… Ponytailed, goofy, and barbed-wire tough, the former high school science teacher from Golden, Colo. doesn’t talk about suffering, but rather about her eagerness to explore the limits of human endurance. Suffering she waves off—it’s a necessary byproduct of her quest for that ever-receding boundary.
She’s a physically gifted athlete, but it’s her head game that sets Dauwalter apart, even in the world of titanium-minded endurance specialists. Soul-crushing landscapes and dog-shit weather don’t even count as annoyances to her. Swirling intestines, hallucinations, a sleep-starved brain struggling with basic cognition, quads so swollen they appeared to be swallowing her kneecaps—her response to this sort of agony is to wonder how much farther she can go.
As for her competitive spirit: She’s won 11 ultras outright, most notably a 10-hour victory over the second place man in the 2017 Moab 240. She’s come second overall in seven other races. Dauwalter told me she considers every person on the start line her competition, not just women, and that few women win overall, as she has, simply reflects greater number of men in ultra endurance events. More than any other woman in ultrarunning, Dauwalter is an open division threat, and that universally competitive mindset is crucial to her success. All of which is to say, she’s made for Big’s Backyard.
Casey Brown overcame poverty and the bizarre death of her brother to become a world-class mountain biker, doing jumps on a terrain with no margin for error. But is she good enough to be the first woman to compete in the sport’s most dangerous event?
Yes, Canada qualified for the 2019 FIFA Women’s World Cup, and his team sits fifth in the current world rankings.
But the goal is to turn Canada into what he calls a “Tier 1” side in the women’s game, alongside powerhouse nations such as the United States and Germany.
On that score, the Danish-born coach has some work to do, but he feels the Canadian women’s team is trending in the right direction.
She has gone from starting-lineup centerpiece to second-half substitute. She still wears the No. 10 but has been asked to reinvent herself as a No. 9.
At 36, Carli Lloyd has kept a positive outlook, a level of professionalism and, perhaps most important, a presence on the score sheet as her role with the United States women’s national team has gradually diminished in the past two years. But as she sat pondering her situation last Friday in the lobby of her team’s hotel in Lisbon — one day after appearing as a reserve in the United States’ 1-0 victory over Portugal, and only seven months before the start of another Women’s World Cup — Lloyd said she needed to make one thing clear.
“I think there would be something wrong if I were satisfied and saying, ‘I’m O.K. with coming off the bench,’” she said. “I’m going to be flat-out honest: I’m not O.K. with coming out. I don’t think anybody should be O.K. with coming off the bench. I’m going to fight and push my teammates and try to help in any way possible.”
She paused, then added: “There’s a lot that can change in seven months.”
To everyone who followed the U.S. women’s hockey team’s boycott and fight for equality last year, for everyone who tuned into Team USA’s thrilling Olympic gold-medal win over Canada in February and to everyone who cheered for the women immediately when they returned home, veteran forward Hilary Knight has a message:
“We’re in hockey rinks, not only every four years, but every single day. We’re trying to make the game more accessible to everyone in various markets. But try to go out of your way to watch us at the same time. Because we’re definitely not done yet.”
Previous study has showed superior sensory organisation ability in rhythmic gymnasts, but mostly in longitudinal data. With a cross-sectional design, this study used a dual-task paradigm to examine the above phenomenon. Fifteen female rhythmic gymnasts (15.0 ± 1.8 yr.) and matched peers (15.1 ± 2.1 yr.) were recruited. The Sensory Organization Test (SOT) was administered with a concurrent lower-demand (serial subtraction of three, serving as the baseline) or higher-demand (serial subtraction of seven, serving as the dual-task) arithmetic task. The results showed no main effect of group, but a group by level of arithmetic task (P = 0.001) interaction effect on SOT equilibrium score. The higher-demand task facilitated balance performance in the gymnasts, but it impeded performance in the controls, with the differences more pronounced in challenging SOT conditions. With the higher-demand task, the gymnasts adopted a sensory strategy with a higher visual ratio but a smaller somatosensory ratio compared to the controls. Better visual utilisation of sensory organisation ability was apparent in gymnasts, but only when the SOT test was performed with a higher-demand secondary task. We have demonstrated the efficacy of using the dual-task paradigm to identify the superior sensory organisation ability of adolescent rhythmic gymnasts.
