Olivia Moultrie, the 15-year-old American soccer player who last month filed a federal antitrust lawsuit against the National Women’s Soccer League and its 18-year-old age eligibility requirement, was awarded a temporary restraining order on Monday. She is now free to sign with an NWSL team.
“The court finds,” federal judge Karin Immergut explained, “that the 10 teams that make up the NWSL have agreed to impose the NWSL’s age restriction which excludes female competitors from the only available professional soccer opportunity in the United States because they are under 18, regardless of talent, maturity, strength, and ability.” The judge added that NWSL failed to persuasively offer “legitimate procompetitive justification for treating young women who want an opportunity to play professional soccer differently than young men.
Vanessa Bryant said last week that her husband played through injuries because he felt a responsibility to the fans. Bryce Harper grew up a Kobe fan and can relate to what Kobe played through.
Some people adopted pets during the pandemic. Some made sourdough. Olympic speedskater Brittany Bowe has sort of combined the two.
Bowe began making bread in her Salt Lake City home after her US Speedskating teammate Kimi Goetz gave her a starter kit last summer. The yeast and bacteria mixture that makes the sourdough rise has since taken on a life of its own.
“I have it in the fridge now and my roommate is taking care of it,” Bowe said in a phone interview during a recent trip to the Netherlands. “So I’m sending her a weekly text: ‘C’mon, it’s time to feed the sourdough baby.’
… One of the key pillars of Leverkusen’s talent development philosophy is an intelligent upbringing, explained Gilbert Gorges, the Head of Match Analysis Academy at the club. “We don’t tell the players what they exactly have to do in each situation on the pitch, because there are too many in football, but encourage them to come up with their own answers,” said Gorges. “I think this approach is more beneficial as it develops a knowledgeable and independent player. You cannot predict all the situations a player comes across during the game, but you can provide them with tools and knowledge. And then players take responsibility to make decisions on the pitch.”
… Cost has worked with Feyenoord since the start of the club’s 2016 season, helping the team win the league in his inaugural season and the KNVB Cup in 2018. One of the Netherlands’ biggest teams, Cost managed the club’s medical, nutrition and strength and conditioning staff. He developed training and rehab programs, testing protocols and worked to physically prepare youth players for the first team.
Prior to working in soccer, Cost helped the Dutch National Field Hockey Teams reach Olympic glory as the program’s Head of Sports Performance and Medicine. During his tenure, the women won silver at the 2012 London Olympics and finished fourth at Rio 2016, while the men took silver in 2012 and finished fourth in 2016. The teams also medaled in all four World Cups played during his time on staff. In a similar role to Feyenoord, Cost oversaw medical, strength and conditioning, nutrition and video performance staff and worked to track load management, create periodization plans and manage physical/medical testing.
… We’ve now seen ECG, a pulse oximeter and skin temperature sensors appear on smartwatches but there’s one type of sensor and biomarker we haven’t seen yet and that’s non-invasive glucose monitoring.
Right now, there are devices dedicated to glucose monitoring that can be connected to smartwatches and smartphones to provide that data. Currently, there isn’t a smartwatch that can offer that feature on its own.
An artificial intelligence tool being developed by Duke scientists can be added to the standard toilet to help analyze patients’ stool and give gastroenterologists the information they need to provide appropriate treatment for chronic issues such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and irritable bowel syndrome (IBS).
The work is being done by Duke University’s Center for Water, Sanitation, Hygiene and Infectious Disease (WaSH-AID), and was presented Saturday at the virtual conference Digestive Disease Week 2021.
“Typically, gastroenterologists have to rely on patient self-reported information about their stool to help determine the cause of their gastrointestinal health issues, which can be very unreliable,” said Deborah Fisher, MD, associate professor of medicine at Duke University and one of the lead authors on the study.
The US Open will use Hawk-Eye Live electronic line-calling on all competition courts during this year’s tournament for the first time, the USTA said in a statement on Monday.
Seven of the nine US Open Series events leading into the year’s final major, including the Western & Southern Open and the National Bank Open, will also fully use the technology this summer.
The USTA used electronic line-calling for the Western & Southern Open and US Open on all courts except Arthur Ashe and Louis Armstrong Stadiums in 2020 when both events were played at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center. According to the USTA, Hawk-Eye Live made around 314,000 calls during the two tournaments.
Sports tech startup Playermaker, a maker of a shoe-mounted wearable device to track football performance, has been accepted to be part of the International Federation of Association Football’s (FIFA) Innovation Programme.
The innovation program, launched last year by the international governing body of association football, aims to help bring innovative products to the game by making sure that new devices meet its global standard. The program will enable firms to try out their products and change their technologies according to needs and rule requirements.
Playermaker, a Tel Aviv firm now headquartered in the UK, has created a boot-mounted connected wearable sensor device designed to provide in-depth level analysis into athletes’ performance when worn in play. The technology is already being used by more than 150 soccer academies and professional teams across the world including Norwich, Liverpool and Arsenal, providing coaches and players with insights about their plays, and help them make decisions based on data about player development and training priorities.
University of Nebraska–Lincoln, Nebraska Today from
Personalized nutrition has emerged in recent years as a key potential solution to a variety of diseases that originate in the gut, and Nebraska scientists are mining microbiome data to determine how individuals’ digestive systems might respond to different nutritional approaches.
As a running coach, you get to see a lot of blood work. And sometimes it can just feel … off.
Many of the knobs seem to be turned in the wrong direction. Stress hormone cortisol might be high, vitamin D low, hemoglobin nowhere near where it could be, other numbers moving up or down seemingly at random. It’s often accompanied by fatigue and lack of adaptation over time. What’s going on?
The answer to that question can vary significantly. It might be stress, underlying health concerns or just natural variability. But one possible answer keeps coming up over and over. And it turned me into an evangelist, preaching the same phrase constantly:
Eat enough, always. Eat too much, sometimes. Eat too little, never.
The challenges women’s sports face have drawn national attention in recent months, particularly when it comes to the inequities they encounter. A new MIT Sloan School of Management case study examines the past, present, and future of the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) and how it successfully navigated the COVID-19 pandemic.
Under the leadership of the league’s new commissioner Lisa Baird, the NWSL was the first professional sports league to return to action during the pandemic and the first to crown a champion. It also succeeded in reaching larger audiences and expanding to new markets. Authors of the case study, MIT Sloan Associate Director of Curriculum Development Cate Reavis, journalist and Boston University Lecturer Shira Springer, and MIT Sloan Senior Lecturer Ben Shields, highlight learnings from Baird and the NWSL about leadership, strategy, and innovation.
“This is a remarkable story about a business navigating the uncertainty of the pandemic and emerging in an even stronger position,” says Shields. “There is so much to learn from studying how Commissioner Baird and her team are charting a growth path for women’s professional soccer in a more equitable and sustainable way.”
… “We call it the culture of excellence and we expect everything to be the best of the best, and right now it’s not here at Jacksonville,” Meyer said. “There’s a lot of great things that are, there are certain areas that are not. My job, and I push really hard especially when you talk about health and safety of players, I expect it to be the very best. So, we’re pushing hard, and our owner, Shad, has been fantastic to listen and to learn about what we expect.”
Kim Pegula is the fourth team president since she and her husband bought the franchise, which has cycled through seven head coaches – eight if interim coach Don Granato isn’t retained – and four GMs in a decade.
“When you feel like there’s a disconnect with the people that you have in charge, it’s hard to sit by and just let it continue, knowing that you so desperately want to win and you so desperately want to succeed for your fans and your staff and your community,” Kim Pegula said after Botterill’s firing.
