CBC Sports, Player's Own Voice, Melissa Bishop-Nriagu) from
It’s a Sunday afternoon, my feet are up, I have a litre of water sitting beside me, and a rather large belly bump which seems to be dancing.
I’ve just come in from the gym where I was on the elliptical trainer, doing a few light weight exercises. I’m 33 weeks pregnant and trying to balance a fine line of healthy baby, healthy mom, and the fitness I have come to expect from being a track and field athlete.
For the last nine years, I’ve watched my husband Osi — the biggest kid I know — interact with his nieces, nephews and friends’ kids. My jaw drops at how well he interacts with them, he’s a kid-magnet and they love to be around him. Osi and I haven’t been married long, but we’ve spent the better part of a decade together.
… Rudolph loved sports, and in the summer after sixth grade, she was able to join in on basketball games, shooting hoops with whoever was at the playground, which usually meant a bunch of boys. In high school, she started running track. She liked it so much that she skipped classes and snuck into a nearby college stadium to practice, sometimes loitering near the coach to pick up pointers.
“Running, at the time, was nothing but pure enjoyment for me,” she later wrote. “I loved the feeling of freedom… the fresh air, the feeling that the only person I’m really competing against in this is me. The other girls may not have been taking it as seriously as I was, but I was winning and they weren’t.”
If you’re a college athlete, you’re likely aware of what a challenge it can be to balance academics and athletics.
Student-athletes face long days and busy schedules, making their college experience very different from the majority of their peers. In order to prove themselves on the field and in the classroom (and thrive in their academic and athletic roles), college athletes need a solid support system.
Azusa Pacific University sophomore Emily Moran plays on the university’s softball team and recognizes that it can sometimes be difficult to balance her time and attention between her studies and sport. However, like any responsible student, she knows that her studies are ultimately her main priority. Having the support of a coach who also understands that fact has helped her find the right balance.
British Weight Lifting is delighted to launch #StrongIsNotASize in partnership with Women In Sport, #StrongIsNotASize aims to empower women of all abilities to feel comfortable and confident stepping into weights areas in gyms.
… Neville says the changes to the top tier of women’s football next season are “massively important” in regards to a fully professional league and when discussing the plight of Sunderland added clubs have to be at a “certain level.”
“It’s sad for Sunderland, for Mel [Copeland] and the players,” he said. “The league has had to make tough decisions and I don’t get involved in that. I think the league is getting stronger and it’s up to the clubs. It’s okay to say we’re sad but to get into that league, you’ve got to be a certain level and we’re hoping those teams stepping up will improve the quality.
… Concussions are complex things. Also called a traumatic brain injury, or TBI, they can be caused by a blow to the head or being shaken strongly, and the range of symptoms people show when they have one is highly varied. Part of the issue of understanding how concussions affect people of different sexes differently has to do with the fact that, for a long time, only men were used as subjects in studies about concussions, as with a lot of other medical conditions (see heart attacks above). “We classically have always known the male response to brain injury,” Mark Burns, a professor at Georgetown University, told NPR in 2017, but studies on women’s brain injuries are more rare.
Although fast-pitch softball may be less risky than youth baseball, the potential for injury still exists.
Youth baseball leagues often have fairly strict limits on how many innings pitchers can pitch, or how many pitches a player can throw. But for girls playing fast-pitch softball, such guidelines are rare. One reason is that softball pitchers throw underhand, a motion thought to stress the arm less than the overhand throws seen in baseball.
In a pair of recent studies, sports medicine specialist Matthew V. Smith and his colleagues evaluated more than 100 athletes, ages 14 to 18, to understand the risks faced by softball pitchers. They report their findings in the American Journal of Sports Medicine.
Athletes that have undergone an anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction often demonstrate more pronounced inter-limb knee joint kinetic asymmetry in comparison to uninured athletes, even after they have completed rehabilitation. Part of the reason for the persistent asymmetry may be that sports medicine professionals are typically not able to assess knee joint kinetics within the clinic setting. Developing measures to assess knee joint kinetic symmetry could help to augment current rehabilitation practices. OBJECTIVE:
The purpose of this study was to explore the extent to which inter-limb vertical ground reaction force symmetry can predict knee kinetic symmetry during a drop landing task. DESIGN:
Subjects performed double-leg drop landings while three-dimensional kinematic data were collected using a multi-camera system. Ground reaction force data were collected synchronously using two adjacent force plates. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES:
Knee joint moments and power were calculated for both limbs during the landing trials. An inter-limb symmetry index (dominant/non-dominant limb) was calculated for both the peak knee joint moment and power variables, as well as for the peak vertical ground reaction forces. Linear regression analyses were performed to determine if the degree of symmetry in the peak vertical ground reaction forces predicted the degree of symmetry for the kinetic variables. RESULTS:
The symmetry index for the vertical ground reaction forces was a significant predictor of the symmetry indices for the knee joint moments (r = 0.81; p<.001) and power (r = 0.88; p<.001).
