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High School Football D.J. Vanderwerf Shines as 3-Sport High School Athlete with Prosthetic Leg

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Can he scramble? Will it pop off if he gets hit? Will it hurt the players who hit him? These are the questions D.J. Vanderwerf faced when he entered the realm of high school sports as the only young man in his area playing with an artificial limb.

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A native of Sweetwater, Tennessee, Vanderwerf came in and quarterbacked Sweetwater High School’s football team to a 3-1 record at the end of the 2014-15 season. He’s a three-sport athlete and has lived nearly his entire life without the bottom half of his left leg after being born with fibular hemimelia—a birth defect causing a shortened or entirely absent fibular bone in the leg.

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Vanderwerf hasn’t let that dictate his goals, and with the help of a converted by Web2PDFConvert.com

prosthesis, he’s been walking and mobile since he was 15 months old. Yahoo Sports’ Rivals.com (h/t The Big Lead’s Stephen Douglas) profiled the high school junior when he attended the 2015 Rivals Quarterback Challenge in Cincinnati in April. There, Vanderwerf shared his story, explaining how he’s had to prove he belongs on the playing field. Vanderwerf said: People doubted me at first, that I couldn’t really do anything with my leg. The coaches had questions about my mobility, if my leg would stay on. You know, if I got hit, if I’d get hurt easily. If I’d hurt the other kids. Once I started playing they realized that I can do anything that anybody else does.

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When he’s not working on his spiral, Vanderwerf also pitches for the Sweetwater High School baseball team and plays basketball. He says he’d like to play sports in college and that he wants to help others with disabilities.

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“I’d like to actually become a prosthetist—that’s the person that makes the things that I wear,” Vanderwerf said. “I expect to go to college. I’d like to play a sport in college, preferably football. But we’ll see.”

Dan is on Twitter. Throw D.J. the rock and watch what he do with it.

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Virtual reality for QBs: Stanford football at the forefront By Daniel Brown

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POSTED: 09/09/2015 02:17:17 PM PDT UPDATED: 09/10/2015 06:32:30 AM PDT

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Stanford University quarterback Ryan Burns poses with the STRIVR labs Inc. VR headset for a photo illustration at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif., on Wednesday, Sept. 2, 2015. (LiPo Ching/Bay Area News Group) ( LiPo Ching )

STANFORD -- Trent Edwards, who played quarterback for Stanford a decade ago, is back in the huddle again. Or so it seems. He's actually standing on the stage of a campus lecture hall and showing an audience of leading Silicon Valley sports minds the future of football. Edwards is wearing a virtual reality headset and everything he sees through his goggles is projected onto a big screen. A wave of "whoas" and "no ways" ripples through the crowd as the quarterback turns to his right and his left. Improbably, it looks and sounds as if Edwards is in the middle of a live Stanford practice. The quarterback scans the defensive formation, pauses as the tight end goes in motion and swivels behind to see -- "cool!" -- a running back lined up in the backfield. Something quavers in Edward's voice. He's a college passer again. "I'm feeling it right now," he says. "I'm feeling the juices."

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Edwards gets so immersed in this alternate universe that he forgets where he is. He takes an ill-advised step forward and nearly tumbles off the stage. Jeremy Bailenson, a Stanford STRIVR Labs Co-founder Trent Edwards demonstrates the STRIVR virtual reality football training system at the STRIVR Labs office in Menlo Park, Calif., on Friday, June 19, 2015. (LiPo Ching/Bay Area News Group) ( LiPo Ching )

professor and one of the world's leading authorities on virtual reality, rescues the awkward moment by quipping that

someone could strike it rich by inventing air bags to go with the headset. But it's clear from the demonstration that the next big thing has already arrived. Advertisement

