When Hilary Spires toed the line at the Coast Mountain Trail Series (CMTS) Run Ridge Run 13K race on Saturday, February 23, she wasn’t only starting a trail race–she was starting her second trimester. With 600 metres of ascent, the technical (and snowy) 13K course was Spires’ second race pregnant (her first a road race at the Vancouver First Half Marathon). Run Ridge Run felt “really, really good!” Spires said. “It was just so fun to be out there in the mountains for the first trail race of the season, with such a lovely group of people. The giant snowflakes made it extra beautiful.”
Dallas Morning News, SportsDay blog, Callie Caplan from
Randi Thompson has been to the UIL girls’ basketball state tournament before. Frisco Liberty qualified in 2016 when the guard was a freshman. She knows what to expect.
But Thompson’s path back to the Class 5A final four hasn’t unfolded as she would’ve predicted.
She’s twice torn the anterior cruciate ligament in her right knee, and the injuries robbed her of most of her sophomore and junior seasons. Her current prowess as a senior, according to medical statistics, is unlikely.
If she did not do it, that would be understandable.
Isabella D’Aquila did play for the JSerra girls soccer team this season, her senior year. She scored 34 goals and led the team to a third straight CIF-Southern Section Division 1 championship. D’Aquila scored that 34th goal Saturday in the Lions’ 3-0 win over Los Alamitos in the Division 1 final.
She was the national high school player of the year last season. D’Aquila, at JSerra since her freshman year, has been selected to play for national teams. She now is in Spain training with the U.S. Under-20 Women’s National Team.
There is some trepidation in doing this. With the uncertainty of how it could go and the painful memories of how it has gone before, the fear is undeniable.
“Absolutely,” Alexis Garcia said. “The minute I left that office after telling them I would do this, I started thinking, ‘What did I just do? What if I get hurt again?’ It’s been in the back of my mind.”
How could it not be?
Three times, the former New Paltz High School athlete has experienced the agony and disappointment of severing the anterior cruciate ligament in her knees. Three times, the 19-year-old has endured the grueling year-long rehabilitation process.
Two years ago — in a move that delighted some in women’s sports and shocked others — Olivia Moultrie announced that she had accepted a scholarship offer to play college soccer at the University of North Carolina. She was 11 years old.
On Monday, Moultrie, the youngest girls’ soccer player to publicly accept an academic scholarship offer, became the youngest girls’ soccer player to then officially forgo her college athletic eligibility. Now 13, Moultrie announced that she had signed, in short order, a representation deal with the Wasserman Media Group, a sports agency, and a multiyear endorsement deal with Nike. In taking those two actions, Moultrie formally began her professional career.
Long-time University of Manitoba head football coach Brian Dobie clearly remembers the moment three years ago, at a super elite camp for hot high school recruits in the Toronto area.
Some small defensive back made three or four ripping tackles.
“I turned to a couple of Ontario coaches I didn’t even know,” Dobie said Wednesday morning in a phone interview from Winnipeg, “and I pointed and went, ‘THAT guy is an outstanding tackler.’
“And one of the coaches said, ‘Yeah, coach. That guy is a girl.’ That’s how I first heard about Reina.”
How do you get players at the elite level to keep on improving? For United States women’s national volleyball team head coach Karch Kiraly, video analysis is a vital tool that facilitates higher learning.
As a three-time Olympic gold medalist, coach Kiraly is a strong authority on what technology makes elite players tick. He explains the suitability of video to the success of his elite program.
“My biggest goal with this program for the other coaches, our staff and I, is trying to give our players every tool possible to improve and to learn at the fastest rate possible,” said Kiraly.
“The bottom line is we’re trying to figure out who might be able to come to the USA gym and continue to develop”.
In his first season at helm of Pitt’s women’s soccer program, Randy Waldrum experienced his share of growing pains.
The veteran college coach who’s helped turn multiple women’s soccer programs around and has won multiple National Championships, knew that drastic changes needed to made to move the Pitt women’s program forward after a season which Pitt showed slight improvements (4-12-1 overall record), but couldn’t pick up a win against Atlantic Coast Conference competition (0-10).
“Anytime you have to make a lot of changes, it can be good and bad,” Waldrum said. “Many of the kids that were with us (in the Fall), have been great, but right now, we’re trying to build a program and get players that can compete at that level. The ACC is so competitive.”
When assessing biomechanics in a laboratory setting, task selection is critical to the production of accurate and meaningful data. The injury biomechanics of landing is commonly investigated in a laboratory setting using a drop landing task. However, why this task is so frequently chosen is unclear. Therefore, this narrative review aimed to (1) identify the justification/s provided within the published literature as to why a drop landing task was selected to investigate the injury biomechanics of landing in sport and (2) use current research evidence, supplemented by a new set of biomechanical data, to evaluate whether the justifications are supported. To achieve this, a comprehensive literature search using Scopus, PubMed, and SPORTDiscus online databases was conducted for studies that had collected biomechanical data relating to sport injuries using a drop landing task. In addition, kinematic and kinetic data were collected from female netball players during drop landings and maximum-effort countermovement jumps from the ground to grab a suspended ball. The literature search returned a total of 149 articles that were reviewed to determine the justification for selecting a drop landing task. Of these, 54% provided no explicit justification to explain why a drop landing task was chosen, and 15% stated it was selected because it had been used in previous research. Other reasons included that the drop landing provides high experimental control (16%), is a functional sports task (11%), and is a dynamic task (6%). Evidence in the literature suggests that the biomechanical data produced with drop landings may not be as externally valid as more sport-specific tasks. Biomechanical data showed that the drop landing may not control center of mass fall height any better than maximum-effort countermovement jumps from the ground. Further, the frequently used step-off technique to initiate drop landings resulted in kinematic and kinetic asymmetries between lower limbs, which would otherwise be symmetrical when performing a countermovement jump from the ground. Researchers should consider the limitations of a drop landing task and endeavor to improve the laboratory tasks used to collect biomechanical data to examine the injury biomechanics of landing.