CONCLUSION:
Inter-limb symmetry in the peak vertical ground reaction forces can be used to predict knee joint kinetic symmetry during a double-leg drop landing task.
One year removed from Serena Williams being the only woman to grace the top 100, there are currently no women featured on Forbes’ breakdown of the highest-paid athletes of the past year.
Williams didn’t make the cut in the latest edition of the magazine’s yearly roundup because of the time she spent away from her sport to have her daughter, Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr. She earned $18 million in sponsorship deals, but that hefty payday wasn’t enough to push her into the top 100. Nicolas Batum, a guard for the Charlotte Hornets, was 100th on the list with a $22.9 million salary.
Vanity Fair, The Hive blog, Vanessa Grigoriadis from
As new accusers continue to emerge in the wake of Larry Nassar’s abhorrent crimes, gymnastics—and the idea of girlhood that the sport perpetuates—is undergoing a revolution.
… With World Cup qualifying a matter of months away and the start of the tournament in France now just a year away, the moment in Jacksonville highlighted the challenge for U.S. coach Jill Ellis. It isn’t a challenge with Lloyd or any one player specifically — although the star is one piece — but with a roster that is the puzzle itself.
It is about a youth movement that can’t be all about youth.
Is a roster that was overhauled the past three years inherently better? Better able to blend familiar American assets with ever-expanding technical and tactical sophistication in the global game? Better positioned to win a World Cup outside North America for the first time since 1991? Better as a blend of experience and fresh talent?
Or did it merely get younger?
If Ellis find the balance, the U.S. women should win the World Cup next summer. They should at least be the favorite. That remains both the luxury and expectation born of a talent pool still unmatched in its depth.
… Forbes released its annual look at the world’s highest-paid athletes on Tuesday, and it highlights the gap in pay between men and women in professional sports. Women were shut out for the first time since we expanded the list to 50 names in 2010 (Forbes has published a top 100 since 2012). There had always been at least one female tennis player, and as many as three, making the cut. Serena Williams is the top-earning female athlete this year at $18 million, but she fell nearly $5 million short of the $22.9 million cutoff for the top 100.
Finding a female in the boardroom of an English football club is a tough task, even in 2018.
Durham University student Amée Gill is researching the experiences of women in leadership positions across English men’s football for her PhD. Some of her results were published last December by Women in Football, and they made for illuminating (though depressing) reading.
Gill found that just 35 of the 523 directors across league football were women, accounting for 7% of the total. Only seven of the chief executives across the whole of the Premier League and Football League were women (also 7%).
As organizational and societal decisions become more data-driven academic institutions, industry, and government officials continuously identify data literacy as an important skillset for individuals currently in and entering the workforce. Unfortunately, a dearth of qualified data literate employees exists producing a need for effective data science education and training for undergraduates.
The National Academies of Sciences (NAS) formed a study committee to consider the core principles and skills undergraduates should learn and the pedagogical issues that must be addressed to build effective data science education programs. The “Data Science for Undergraduates: Opportunities and Options” project underscores the importance of preparing undergraduates for a data-enabled world and recommends that academic institutions and other stakeholders take steps to meet the evolving data science needs of students. To meet these evolving data science needs requires comprehensive inclusivity. The project conducted two studies, “Envisioning Data Science: An Undergraduate Experience” and “Keeping Data Science Broad,” each collecting input from data science programs, institutions, and industry leaders. During the final project webinar, “Data Science for Undergraduates: Opportunities and Options”, presenters discussed finding that inclusivity is necessary for data science education. According to the findings, “inclusivity“, “broadening“, and “collective“, describe the future vision of data science education.
After shedding light on RED-S and the female athlete triad, Jessica Piasecki explains how she has been affected
As an athlete I have experienced a significant number of issues related to RED-S (Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport) and the female athlete triad. I have learnt a lot, however it is now perhaps a little too late, so I am attempting to educate as many young aspiring athletes as I can on this important topic using my own experiences as reference.
This is part 5 in the series of reviews from the IOC expert committee on exercise and pregnancy in recreational and elite athletes. Part 1 focused on the effects of training during pregnancy and on the management of common pregnancy-related complaints that may be experienced by athletes1; part 2 addressed maternal and fetal perinatal outcomes2; part 3 reviewed the implications of pregnancy and childbirth on return to exercise and on common illnesses and complaints in the postpartum period.3 Part 4 provided recommendations for future research based on parts 1 through 3.4 In part 5, we summarise our recommendations for exercise during pregnancy and after childbirth in recreational exercisers and elite athletes experiencing healthy pregnancies. Part 5 also serves as a background for healthcare personnel to advise women who wish to stay active at a high level.