Sports Medicine Research: In the Lab & In the Field, Jane McDevitt from
Take Home Message: A youth football (soccer) player performing the 11+ Kids program was 58% less likely to have a serious injury during one season compared with a player doing a usual youth soccer warm-up regimen.
The University of Canberra Capitals are participating in an ongoing study by UCRISE which aims to rectify poor sleep in female athletes to enhance recovery.
Female athletes are prone to sleep problems because of their high levels of anxiety and depression and earlier timing of daily rhythms of melatonin, the hormone which helps induce sleep.
Their working conditions also play a role in sleep disturbances such as, for example, their travel expectations which are generally poorer than those experienced by male athletes.
In this episode of Behind the Crest, Presented by Volpi Foods, the U.S. WNT’s last event of 2018 has brought the team to Portugal, where it began training camp with some physical testing that will help High Performance Coach Dawn Scott set a foundation for the players to hit the ground running in January on the road the 2019 Women’s World Cup in France.
… Soccer and volleyball share a season. At Stanford, they also share an identity.
“It’s a privilege to have this pressure on us, that we love leaving our legacy and it’s something that we actually look for in games,” McGrady said. “It’s the pressure to do well, and you know that you can take it and you know you can do well with it.”
The athletes’ shared experience starts from the moment they arrive on campus. Stanford operates on the academic quarter system. When classes began on Sept. 24 this year, volleyball was already 11 games into its season, soccer nine games. The players on both teams arrived nearly two months before other students. So for the entire preseason and a considerable portion of the regular season, they had the campus, if not entirely to themselves, considerably more so than during the rest of the year.
“The benefit is that you have their full attention,” soccer coach Paul Ratcliffe said. “You can train them and prepare them and communicate with them during that time period and their focus is on the soccer aspect. You have plenty of time for the team to bond and gel. They get to know each other and have a good time off the field because they have time to relax and enjoy each other’s company.
A new study by Ottawa researchers suggests adolescent girls are slower to recover from concussions than boys the same age — or younger girls.
In a large, national study conducted by investigators at CHEO Research Institute and the University of Ottawa, more than half of adolescent girls (ages 13 to 18) were still experiencing post-concussion symptoms 12 weeks after their initial injury.
By comparison, more than half of all adolescent boys were free of symptoms after four weeks.
From an ethical standpoint, transparency is an essential requirement in public policy-making. Ideally, policy-makers are transparent and actively disclose the presence, purpose and means of a decision aid. From a practical point of view, however, transparency has been discussed as reducing the effectiveness of decision aids. In the present paper, we elaborate on how transparency affects the effectiveness of defaults. In three experiments, we manipulated whether the endorser was transparent about the default or not and assessed participants’ decisions to opt out or comply. Throughout the experiments, we found that proactive transparency reduced opt-out rates as compared to a non-transparent default condition. Moreover, proactive disclosure of a default reduced opt-out rates as compared to informed control groups, where participants imagined they had retrieved the default-related information by themselves (Studies 1 and 2). The results further indicate that a lack of proactive disclosure may lead targets to perceive the endorser as less sincere and to feel deceived, which in turn hinders the effectiveness of the default. In general, our findings lend support to the proactive transparency paradigm in governance and show that a default-based policy can be transparent and effective at the same time.
… ESPN: In North America, women are almost never considered for player personnel roles on men’s teams. How were you able to overcome the gender biases and earn this job? Is it just easier, culturally, to achieve something such as this in Norway?
OLSEN: I think it’s easier in Norway because we have a different culture. Plus, there has been a lot of focus in Norway the last couple of years that women are capable of doing the same job as men, and it’s time we give them a chance. Women have been getting jobs as coaches with men’s soccer teams, and that’s a huge step for equality. There is no reason why a woman can’t get a job on men’s teams. They just have to be good at their job.
