
Heart rate measurement using a continuous wave Doppler radar sensor (CW-DRS) has been applied to cases where non-contact detection is required, such as the monitoring of vital signs in home healthcare. However, as a CW-DRS measures the speed of movement of the chest surface, which comprises cardiac and respiratory signals by body motion, extracting cardiac information from the superimposed signal is difficult. Therefore, it is challenging to extract cardiac information from superimposed signals. Herein, we propose a novel method based on a matched filter to solve this problem. The method comprises two processes: adaptive generation of a template via singular value decomposition of a trajectory matrix formed from the measurement signals, and reconstruction by convolution of the generated template and measurement signals. The method is validated using a dataset obtained in two different experiments, i.e., experiments involving supine and seated subject postures. Absolute errors in heart rate and standard deviation of heartbeat interval with references were calculated as 1.93 +/- 1.76bpm and 57.0 +/- 28.1s for the lying posture, and 9.72 +/- 7.86bpm and 81.3 +/- 24.3s for the sitting posture. [full text]
Intense heat and high humidity could pose a serious risk to athletes at this year’s Tokyo Olympics, according to a new report.
The report, published Wednesday by the British Association for Sustainable Sport, details the concerns of leading athletes and scientists about the health impacts of soaring temperatures in Japan.
On a Saturday afternoon in mid-April, a few weeks after he was traded to the Nuggets, Aaron Gordon sat in the hotel room he was temporarily living out of and reflected on the most challenging season NBA players had ever dealt with.
While bouncing around the country as a deadly transmittable virus continued to spread, players had been contending with health and safety protocols that induced isolation, obliterated daily routines and separated them from partners, children, friends and family. Novel stressors had been stacked on top of the countless professional and personal reasons players might feel anxious during any typical season.
Meanwhile, their bodies were being ground down by the compressed 72-game schedule. The physical injuries potentially caused by such a grueling endeavor have received ample attention; no shortage of media hands have been wrung over Kevin Durant’s strained hamstring, LeBron James’s high ankle sprain or Jamal Murray’s torn ACL. But comparatively little notice has been paid to an unseen element of players’ well-being, one affected as much if not more by this season’s atypically harsh conditions: mental health.
… The study, published in Cities: The International Journal of Urban Policy and Planning, analyzed local property ownership records, construction permits and U.S Census data. Shelton found that between five and 10 percent of all housing units in Starkville are likely gameday homes, and much of the town’s net growth in housing units over the last 15 years is made up of vacant properties that are suspected to be gameday homes. In some neighborhoods, more than 75 percent of housing units are used as gameday homes.
According to Shelton, these properties — which have grown significantly in the Southeast in recent years — are owned by wealthy alumni, fans and investors who rarely occupy the homes, resulting in a net-negative for permanent residents.
“Having so much of the activity in the housing market focused on these limited-use, largely vacant properties drive up housing prices for the people who actually live and work in the area,” said Shelton. “A lot of these smaller towns are now seeing rapid growth, but it really cuts into the kind of vibrancy and energy that you expect from a college town.”
… Evan Nesterak: At this stage in your career, after all you’ve studied, you could focus on anything you wanted. What is it about noise that it was able to capture and hold your attention?
Daniel Kahneman: In the mathematics of accuracy, there are two types of error which are equivalent. There is the average of error, which is bias, and there is the variability of error, and that’s noise. I’ve been studying bias all my life, but a few years ago encountered an instance of noise, and I was very impressed both by how much noise there was (among underwriters judging exactly the same thing) and mostly I was impressed by how little people knew about it.
There is a chapter where I have that equation—and it’s completely trivial, yet when you think about it it’s extremely important—that the mean squared error is equal to bias squared plus noise squared. That sets noise as a big problem, because we know that bias is a big problem. In fact, I suspect that in many situations noise is significantly a more severe source of inaccuracy and error than bias is.
For all that data has grown in prominence and visibility around the world of football it can still be something of a jolt to the senses when the likes of Thomas Tuchel seem so comfortable talking about their team’s expected goals (xG), attacking third recoveries and touches in both penalty boxes.
There is more to Tuchel’s coaching success at Chelsea than his understanding of his new team’s metrics but it is equally true that he appreciates the value of numbers. When he arrived at Stamford Bridge midway through the season he brought just three colleagues with him to add to the Blues coaching staff. Two were to be his assistants, Arno Michels and Zsolt Low, while the other was Benjamin Weber, his video and data analyst.
… At both clubs, investment on the pitch has been matched by similar spending behind the scenes — like recruiting the best administrators and coaches, as well as building world-class facilities for the players to hone their skills.
Money undoubtedly talks, and it is why Chelsea and City are preparing to meet in Porto to contest the Champions League final, but ESPN has gone beneath the surface to identify just why transfer spending is not the only reason why they have become the powerhouse teams of English, and maybe even European, football.