United States forward Mallory Pugh (11) and Paraguay midfielder Fanny Godoy (10) battle for the ball during the second half of an international friendly soccer match, Thursday, Sept. 16, 2021, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak)
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United States forward Mallory Pugh (11) and Paraguay midfielder Fanny Godoy (10) battle for the ball during the second half of an international friendly soccer match, Thursday, Sept. 16, 2021, in Cleveland. (AP Photo/Tony Dejak)
Mallory Pugh was soccer’s next big thing as a teenager but she has faded from the limelight as she struggled with injuries and consistency.
Now healthy, Pugh has returned to the U.S. national team more determined than ever.
Pugh had a career-high three assists during the United States’ 9-0 victory over Paraguay in Cleveland, her first game with the national team since early 2020. The teams are set for a rematch Tuesday in Cincinnati.
The 23-year-old is making something of a comeback after being left off the roster for the Tokyo Games. Something clearly shifted in Pugh’s mindset while she was away from the team.
Our own Jeff Marek likely borrowed this line from someone, but he’s repeated it often to Elliotte Friedman on 31 Thoughts: The Podcast and it’s resonating with me right now.
I’m sure I won’t be the only reporter rooting for Jonathan Drouin this season. In exclusive interviews with RDS and TVA Sports that aired Monday night the 26-year-old opened up about anxiety and insomnia that plagued him for years before it became insuppressible and had him decide to step away from hockey last April. He said that, now that he’s prepared to return, all he wants is to do is play the game and enjoy it, and as someone who’s gotten to know Drouin — not as well as his friends and family, but as well as he’s allowed reporters to know him — I sincerely hope he gets what he wants.
I’m not just rooting for him, but also for every player who has dealt with similar issues and faced them head-on. It takes a great deal of courage to acknowledge a problem exists and even more to open up about it, and if we’re not behind the people who exhibit that type of courage, we’re only exacerbating the problem.
‘Whether it was because they were just trying to shut us up, or because they actually believed it was the right thing to do, it don’t matter to me. That representation is important.’
… Behind the scenes, Lage has made small tweaks to make the atmosphere around the club more amiable. Whilst personal one-on-one meetings were not the norm under Nuno, Bruno is said to welcome players’ into his office with open arms.
Away from Lage’s office, a new auditorium has been installed at Wolves’ training ground, under his instruction. Built with 30 seats, there is now a greater emphasis on analysing last week’s match. Although these changes aren’t revolutionary, they go some way to explaining the cause of the good-feel around the club at this moment.
Whether it’s because there’s a clean slate at Wolves, or the small details that Lage has tweaked – there’s an added exuberance to the way the team has started the season. After 4 games, Wolves had mustered 71 shots, the 3rd most in the league. Not only are they consistently shooting, but also crafting out good opportunitie
When Huddersfield’s Director of Football Operations, Leigh Bromby, presented at our Individual Development Coaching Webinar in June, he brought along six of his colleagues.
First-team coach Danny Schofield, Head of Analysis Craig Nosworthy (now at Manchester City), Head of Performance Paul Bower, Under-17s lead George Danaher, Head of Goalkeeping Paul Clements and Head of Recruitment Josh Marsh each delivered a short segment on the work that their department did to develop players.
The message was clear: Huddersfield are a development club and everyone is involved.
Single-molecule counting is the most accurate and precise method for determining the concentration of a biomarker in solution and is leading to the emergence of digital diagnostic platforms enabling precision medicine. In principle, solid-state nanopores—fully electronic sensors with single-molecule sensitivity—are well suited to the task. Here we present a digital immunoassay scheme capable of reliably quantifying the concentration of a target protein in complex biofluids that overcomes specificity, sensitivity, and consistency challenges associated with the use of solid-state nanopores for protein sensing. This is achieved by employing easily-identifiable DNA nanostructures as proxies for the presence (“1”) or absence (“0”) of the target protein captured via a magnetic bead-based sandwich immunoassay. As a proof-of-concept, we demonstrate quantification of the concentration of thyroid-stimulating hormone from human serum samples down to the high femtomolar range. Further optimization to the method will push sensitivity and dynamic range, allowing for development of precision diagnostic tools compatible with point-of-care format. [full text]
Concussions, ACL tears and Achilles ruptures are all debilitating injuries that can derail athletic careers. Stress fractures and plantar fasciitis can linger and recur. These ailments often seem like bad luck, suffered by happenstance, but what if new research suggests that some athletes were born more susceptible to these injuries—and that maybe they can be prevented?
The Palo Alto-based startup AxGen, led by a respected former Stanford University geneticist, is pioneering, peer-reviewed DNA tests that indicate key genomic markers of specific injury risk. AxGen, named as shorthand for “actionable genetics,” offers tests for 13 sports injuries and counting, as well as 15 biomarkers that can prompt users to take action through preventative exercises or nutrition.
