The trio of McCowan, Brown and Gustafson certainly stick to what works. The three have combined for 3,042 shots in their careers and have just one 3-point attempt between them.
“There’s not many of us,” Brown said. “Sixth, seventh, eighth graders — I see a lot of (younger) big girls dribbling early or even dunking. But I still think we should do what we do best.”
Gustafson went from averaging 10.7 points during her freshman year to 25.2 points, 12.8 rebounds and more than two blocks per game last season as a junior. At 6-foot-3, she doesn’t have the same imposing height of McCowan and Brown, but uses quickness to dominate in the Big Ten.
“I love playing against girls who are as tall or taller than me, so I can really use my agility and speed,” Gustafson said.
… Jamaica’s greatest sporting triumphs – bobsleigh achievements aside – have been in athletics, with “triple-double” Olympic sprinting champion and 100 meters and 200m world record holder Usain Bolt the symbol of the country for more than a decade.
However, with the 32-year-old now retired from athletics and attempting to get his own soccer career off the ground, there is space for new heroes to emerge, for which Johnson-Smith believes the Reggae Girlz are perfectly placed.
When the U.S. women’s ice hockey team won the gold medal this past February at the Olympic Winter Games PyeongChang 2018, Melissa Samoskevich and Caitrin Lonergan were at home, watching the women they had practiced so much with in the lead-up to those Games.
“I didn’t make (the Olympic team), but I knew exactly how hard they worked to get there and how hard it is to win a gold medal,” Samoskevich said. “It made me think about how hard I need to work to get there.”
With the 2018 Games now in the rearview mirror, Lonergan and Samoskevich have a golden opportunity in front of them. They are among the six women who making their Four Nations Cup debut this week in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.
It was just five years ago – in 2013 – that no American woman finished in the top 10 at the New York City Marathon.
Sunday there were four in the top seven, marking the best performance by the U.S. women here since 1977. Defending champion Shalane Flanagan captured third, leading a growing crop of U.S. runners that are making inroads on the international scene.
“The top American talents are going to the marathon more than in the past,” noted two-time Olympian Molly Huddle, who was one spot behind Flanagan in fourth. “It’s become a glamorous event for us.”
We observers have long since exhausted the well of superlatives when it comes to Simone Biles. The 4ft 8in, 105lb sprite from suburban Houston had emerged as a once-in-a-lifetime talent even before her star-making coronation at the Rio Olympics, where she fulfilled her long-held promise with four gold medals in seven unforgettable days. Turns of phrase, margins of victory, records broken: these languages are entirely ill-suited for translating her unique physical genius, which, truly, must be seen to be believed. That Biles is the best athlete in America today, which she is, feels like an undersell.
Take her showing at last week’s world championships, where the 21-year-old became the first woman to win a fourth all-around world title and the most decorated female gymnast ever. The outcome itself was unremarkable: Biles has won every major team and individual all-around competition she’s entered since her senior career began in 2013, a dumbfounding run of consistency that prompted the sport’s cognoscenti to declare her the most talented gymnast in history before she’d competed in an Olympics.
What stood out was that Biles, one could reasonably argue, was having the worst big competition of her career – and she still won a medal in every single event.
… The apathy toward team competition by the players is not new, and it isn’t limited to the women’s side. A similar lack of interest from men’s stars and, in turn, global audiences prompted the International Tennis Federation to overhaul the Davis Cup starting with the 2019 event, condensing it into one week of competition in November.
So far, any changes to Fed Cup have been put on hold.
“It’s easy to blame the players, but that’s a mistake,” said Patrick McEnroe, who served as the U.S. Davis Cup captain from 2000 to 2010. “We ask a lot of them, time-wise, and what’s the payoff? The issue is a scheduling problem and it’s the fault of the governing bodies of the sport.”
In just a few hours, all eyes will be on New York City as some 50,000 runners take to the streets for the 48th annual TCS New York City Marathon. But before we see new champions crowned, we spoke with this year’s professional field to learn about their buildups and what advantage they think they have over their competition.
