Six months before she was named MVP of the National Women’s Soccer League, and seven before she pushed the United States to the brink of a Women’s World Cup berth, Lindsey Horan received an important phone call from U.S. Coach Jill Ellis.
Horan, who grew up in Golden, was a fixture on the world’s top-ranked team, but with a new NWSL season underway and the global competition a little more than a year away, Ellis wanted to see more from her. She wanted to see Horan become more assertive in the attack and diversify her qualities. She needed her to take charge of the midfield and place her stamp on every match.
“I challenged Lindsey and said, ‘If you want to be this attacking midfielder for us, you have to be able to have a dangerous pass and a shot from distance,’” Ellis recounted last week.
… During the off-season, the Tahoe, California, native sticks to a steady regimen of climbing and long-distance road biking that keeps her muscles and her mind on track. But Parker knows there’s much more to high-alpine success than a few extra days at the climbing gym. We asked Parker for her tips on training for long missions in the mountains.
Darcy Leslie spent eight years playing for the now-defunct Chicago Force, establishing herself as one of the best women to ever put on the pads. She was a national champion, and was decorated with many individual awards every season, including perennial team Defensive MVP and league All American. She also was Women’s Football Alliance ( WFA ) Conference Player of the Year in 2013.
“My Force [career] entails some of my greatest athletic accomplishments,” said Leslie, who lives in Chicago’s Rogers Park neighborhood and is a general manager for Canine Crew and CrossFit Coach at Hardware Crossfit.
Football is still in her blood, though now retired from playing. Leslie was a Summer Scouting Specialist for the New York Jets.
… “Coach Staley really prepped me so things weren’t a shock,” Wilson said of her adjustment to the physicality and style of play in the WNBA. “I didn’t feel like I hit a rookie wall to where things weren’t going my way. I would figure out what the problem was, and you can fix problems.
“But I think the best is yet to come. I still have a lot to learn, and that’s what I’m most excited about. It’s a lot of fun being on such a young team.”
… With the excitement surrounding the Women’s national team (USWNT) and their dominant run through World Cup Qualifying, US Soccer still has an eye on the big picture of player development. That focus is evident in their recent hiring of Mirelle van Rijbroek as the Director of Talent Identification for the girls and women’s side of US Soccer.
At the recent US Soccer Development Academy Showcase and Playoffs in Oceanside, California, Soccer Nation had a long and extensive conversation with van Rijbroek.
Professor Gina Neff has been asking questions about bias and balance of power in the development of artificial intelligence (AI) systems. She talks to Ruth Abrahams about the challenges we face in marrying futuristic solutions with values of trust, openness and equality.
… The man tasked with investigating whether there is a direct link is Stewart, whose research team is comparing the medical histories of 10,000 former professional footballers with 30,000 members of the general population.
The study, “Football’s Influence on Lifelong Health and Dementia Risk”, is funded by the Football Association and the Professional Footballers’ Association, with the aim of gathering hard evidence on an emotive subject.
It was Stewart who in 2014 said that Astle had died aged 59 from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) stemming from head injuries after examining the former player’s brain. The condition is normally associated with boxers.
A new study of female high school soccer players suggests that a neck collar may help protect the brain from head impacts over the course of a competitive soccer season.
“In sports, there’s a heavy focus on single big blows to the head that might lead to what is subjectively described as a ‘concussion,’” said Greg Myer, PhD, director of sports medicine research at Cincinnati Children’s and lead author of the study. “What we really wanted to look at now is the cumulative effect of head impact exposure over an entire season. Evidence indicates that cumulative load of head impacts is potentially more concerning than that one single blow.”
The neck collar device, called a Q-Collar, is designed to press gently on the jugular vein to slow blood outflow, increasing the brain’s blood volume during competitive play. The resulting effect is blood filling the brain vessel (like an airbag) to help the brain fit tighter within the skull cavity, reducing the energy absorbed by the brain during collisions.
The purpose of this study was to examine the effect of purposeful heading in football on measures of cognitive function in a large cohort of female interscholastic football players over the course of their playing career. 217 interscholastic female football players participated in this prospective analysis of football heading over a 4-year timeframe with headers being recorded during sanctioned matches throughout this time. Subjects were categorized into 3 different groups based on their total number of interscholastic career headers: low (< 100), moderate (100−199), and high (200+). Baseline and subsequent post-season neurocognitive performance measures utilizing the Automated Neuropsychological Assessment Metrics (ANAM) software were derived on all players along with a monitoring of concussion-related symptoms. Data were analyzed using a series of two-level growth curves. While there were a few subtle decreases in performance throughout the testing period, no significant differences in test scores occurred during the interscholastic careers of these female football players. While we hypothesized that differences in cognitive performance would degrade over the playing career, especially in the high header group, our results prove otherwise adding to the existing body of evidence recognizing no changes with these variables in other cohorts of football players.
This video from Nine Mind Asylum and Kettlebell Kitchen features runner Allie Kiefer’s focus on nutrition in an effort to qualify for the 2020 Olympics.