After a quiet trial run last year, the virtual

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repetitions even without playing time. For the football community, it's a way to minimize contact -- i.e. concussions -- in an era of increased concern over player safety. The 49ers are among a growing list of NFL believers. They signed a two-year agreement in July, when general manager Trent Baalke said: "We are constantly searching for methods to better prepare us for game day." Stanford coach David Shaw said he's been rejecting technology like this for 20 years because every previous incarnation was "terrible, terrible." They were mostly video game caliber representations rather than a 3-D reality. But when Bailenson and a pair of his ex-players, Edwards and kicker Derek Belch, brought him this breakthrough, Shaw not only embraced it for Stanford practices, he fronted the money to help found the company. No one actually throws a pass while wearing the headset, but for Shaw it was way to bring his playbook to life. It's especially helpful in college, where the NCAA cracks down on contact hours. "We're cutting our practice time, which means we don't have to pull them away from their studies," Shaw said. "We can say, 'When you guys have time, come back. It's available to you.' converted by Web2PDFConvert.com

you.' "These guys, by their class schedule, will come by and put the headset on and actually have their own individualized practice. Less body contact. Less concussions. Less time on the field. That's just phenomenal."

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This venture began with, of all things, a Stanford master's thesis. In 2005, Belch took Bailenson's "Virtual People" class, which is heavy on how the brain functions in a virtual environment. The kicker approached the professor after class and said, "Wouldn't it be great

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if we could use this to train football players?" Bailenson told him it was a brilliant idea, but warned him how often previous attempts had

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Belch's continued research in the field led to the creation of STRIVR Labs. (STRIVR stands for Sports Training in Virtual Reality.) The company uses GoPro cameras to film drills at a 360-degree angle. The programmers stitch together the images for a complete picture. In the end, coaches and players wind up with something exponentially more instructive than traditional game film. Quarterbacks can look into the faces of oncoming blitzers or, say, recognize how linebackers disguise an exotic coverage scheme. The software can be used with any commercial head-mounted display, such the Oculus Rift. It can also work without a headset. STRIVR ran a small experiment at Stanford last year. They put three quarterbacks -- a senior, junior and a freshman -- into a virtual environment. The quarterbacks watched a series of plays. Then Belch tested their reaction time and recall. Then the QBs used the headsets for a month before STRIVR came back and ran the tests over again. Reaction times were down; recognition recall was way up. Starting quarterback Kevin Hogan mostly left the technology to his backups last season, since he was getting real-time action in practice. But he was curious enough to run through plays on the headset before each of his last three games. Hogan's completion percentage in those games jumped from 63.8 percent to 76.3 percent, and the Cardinal beat all three opponents -- Cal, No. 10 UCLA and Maryland -- by an average of 22 points. "His decision-making was faster. Everything was quicker," Shaw said. "He saw things happening and could make those decisions and anticipate the ball coming out of his hands. "I'm not saying there is a 1-to-1 correlation, but it was along those lines. He played extremely well. He was always big, fast and strong and a heck of a quarterback, but we got him to think a little bit quicker. I think this virtual reality immersion and going through these plays" helped him. Hogan, in an interview conducted before his shaky performance in Stanford's opener at Northwestern, said he finds the technology useful -- if only to underscore his old-school preparation. He said he used the headset at the end of a practice week to reaffirm the things he'd learned. "If you're studying from the QB's perspective, going through reads, looking at the depth of the linebackers, how quickly the windows close, (the virtual reality) is beneficial," Hogan said. "It's a good complement." Across football, the first wave of teams is hoping their quarterbacks can make a similar jump. STRIVR already counts Arkansas, Auburn, Clemson, Dartmouth, Georgetown, Rice and converted by Web2PDFConvert.com