“It’s scientifically rigorous, and it addresses the idea that all athletes are not created equal, and some of them are going to be at more risk for a knee injury at birth and more at risk for shoulder injury,” says Stuart Kim, a co-founder and the CEO of AxGen. “We could know that, and we could alert an educated team.”
Omron engineers have worked hard to create long lasting and reliable sensing products for manufacturers and product designers. With continued growth of smart sensor demand within the touchless market and for the medical industry, Omron has continued improvements on their latest sensing product, the B5L Time of Flight sensor. An already advanced sensing product that can read and map 2D and 3D environments using state of the art visual technology, Omron is now including software that can detect and track human skeletal movement in real time.
… The interactions between hypoxia and cell biomechanics and the underlying biochemical mechanisms of the accelerated damage in diseased red blood cells are well understood, however, the exact biomechanical consequences of hypoxia contributing to red blood cell degradation (aging) remains elusive.
Researchers from Florida Atlantic University’s College of Engineering and Computer Science , in collaboration with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), sought to identify the role of hypoxia on red blood cell aging via the biomechanical pathways. In particular, they examined hypoxia-induced impairment of red blood cell deformability at the single cell level, compared the differences between non-cyclic hypoxia and cyclic hypoxia, and documented any cumulative effect vs. hypoxia cycles, such as aspects that have not been studied quantitatively. Red blood cell deformability is an important biomarker of its functionality.
Some say it takes 60 days to break a habit, and we all know exactly which ones come to mind when we think of the habits we’d like to break. Whether it’s a habit that has to do with your fitness routine, how much time you spend on your phone, or perhaps some pesky eating habits, we all have the power to break them if that’s what we truly wish.
When it comes to eating habits, how do you know which ones are best to break? We talked with Laura Burak, MS, RD, author of Slimdown with Smoothies, and founder of Laura Burak Nutrition and Amy Goodson, MS, RD, CSSD, LD author of The Sports Nutrition Playbook, both members of our medical expert board, about habits related to food that might be keeping you from achieving your health goals.
It was the beginning of the season, and my team was getting ready to practice. As I walked alongside them to the track, the athletes were talking about how hungry they were. Some mentioned they hadn’t eaten since 10 a.m., and others couldn’t wait until after practice to run across the street to grab a donut because it was “buy one, get one free” day. As we passed the long jump pit and headed to the spot under the scoreboard where we meet before warm-up, they continued to talk about how hungry and tired they were.
At that moment, I realized that if my team is distracted every day by feelings of hunger and fatigue, something needs to change.
I was surprised, because I make a point of constantly discussing the importance of a good diet and its impact on health and performance. Even though we talk about it, however, these high school kids still don’t know how to implement the information. I also realized that they were student-athletes, and their schedule isn’t meal friendly.
… Following suggestions from the league’s competition committee, the NBA has spent time this offseason teaching its referees how to handle it when offensive players are making non-basketball moves with hopes of drawing contact from defenders — something that will be a point of emphasis this season.
Going forward, such plays will merit either a no-call or an offensive foul.
“One of the things that we realized with a free-flowing game that’s played in space is this idea that we want competitive balance,” said Monty McCutchen, the NBA’s senior vice president and head of referee development and training. “We want this idea that both on offense and defense, you have equal opportunities to be competitive and to compete every night. … And as the rules are written, our players are the best in the world at innovating up to the limits of those rules.”
Cutting-edge schemes and a push for player safety are creating radical evolutions in football’s most basic element. Welcome to the last days of the down lineman.
… You may not believe this, but an overwhelming majority of parents want their kids to be engaged in sports for the RIGHT reasons, not the toxic reasons we often read about (chasing the college scholarship, professional sports dreams, etc). Most families enter into their first youth sports experiences with a desire for their child to experience the joy of learning new skills, the excitement of competition, the honor of working together as a team towards a shared goal, and the reward of practice and perseverance. Most parents also value and seek “balance” in the form of reasonable time and cost commitments, local play vs. travel, inclusion, equity, and variety. Yet, when parents go to register their children for programs, all too often that demand is met with what I refer to as the “2 Extremes”.
Extreme 1 – The “Select” or “Elite” team experience that promotes performance and results over the values of inclusion, joy and participation. High cost, high time commitment, frequent travel, high pressure on kids to perform, high pressure on parents to stay involved (fear of missing out).
Extreme 2 – The disorganized, poorly managed “recreational” experience. Low cost, low commitment, low pressure, yet typically plagued by inadequate communication, poor coaching, inadequate volunteer and staff training, and a general disregard for delivering a high quality experience.