Training Peaks, Chrissie Wellington and Andy Kirkland from
… It was only a few weeks out from my A-race, the IRONMAN 70.3 World Championships, and I was attending a training camp with my coach. My running off the bike had been a concern for a while, but I was really taken aback when my coach said the limiting factor was that I was “carrying too much weight from the waist down” and I needed to be much slimmer.
This required that I took strict control of my diet and that my body needed to be “shocked” in order to lose weight. Intuitively, this felt wrong. I am a 5’ 8”, 61 kg female triathlete who had never considered myself overweight until that point. I was training 20-hours per week and didn’t want to restrict fuel in order to lose weight at this stage of the season. While I may not be the slimmest triathlete, it has always been really important to me to try to maintain a healthy relationship with food, especially when there is so much pressure to be lean. I always strive to find balance in life and feel it is important to be happy with myself.
After two uncomfortable days of me agonizing over whether any truth lie in the comments, the subject was brought up again. Prior to this, I held my coach in high regard, respected her advice and her successes as an athlete, too. However, the experience was very upsetting, and it undermined my confidence and had me questioning my body image.
Thankfully, I have a supportive family and friends who are helping me rationalize what I was told, specifically that I need to lose weight in order to be successful.
… In the second half of a 1-0 loss to France 15 months ago – the team’s third scoreless loss at home in seven games – Ellis changed formation, ending her experiment with a three-woman back line in favor of a 4-3-3.
“For us, a lot of it was nailing down what system we wanted to play in terms of what fit us,” Ellis said. “That was part of the process of finding out where our best players on the field do the best things.
“From there, it was just a matter of getting better at it and learning more of the nuances of the system. We had the quality in the players, it was now starting to put the pieces together.”
Players want a single North American women’s professional hockey league. NHL Commissioner Gary Bettman does, too. And now National Women’s Hockey League founder and Commissioner Dani Rylan is on record saying she is working toward that objective.
“One league is inevitable,” Rylan wrote in an email to The Associated Press, her strongest statement regarding a potential merger with the rival Canadian Women’s Hockey League.
“We will get this done,” Rylan wrote. “It’s on us, and we embrace the challenge,”
Rylan’s comments come nearly four years after she split from the CWHL to establish the NWHL, which became the first women’s hockey league to pay its players a salary.
Prize money has been the primary yardstick for measuring gender inequality in professional tennis. Most in-depth studies of prize money differences have focused on earnings of top players or prize money commitments by tournament. In this post, I take a different view on prize money differences by focusing on earning opportunities in each week of the the tour calendar.
You can find a variety of analyses on the Web about prize money differences between the men’s and women’s tours. Many of these have looked at the career earnings of top male and female players. Others have looked at the prize money allocated on a tournament-by-tournament basis.
When it comes to the inequality felt by any individual player, both of these approaches have some drawbacks. Most players are not the top earners in the game, so the comparisons of the highest earners is of limited relevance for them. Second, tournament-by-tournament comparisons do not account for draw size differences in singles, qualifying, or doubles draws; nor do they consider where tour events overlap on the calendar, forcing a competitor to choose at most one of these to enter.
… The WNBA still remains the best positioned of all of the women’s team sports endeavors because of the NBA support. I’m on the board of U.S. soccer now. What women’s soccer has done–I mean what their national team has done– has been incredible. But the pro league has a long way to go.
Women’s hockey is still on the horizon. I did a white paper for the NHL. In 2010 Gary [Bettman], the commission the NHL, asked me to help him understand women’s ice hockey and whether the NHL could give a lift. I do believe they can and I do hope they do because I think that’s the future of women’s ice hockey at the professional level is for there to be a league fronted by the NHL. And so I hope that happens but that’s on the horizon.
You know I kind of lost track at this point where softball and volleyball are lacrosse. I think they may be in the embryonic stages. But you know, it’s really the WNBA leading the way at the women’s professional team sports level … to me the formula is product, promotion, scheduling, and leadership. That’s my four point formula for success. All four have to come together. Every single one matters.
You might not know Sherri Nichols’s name, but if you care about baseball, you’ve felt her influence on the game. Meet the woman whose precedent-setting work left a vital legacy in a field largely populated by men.
With the Women’s World Cup less than eight months away, U.S. national team midfielder Megan Rapinoe is dismayed by what she sees as ongoing issues of inequality in soccer.
From uncertainty about the use of video review and the amount of prize money, to scheduling other tournament finals on the same day as the championship game, equity issues are getting more attention as the World Cup looms.
From Rapinoe’s standpoint, that’s symptomatic of the short shrift paid to the women’s game by FIFA, soccer’s governing body.
… “I think they’re probably looking for pats on the back for the increase, and they’re not getting any from here,” said Rapinoe. “Until they’re going to take meaningful steps to truly show they’re caring about the women’s game in a sort of deeper way, it’s like, I don’t know, $15 million is nothing to them. It could mean something to us. It’s a significant amount of money, I get that, for the teams, but where are they even pulling this number from? If they just want to sort of arbitrarily do it, they could increase it by $100 million and wouldn’t miss it.”