Vanderbilt among its NCAA clients. In the NFL, the 49ers, Cowboys, New York Jets, Arizona Cardinals, New Orleans Saints and Minnesota Vikings are aboard with the Stanford-born company. The Tampa Bay Buccaneers, meanwhile, began using a competing virtual-reality system, created by EON Sports VR. That football simulation program called SIDEKIQ, uses computer-generated graphics that can be used to tailor a virtual-game scenario. The Bucs bought it in part as a teaching tool for rookie quarterback Jameis Winston, this year's No. 1 overall draft pick. The 49ers, too, have a quarterback under the microscope. The knocks on Colin Kaepernick are his inability to read defenses and his struggles to keep the offense on pace with the play clock. Geep Chryst, the 49ers offensive coordinator, said watching the clips from Stanford practices made him optimistic. "Because it's not CGI generated, it's real people, and watching Stanford last spring one of the guys broke the huddle and dropped his mouth guard," Chryst said. "Now, you wouldn't write that as a script. Things like that happen all the time. And (the quarterback) has to kind of look down and wait for him to pick up his mouth guard and put it back in. "That kind of trips you up if you're trying to stay within a rhythm ... All of those little things are great to practice. You have to solve it on your own. You can't call a 30-second timeout or reset the play clock just because of that." During a break at the Innovation Conference, Bailenson took members of the Atlanta Falcons staff, including coach Dan Quinn and assistant general manager Scott Pioli, on a tour of the lab. To show how powerfully the brain could be duped, the professor had Quinn, the 49ers former defensive line coach, strap on the virtual reality headset. Again, a screen projected what Quinn saw -- in this case, a rickety plank extending across a 10-meter pit. Bailenson asked Quinn to take a few steps on the plank. Then he asked Quinn to step off and plunge into the ominous looking pit. "Step off?" the coach said, nervously, as if to buy time. The front of his brain was telling him it wasn't real. But the back of his brain wasn't so sure. Quinn eventually took the leap of faith, but not everyone does. Bailenson said about onethird of the participants are too scared to step off the plank. There was also the time a 280pound judge lost his footing while walking across the virtual board. "And gravity kicked in, and so he fell virtually," Bailenson said. "How does he save his life? If this were real, the way to save his life would be to dive at a 45-degree angle and catch the lip on the other side. So that's what this gentleman did." The ability to rehearse such perilous situations is part of what appeals to football coaches. It's also why it resonated with Edwards, a former national sensation as a quarterback at Los Gatos High. He spent his Stanford career getting pummeled behind a shaky supporting cast and then endured further beatings over eight NFL seasons. Virtual reality training might have preserved his body for the stardom that once looked inevitable. "When I met with Derek for the first time, I literally said to him, 'I can't join fast enough. I can't be here fast enough,'" Edwards said. "Tell me how much money I need to put into this, converted by Web2PDFConvert.com

can't be here fast enough,'" Edwards said. "Tell me how much money I need to put into this, tell me how much time I need to put into this, and I'm there." Besides giving players a tool for studying schemes, STRIVR can program, say, noise or other conditions that might otherwise catch a team unprepared on game days. Heading for the raucous sounds of Seattle's CenturyLink Field? It can be recreated in the headset. "Absolutely. We can make it dark. We can make it rain. If it exists, we can create it," said Tracy Hughes, the founder and CEO of Silicon Valley Sports Ventures, and an adviser to STRIVR. "We can pump in crowd noise. We can make it evening. Dusk. "You know how some fans do a 'white out' or wear red? That makes a difference. We could create that backdrop." For now, the cost is likely prohibitive for anything but NFL or major college teams. High schools and youth league teams will have to wait. Financial terms of their contracts have not been disclosed, but Belch has said that the $250,000 price tag floated elsewhere is inaccurate. Whatever the cost, Shaw envisions a day soon when virtual reality training is a part of every top program regimen. "In this world, I get to see what my quarterback sees," he said. "I get to see which way he's looking. And I don't have to guess: I actually see which way he turns and can see exactly in his field of view. "And that kind of speeds up the conversation. And it also doesn't let him lie to me. We talked about eye-tracking? To pinpoint exactly where they should be looking, that's huge for us. And that's going to be huge for our team." Mercury News staff writer Jon Wilner contributed to this report. Contact Daniel Brown at dbrown@mercurynews.com.

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It's important to remain aware of what's happening in real football when playing fantasy football. Counting on Washington quarterback Robert Griffin III, left, for example, is not wise because he lost the starting job to Kirk Cousins, right. Patrick Semansky /Associated Press