“I just love racing in New York. I have a lot of really good memories here and I think that the mental, motivational component of that is important,” said American Molly Huddle. “The fans…you know I’m a New Yorker, so they know my name. Good vibes when I get on the starting line in New York City. There’s a comfort level and an excitement.”
Huddle also discussed the much-talked about American women’s field and what Shalane Flanagan and Des Linden’s wins in the past year has meant for her own mindset. “Before, I used to think, ‘Oh it’s been so long, what are the chances that I can [win]?’ So definitely after seeing Shalane win it’s like, ‘well you can do it,’” said Huddle. “I think all of the American women have a little bit more of a ‘Don’t rule it out,’ mentality now.”
Oiselle Running Apparel for Women, Erin Taylor from
After I had my first baby I enthusiastically did my first run the day she turned six weeks because that’s when everyone says you can/should start exercising again. And after not running through my pregnancy, I missed running. I ran for a few weeks and then had to stop for two months to regather my strength — one step forward, two steps back… Looking back, I can see that when that 6-week milestone arrived, I allowed myself to be steered by comparison and an unrealistic and often uninformed dialog about postpartum recovery and fitness rather than where I actually was at the time — which was the most depleted I’d ever been.
Personally, I find the notion that a woman should be ready or expected to start working out just six weeks after making a human being totally mind-boggling.
For years, female athletes have relied on training protocols, injury guidelines, and nutrition plans based on research conducted with men. That’s starting to change.
Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise journal from
Purpose Hop tests are widely used to quantify recovery from anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction (ACLR) surgery. However, there is evidence that simply measuring hop distance may not be indicative of the quality of movement or representative of potential limitations in hopping mechanics, particularly during landing. The first purpose of the present study was to compare hop distance and loading symmetry between ACLR athletes and healthy uninjured recreational athletes. The second was to determine the association between hop distance and loading symmetry.
Methods Twenty-five ACLR patients and 30 healthy controls completed the single hop, triple hop, and crossover hop test on each limb while the loadsol®, a single-sensor force insole, collected impact forces (100 Hz). A limb symmetry index was calculated for hop distance, peak impact force, loading rate, and impulse from the final landing of each trial. LSIs were compared between groups using Mann-Whitney U-Tests and distance and loading LSIs were compared using Spearman rank correlations.
Results ACLR patients had reduced symmetry in hop distance and loading relative to healthy controls for every hop test and outcome measure (p<0.05), except peak impact force on the single hop. Hop distance symmetry was significantly related to each loading symmetry measure on the crossover hop test (p<0.01) and to peak impact force and impulse symmetry on the single hop test (p<0.05) in each group.
Conclusion This study demonstrates that ACLR patients both hop further and generate larger forces when hopping on their non-surgical limb relative to their surgical limb. Additionally, hop distance and loading symmetry provide clinicians and researchers with different information and therefore should be considered together when making return to sport decisions.
Ankle injury is the most common injury in men’s and women’s basketball, regardless of the level of competition. Purpose:
To use the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Injury Surveillance Program/System (ISP/ISS) to review the 10-year epidemiology of ankle injuries in men’s and women’s collegiate basketball players. Study Design:
Descriptive epidemiology study. Methods:
The NCAA ISP was queried for men’s and women’s collegiate basketball ankle injury data from the 2004 through 2014 academic years. Ankle injury rates were calculated based on injuries per athlete-exposure (AE). Injury proportion ratios (IPRs) were determined by comparing variables between sexes. Activity and position of injury were also studied. Results:
Over the 10-year study period, most ankle injuries in collegiate basketball occurred in the preseason (female, 1.45/1000 AEs; male, 2.00/1000 AEs), were contact related (female, 50.4%; male, 57.6%), were treated conservatively (female, 98.5%; male, 99.3%), and were new injuries (female, 78.0%; male, 78.9%), resulting in a time loss of less than 7 days (female, 62.7%; male, 65.2%). The most common injury types were lateral ligament complex tears (female, 83.5%; male, 80.0%), deltoid ligament tears (female, 5.6%; male, 7.2%), and high ankle sprains (female, 7.1%; male, 7.0%). Guards experienced the highest rate of ankle injuries in competition (female, 50.1%; male, 43.3%), and rebounding was found to be the most common activity during an injury (female, 30.3%; male, 34.4%). The rate of ankle injuries was significantly lower in women than in men (IPR, 0.81 [95% CI, 0.75-0.88]). Conclusion:
This study found that most ankle injuries in collegiate basketball occurred during the preseason, were contact related, were treated conservatively, and were new injuries that resulted in a time loss of less than 7 days.