Earlier this month the University of Texas announced its plans to build an outdoor swimming and diving center that will open next fall. The Longhorns will add this to the indoor Lee and Joe Jamail Texas Swimming Center, boasted as one of the fastest in the world with the pool’s depth, gutter system, high filtration and lane width.
“Championship caliber teams need a championship-caliber swimming center,” the school tweeted.
There is no denying Texas’ dedication to the swimming and diving program. And their teams have undoubtedly benefitted.
… On Saturday, USA Hockey’s annual Try Hockey Day, a part of Hockey Week Across America, is expected to attract 10,000 kids across the nation. Many of them will be young girls. Million said there were 3,500 female hockey players in the United States back in 1988. Now those numbers are pushing 80,000.
Want to learn to curl like the pros? Looking for breaking news, videos, Olympic and Paralympic team bios all at your fingertips? Download the Team USA app today.
“As we continue to grow the game,” Million said, “those numbers will only keep getting larger and larger.”
… To those in the know, there was little surprise that [Katelyn] Ohashi, once not far from an Olympic berth, rediscovered her joy of gymnastics at U.C.L.A., under a coach who cannot do a single pull-up.
Valorie Kondos Field, known as Miss Val to basically everyone, is the first to admit she is not a perfect coach. She is her own sort of taskmaster, and she has a number of rules for her student-athletes. No chewing gum. No hair-ties on the wrists. But she has long presented an alternative to the often joyless training environment that has become associated with the elite levels of the sport.
Reshma Saujani, founder of Girls Who Code, is on a mission to get more young women into computer science. She says the problem isn’t lack of interest. Her non-profit organization has trained thousands of girls to code, and the ranks of female science and engineering graduates continue to grow. And yet men still dominate the tech industry. Saujani believes companies can certainly do more to promote diversity. But she also wants girls and women to stop letting perfectionism hold them back from volunteering for the most challenging tasks and jobs. [audio, 24:41]
During preparations for her second Olympic Games in 2016, Italian rower Sara Bertolasi began suffering intense pain due to inflammation around her pelvis. The long hours spent rowing on Lake Varese in northern Italy or training on a rowing machine had taken an unbearable toll.
The pain limited Bertolasi’s training and made her consider retirement. Around that time, however, she met Martina Ballerio, the manager of the 3D printing unit at Elmec Informatica, a technology firm based in the nearby city of Varese.
… Bone had long been appreciated as much more than an inert internal scaffolding – step by step, it had been shown to be the seat of red blood cell formation, the body’s dynamic reservoir of calcium, and a tissue that, uniquely in our bodies, is constantly, actively broken down then remade. But still, the idea that it was also an endocrine organ – the definition of any organ excreting hormones – and that it played an essential role in keeping mammals trim, seemed too much. ‘It took us 10 years to accept it,’ says Karsenty. ‘It took me 10 years to accept it.’
Karsenty and others eventually confirmed that bones secrete hormones essential for an animal’s health. And with that finding, the skeleton joined a growing list of tissues shown to participate in a body-wide conversation between organs. The traditional concept of the endocrine system as a second-command system working in tandem with the nervous system – and largely directed by the brain – is being replaced with a more autonomous view of interorgan communication, one in which most, if not all, organs have a voice. Grasping the logic of a control system in which the body’s organs are both the targets of hormonal commands and the source of them is still only beginning, but the clinical implications are sure to be profound.
ACL tears are occurring with alarming frequency. Most people are told to have ACL surgery soon after the injury. Many people are under the false assumption that once the ACL surgery and rehabilitation is done the knee is normal. Many people also believe that the majority of athletes return to sports after ACL surgery.
I remember when I was 14 years old standing around at the rink, looking at the results of a skating test I had just completed, which I passed. I was standing close to my two training mates and their family, huddled together, crying, at what was their last skate as figure skaters. The two skaters loved to skate, but the hobby was too expensive for their family. It was a deeply emotional moment for the family and my coach.
Stories like this are not uncommon in ice sports. There usually comes a point where each family has to decide if figure skating is feasible financially, and the answer depends on the skater’s potential. Should we stay or should we go? Such things are deeply personal questions, and responses vary by families’ fiscal situations.
In the span of several days back in November 2018, three women made separate attempts at breaking the women’s fastest known time (FKT) for the iconic Rim-to-Rim-to-Rim (R2R2R) run in the Grand Canyon. Spanning 42 miles, and gaining a total of around 10,000 feet elevation, the route usually involves running from the south rim to the north and back again, and is among the most well-known and sought after FKTs. Sandi Nypaver, Ida Nilsson and Taylor Nowlin all broke the standing record established by Cat Bradley in 2017, and for the moment, the record stands at seven hours, 25 minutes and 58 seconds, set by upstart Nowlin. “For the moment” being the key words.
Women ultrarunners are setting the FKT world ablaze these days. The Co-op Journal analyzed data from Fastest Known Time for 15 notable, often-contested routes across the United States. Including the supported, unsupported and self-supported categories, all but six of the 45 FKTs set by women on those routes have occurred within the last 10 years.
… Though the ACC title will likely come down to Louisville or Notre Dame, that doesn’t mean their path to get to the finals will be easy. Both teams have lost two conference match-ups, including one each to the unpredictable (and wildly fun to watch) Miami. NC State, Florida State and Syracuse are all also ranked in the top 25 nationally, and UNC — who upset Notre Dame in January 78-73 — and a scrappy Clemson team, who have pulled off a couple upsets of their own, are both hovering just below them in conference standings.