What I found is the strange hypocrisy and inconsistency around gambling that is embedded in United States law. The rules actively work against the interests of casual sports fans and low-stakes gamblers like me who just want to make the games more interesting. The very complexity and opacity that make daily fantasy sports legal also make it more likely that the casual fan will lose money. There is a truism in investing that complexity favors the big guy and disadvantages the little guy, and it applies here as well. If securities laws were like gambling laws, it would be illegal for people to buy shares of Google or a United States Treasury bond, because that would be gambling, but legal for them to invest in currency swaps that pay a return if the Swiss franc, Argentine peso and Vietnamese dong together outperform the Swedish krona, Mexican peso and South Korean won. The fantasy sports industry argues that its service is not gambling at all, but rather a game of skill. It’s the sort of game specifically allowed by most state laws and by a 2006 federal law restricting online gambling that carved out protections for fantasy sports leagues. The industry is right about that much. It is a skill, and it unquestionably rewards those who apply dogged analytics to assembling their fantasy lineups. Although daily fantasy sports advertisements target casual fans, a disproportionate share of the contest entries — and even more disproportionate share of the winnings — go to people who play the game on a scale most armchair sports fans couldn’t imagine. An analysis of Major League Baseball contests by Ed Miller and Daniel Singer published in the Sports Business Journal found that 1.3 percent of fantasy players paid $9,100 in entry fees on average, accounting for 23 percent of all entry fees and 77 percent of all profits. While they earned a 27 percent return on their “investments,” the 80 percent of bettors who counted as small fish, spending $49 each, lost about half their money. How do the serious players do it? In the DraftKings fantasy football contests I entered, I assembled a “team,” including a quarterback, running backs and receivers. I scored points based on how many touchdowns and yards of converted by W eb2PDFConvert.com

rushing, receiving and so on they achieved in that week’s games. Each player has a “price” set by the service ($8,000 for the star Green Bay Packers quarterback Aaron Rodgers, for example, or $5,000 for any of numerous journeyman quarterbacks), and my job was to assemble the team of players while coming in under a fixed salary cap ($50,000) that would score the most total points. Analyzing past statistical performance, I predicted which players offered the best value for their price, that is, which ones were likely to score the most points relative to what it cost to put them on the team. The prices don’t change based on the latest news, which means entrants have to figure out on their own when there is a wild mispricing. As I was preparing my entries for last weekend, I had the option of spending $8,500 on Dallas Cowboys receiver Dez Bryant, for example, even though he was out with an injury. There are plenty of tip sheets to help the casual fan determine which players offer the best value for a given week. Many entrants don’t appear to use any such service, or indeed to follow sports news at all. One person, for example, entered a lineup anchored by the benched Washington quarterback Robert Griffin III and the injured secondstring San Francisco 49ers running back Reggie Bush. This person did not win. The next set of advantages for skilled fantasy players is even harder to exploit for the average fan. The most popular contests in daily fantasy are structured as tournaments, in which only the top-scoring 10 or 20 percent of entrants win anything at all, with a disproportionate piece of the rewards going to the top overall winner out of hundreds of thousands of entries. For example, one contest I played had a $100,000 grand prize on a $3 entry fee, but 383,000 people entered. “Pretty good” doesn’t cut it; you’ll win only if your players manage extraordinary performances. The way skilled players compete is by putting together teams with high variance. They emphasize players who are boom-or-bust, who might rush for 200 yards once in a blue moon, as opposed to a player who consistently rushes for 100 yards every week. They exploit “covariance,” or the tendency for certain players’ performance to coincide, for example, multiple hitters on the same baseball lineup (if the first gets a hit, the next is more likely to get an R.B.I.). “In horse racing, when the favorite wins, the professional handicappers often lose money, and the same applies in fantasy sports,” said Mr. Singer, a senior partner at the consulting firm McKinsey & Company. “When Clayton Kershaw throws a no-hitter or Tom Brady has a huge game, it’s not as good for the pros,” who instead make their money when a less vaunted — and thus less popular — athlete has a surprise outstanding performance. If you walk into a Las Vegas sports book and put money on a game in some sport you know nothing whatsoever about, you may not win, but you will almost certainly get fair odds relative to the risk you are taking. Playing daily fantasy sports, you will probably get your hat handed to you unless you deploy lots of computing power and analytical techniques that most of us don’t have the time, inclination or skill to use. As for me, I had fun with my week of daily fantasy sports, and even ended up $13 ahead (very much because of luck, not skill). But I suspect I would have enjoyed it as much or more if I could have made a

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