The Michigan men’s basketball team will have a new face on the sidelines next season. A program spokesperson announced Chris Williams as the new athletic trainer on Monday night.
Williams comes from the NBA’s Minnesota Timberwolves. He replaces Alex Wong, who left for another job in May.
Walk the walk, take your time, breathe and score. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? But as Euro 2020 prepares to enter the knockout stage, and with it comes the jeopardy of penalty shootout, you can be sure that at least one player will forget the basic principles of scoring with a free shot from 12 yards and send his team crashing out of the competition.
That is perhaps a brutal way of looking at it. When you add in the pressure of walking from the centre circle to the penalty spot, maybe towards a set of hostile opposition supporters and an imposing goalkeeper, and then think about the implications of failure and triggering the disappointment of millions of people, the apparently simple task becomes an altogether different challenge. And then you miss.
“I have had a couple of decades of thinking it through,” England manager Gareth Southgate said, without irony, when asked to recall his penalty shootout miss against Germany in the Euro 96 semifinal that ended a nation’s hopes of reaching the final.
The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of a mixed-method recovery intervention (MMR) consisting of active recovery, stretching, cold-water immersion, and massage on physical, technical, physiological, and perceptual recovery during and after a five-day simulated tennis tournament. Nine competitive male tennis players (age, 24.6±4.2 years) with national ranking positions (German Tennis Federation) and Universal Tennis Ratings between approximately 11–13 participated in two singles tennis tournaments, which were separated by a three-month washout period. During the tournaments, participants played five two-and-a-half-hour competitive singles tennis match on five consecutive days. For the assignment to one of two groups, athletes were matched into homogeneous pairs according to their ranking. Then, within each pair, the players were randomly assigned to one of two groups. The first group performed MMR during the first tournament, whereas the other group used passive recovery (PAS). During the second tournament, recovery conditions were interchanged. Measures of physical and technical performance as well as physiological and perceptual responses (heart rate, blood lactate concentration, perceived exertion) were recorded during match-play sessions. Furthermore, muscle soreness, perceived recovery state, blood markers, countermovement jump height (CMJ), and repeated sprint ability (RSA) were determined before, during, and after the five-day tournament periods. Results showed significant changes over time (P < 0.05) in muscle soreness, perceived recovery state, creatine kinase, c-reactive protein, insulin-like growth factor 1, and countermovement jump height. However, no significant differences or recovery strategy x time interactions were noted either for tennis-specific performance (e.g. number of total points won) or any other of the measured parameters between MMR and PAS (P > 0.05). In conclusion, the repeated use of MMR during and after a five-day tennis tournament did not affect match performance, match load, or recovery from repeated days of tennis match play.
A significant consideration by the performance staff heading into the NBA Bubble was the potential accumulative increase in player stress and anxiety associated with adhering to the daily NBA Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) protocols,1 2 environmental transition into the Bubble (quarantine and isolation),3 coupled with training and competition demands. The impact of such cumulative stress and anxiety negatively affects players mental health,4 5 resulting in significant sleep-related issues6 with detrimental effects on player health, recovery and performance.7 The National Basketball Players Association (NBPA) highlighted that the uncertainty of the situation the impact of COVID-19 on the players and staff, likely to result in a range of emotions such as “anxiety, fear, uncertainty, confusion, hypervigilance, depression, an increased sense of vulnerability, boredom, and a heightened awareness of the needs for self-care”.8 In response, the NBA expanded their mental health guidelines by adopting new rules that required all teams to have at least one mental health professional on their full-time staff for 2019-2020 season.1
A force plate manufacturer is personalizing injury treatment—and prevention—in ways the NFL has never seen.
Utopia, as Phil Wagner sees it, is a world where those who play sports professionally can take their broken bones, tweaked muscles and recovering bodies to a place resembling a pharmacy specializing in ailing athletes.
University of Colorado Boulder, CU Boulder Today from
Think of them as master Lego builders, only at an atomic scale. Engineers at CU Boulder have taken a major step forward in combing advanced computer simulations with artificial intelligence to try to predict how electronics, like the transistors in your cell phone, will fail.
The new research was led by physicist and aerospace engineer Sanghamitra Neogi and appears this week in the journal npj Computational Materials.
In their latest study, Neogi and her colleagues mapped out the physics of small building blocks made up of atoms, then used machine learning techniques to estimate how larger structures created from those same building blocks might behave. It’s a bit like looking at a single Lego brick to try to predict the strength of a much larger castle.
Duke University, Duke Clinical Research Institute from
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, digital products were being adopted at ~34% CAGR in research studies (Marra et al., 2020), which has further accelerated over the past year and a half. With this pivotal shift toward collecting digital measures using connected sensors, it is vital to evaluate their accuracy and determine how measurement errors may impact research conclusions and healthcare decision-making.
The collaboration will leverage HumanFirst’s Atlas platform and DCRI’s deep expertise in trial design to create and conduct innovative and scientifically rigorous protocols to evaluate sensors and other digital measures on behalf of sponsor partners. The new Digital Measures Evaluation Center will perform fit-for-purpose technical and clinical evaluations that are designed to align with sponsor needs.
NFL player Mario Addison’s seventh annual football camp will feature a completely plant-based lunch menu. The Buffalo Bill’s defensive end will be partnering with Nabati Foods – a plant-based food technology company that offers a wide selection of nutritious, health-conscious foods – to bring 650 kids ages 8-18 plant-based lunches. Addison hosts this football camp in his hometown of Birmingham, Alabama, sponsored by the Mario Addison Community Partnership Organization.
Nabati Food will be providing plant-based burgers for all 650 participants in Addison’s football camp. The football camp will occur on June 26th from 9 am to 1 pm, giving young athletes a chance to try a fully nutritious and filling plant-based meal. While many athletic events and sports promote animal-based diets for protein, Addison and Nabati Food will be providing a protein-heavy, plant-based alternative.
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Most professional sports teams use a host of statistics to evaluate their games and players. Especially since the publication of Michael Lewis’ 2003 book (and later, movie) Moneyball, the role of data in sports has been of make-or-break importance to a team’s aspirations. But Moneyball is about baseball, a game of discrete events: brief, well-defined and self-paced actions with a clear beginning and end. Soccer is different. It is a much more continuous game, where players have to constantly adapt to changing circumstances on the pitch – making it a less obvious candidate for data-driven analysis.
“In fact, an estimated 31% of the outcome of a season is based on luck”, says Ruud van Elk, head of sports science and analytics at PSV soccer club in an article on the website of Brainport Eindhoven. “Our job is to try and control the other 69%.”
… Twenty combined strikeouts was once a lot, but there have been more than 370 such games this season.
That trend is not what baseball wants to see right now. And whether it comes in pleas for more action as yet another strikeout-filled evening unfolds, calls for robot umps after a questionable ball-or-strike decision or even losing interest as teams trade solo home runs, this much is clear: Fans want change. And MLB is listening.
Through fan surveys — including one sent to fans after the 2020 season — player outreach and its own data collection, Major League Baseball is trying to determine the best version of itself for the future.
Former front-office executives Theo Epstein and Michael Hill and former All-Star Raul Ibanez are part of a team at MLB collaborating to examine the game, as well as experiment with it — mostly at the minor league level to start. Their ideas may soon change the game at the highest level.