Back in July, at the WNBA All-Star weekend in Minneapolis, a league official sidled up to me and asked me a question. Did I know how much money the WNBA had lost last season?
The answer, I learned in short order, was $12 million. At first blush it might not seem like the kind of factoid a league struggling to gain greater market share would be peddling, unasked, to a member of the media. But the WNBA is in negotiation mode. Last Thursday’s long-expected move by the WNBA Players’ Association to opt out of its current collective bargaining agreement with the league laid bare those reasons.
Shortly after that conversation at All-Star weekend, I sought out Terri Jackson, the director of operations with the WNBPA. Her union was then just months from a decision to opt out, a natural time for a union president to be out advocating for her members, setting the terms for a battle that would be waged largely in the realm of public opinion. Jackson declined comment, and has just kept doing it. She has declined to make herself available for any interviews, with anyone, to advocate or reinforce the player’s message. As the WNBA’s players head into what may be the most important labor battle in the history of their young league, the union leader is nowhere to be found.
The 2018 WNBA season is over, and the 2019 season won’t start until May. That long offseason gives us an opportunity to think outside the box a bit. The WNBA has been in business for 22 seasons and there are no signs of it slowing down. So, in 10 years, the WNBA should still be going strong.
But how will the league look by 2028? Since the WNBA is still growing, it will likely be a very different league than it is right now.
… In most countries, female baseball players have to pay to play. Women on national teams playing at the highest level the sport has to offer them have to fundraise, scrape, ask for money, and look for sponsors, though some have assistance from their governing bodies. And that’s before having to secure the time away from their educational pursuits or professional careers to participate in selection camps and, if they’re lucky, the World Cup.
Boston Children's Hospital – Notes Blog, Jessica Cerretani from
Public accommodation laws aim to help protect minority groups against discrimination. In the case of transgender people, such laws protect access to sex-segregated spaces including public restrooms, changing rooms and locker rooms. In a health care setting, rooming assignments and other sex-segregated environments are affected by accommodation laws, which can raise questions for staff.
To determine specific areas of concern, Elizabeth Boskey, PhD, Amir Taghinia, MD, and Oren Ganor, MD, in the Center for Gender Surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital examined information from 18 professional trainings conducted by Boskey at five health care facilities in greater Boston. They identified two common areas of concern during these trainings: the theoretical risk posed by the presence of transwomen in sex-segregated spaces, and feelings of unpreparedness for dealing with anti-trans bias.
Retired soccer player and ESPN color analyst Julie Foudy remembers when former tennis star Billie Jean King changed her life for the better. Back in the mid 1990s, not long after the U.S. Women’s National Team (USWNT) won their first FIFA World Cup, the U.S. Soccer Federation was getting ready to offer a new contract to Foudy and her teammates. It was then that she heard King tell the story of how she founded the Women’s Tennis Association and her struggle for equal pay in tennis.
“We were getting $10 a day when we started, and we were just excited to be on the national team, but in the ’90s we started realizing, ‘Hey, we’re proud to be playing for our national team but it doesn’t seem right that we’re staying in roach motels and taking hotel shuttles to a game,’” the former team captain told TheWrap’s Debbie Emery at the Power Women’s Summit in Los Angeles.