Imagine growing up and knowing exactly what you want to do. You work hard for it and get really good at it. There’s just one problem: You won’t even be considered for the job because you’re a woman. That’s not fair. Also, the hockey community in Norway, if I can call it that, is really small compared to North America. This gives us in Norway a bigger advantage, I would say, as it’s easier to get to know people in the clubs and let them see the good job you are willing to put in.
… The new phase UConn is entering is going to force players who have little to no experience to be more involved. Lucky for the Huskies, two players have stepped up during early practices. Sophomore Megan Walker and freshman Christyn Williams impressed in the first two weeks and will likely be named starters. While they can’t be expected to come in and immediately fill the void left by Nurse and Williams, their talent should take some of the pressure off of Katie Lou Samuelson, Napheesa Collier and Crystal Dangerfield.
Walker’s emergence will come as no surprise to Huskies fans, who were big supporters of the sophomore when she joined UConn as the No. 1 high school recruit in the country. Walker didn’t see much playing time last season, averaging 15.5 minutes and 5.8 points per game. She faced the learning curve most freshmen entering a big college program do, also citing not practicing well as a reason she wasn’t on the court more.
Over the summer Walker hit the weight room, gaining nearly 10 pounds of muscle, and spent time getting as many shots up as possible. She focused on gaining strength and maintaining her shot through exhaustion, as well as spending time on her 3-pointer. The extra work paid off, with teammates and Auriemma saying she’s come back stronger and more confident, almost a completely different player.
When dozens of big thinkers gathered at the Smithsonian Arts & Industries Building last December for an eight-hour relay of two-person dialogues, each with an optimism to share, Damion Thomas, the National Museum of African American History and Culture’s curator of sports, cut to the chase.
“I am optimistic because athletes are protesting,” he told his interviewer, Atlantic staff writer Frank Foer.
Whether or not you agree with them politically, Thomas went on to say, “It is very important, because what it shows is that they have bought into these American ideals—these ideas of freedom, justice and equality for all, the idea that America is a place where everybody should be equal before the law.”
Thomas shared that he began to see how sports are an entryway into social and political conversations as a young boy. Later, a professor of a colonial history course he took in college drove a larger point home about the importance of history saying, “Whoever controls the present will use their power to control the past in hopes of controlling the future.” From that point on, he’s been passionate about exploring how history is not about the past, but about the present and the future.
People are more prejudiced against women leaders than the statistics might indicate. This could be because participants in surveys investigating attitudes towards men and women in leadership positions may not answer honestly unless they are guaranteed confidentiality of their answers. These are the findings of a new study by Adrian Hoffmann and Jochen Musch of the Heinrich-Heine-University Düsseldorf in Germany, which is published in Springer’s journal Sex Roles.
It was 69 degrees when the Rowan cross-country teams arrived for practice at the Glassboro, N.J., university’s track on Oct. 30. During the workout, several of the male runners removed their shirts. Some members of the women’s team did the same, continuing the session in sports bras.
On the field inside the track, the university’s football team was holding its own daily practice. There had been tensions between the teams for years, said Gina Capone, a student and a former Rowan cross-country runner.
“The football coach had a problem with the women running on the track,” Capone said. “He said that it was distracting.”
The issue boiled over that day, after a football coach approached the cross-country coach, Derick Adamson, to restate his concerns.
The Argentine soccer federation often is late in paying travel expenses while the players have routinely faced the prejudices of a chauvinistic society that sees soccer as a men’s only game. Still, the long-disadvantaged team of women may be on the verge of a game changer by defying long-established gender inequalities and proving themselves on and off the field.
By finishing third at the Copa America, the team in the light blue-and-white striped shirts earned a place in the playoffs for this year’s Women’s World Cup in France. Argentina will play Panama on Thursday for a spot in the 24-team tournament. For the first time in the country’s women’s soccer history, the game will be played at a sold out stadium in Buenos Aires.