Dr. Shawn Ladda has lots of soccer memorabilia in her Manhattan College office. The professor of kinesiology was the head coach of Columbia women’s soccer from 1988 to 1994. Her own soccer career began at Penn State University.
“I saw a flyer up, ‘Try out for the women’s soccer team.’ I always liked soccer,” Ladda said. “I never was on a girls’ team. I only played on a boy’s club team in Pennsylvania. I went to try out and I made the team.”
At the time, women’s soccer was a club sport in Happy Valley. By Ladda joining the team in 1979, she would change the course of history at Penn State.
… [Lisa] Bluder, worried that Gustafson might be homesick, made a point to pull her into photos, to do something, anything to include her.
“I was actually worried about her on that trip,” Bluder said. “I was worried about her not being able to make it [at Iowa], eight hours from home. I didn’t know how to interpret her quietness then. …
“Now I know she was loving it. And it didn’t matter that she wasn’t around the group and being boisterous. She was taking it in, thinking, ‘This is really cool, I can’t believe that I’m here.'”
To be sure, Gustafson might have been awestruck on her first trip abroad. She might have been shy around teammates. Mostly, though, she just savored the moment in her own way.
… The Americas remain favorites with the bookmakers to win the World Cup, but there are several teams looking to cause an upset in France.
Three of those sides – England, Japan and Brazil – will have the opportunity to test themselves against the U.S. at the upcoming SheBelieves Cup. The round-robin tournament will once again be closely contested, with each of the four sides having a genuine chance of coming out on top.
England, in particular, will be eager to impress, having made great strides under former Manchester United star Phil Neville since his appointment as manager in January 2018. The Lionesses also face Canada, Spain, Denmark and New Zealand in the build-up to the World Cup.
To determine the association between functional screening tests and lower-body, noncontact injuries in Division I women basketball, soccer, and volleyball student-athletes (SA). Sixty-eight injury-free women SA (age: 19.1 ± 1.1 years, height: 171.3 ± 8.7 cm, and mass: 68.4 ± 9.5 kg) were tested preseason with single hop (SH), triple hop (TH), and crossover hop (XH) for distance, and isometric hip strength (abduction, extension, and external rotation) in randomized order. The first lower-body (spine and lower extremity), noncontact injury requiring intervention by the athletic trainer was abstracted from the electronic medical record. Receiver operating characteristic and area under the curve (AUC) were calculated to determine cut-points for each hopping test from the absolute value of between-limb difference. Body mass-adjusted strength was categorized into tertiles. Logistic regression determined the odds of injury with each functional screening test using the hopping tests cut-points and strength categories, adjusting for previous injury. Fifty-two SA were injured during the sport season. The cut-point for SH was 4 cm (sensitivity = 0.77, specificity = 0.43, and AUC = 0.53), and for TH and XH was 12 cm (sensitivity = 0.75 and 0.67, specificity = 0.71 and 0.57, AUC = 0.59 and 0.41, respectively). A statistically significant association with TH and injuries (adjusted odds ratio = 6.50 [95% confidence interval: 1.69-25.04]) was found. No significant overall association was found with SH or XH, nor with the strength tests. Using a clinically relevant injury definition, the TH showed the strongest predictive ability for noncontact injuries. This hopping test may be a clinically useful tool to help identify increased risk of injury in women SA participating in high-risk sports.
Lower-extremity musculoskeletal injuries in soccer are common among sexes. However, it remains unknown whether differences between sexes exist with regard to absolute or relative hip strength and how these differences may relate to injury. In the current study, we performed a retrospective cross-sectional analysis of pre-season data from male (♂n = 21) and female (♀n = 19) professional United States soccer organizations. Two years of pre-season data were collected for peak strength of lower extremity and hip musculature (no duplicates used). A 2 × 2 multivariate analysis of variance was used to detect differences in hip strength between sexes and dominant compared with nondominant legs. For all significant multivariate effects indicated by Wilks lambda and follow-up univariate analysis, a Tukey’s post hoc test was used for pairwise univariate comparisons. A 2-tailed independent-samples T-test was used for comparison of height, body mass, body mass index (BMI), mean leg length, and strength ratios between dominant and nondominant limbs between sexes. Type I error was set at α = 0.05 for all analyses. Height (♂183.1 ± 6.8 cm, ♀170.0 ± 5.5 cm), body mass (♂79.0 ± 8.7 kg, ♀65.1 ± 5.6 kg), BMI (♂23.5 ± 1.3 kg·m, ♀22.5 ± 1.4 kg·m), and mean leg length (♂95.5 ± 4.34 cm, ♀ 88.3 ± 3.24 cm) differed between groups (p < 0.05). Sex differences (p < 0.05) were also found for hip abduction (dominant ♂19.5 ± 3.6 kg, ♀17.3 ± 2.2 kg; nondominant ♂18.5 ± 3.7 kg, ♀16.0 ± 2.3 kg), adduction (dominant ♂19.8 ± 3.0 kg, ♀16.7 ± 2.3 kg; nondominant ♂20.1 ± 2.9 kg, ♀17.6 ± 2.9 kg), external rotation (dominant ♂21.7 ± 3.4 kg, ♀17.7 ± 2.4 kg; nondominant ♂21.6 ± 3.9 kg, ♀16.8 ± 2.1 kg), and dominant hamstring strength (♂27.9 ± 6.5 kg, ♀23.0 ± 4.9 kg). The ratio of hip internal to external rotation strength differed in the nondominant leg (♂1.1 ± 0.2, ♀0.9 ± 0.2, p < 0.05). No significant differences were found between males and females when measures were normalized to body mass. These findings provide baseline pre-season normative data for professional soccer athletes and indicate that strength differences can be expected among different sexes, but are attenuated with attention to body mass. Further research should indicate how pre-season strength measures relate to injury.
South Bend Tribune, Notre Dame Insider Women's Basketball, Anthony Anderson from
… Szemborski, 35, is in his second year as director of strength and conditioning for all Olympic-related sports at Notre Dame, after serving the final seven of his 12 years at Maryland in that same capacity.
He’s in his first season also working on a daily basis with the women’s basketball program and works directly with women’s soccer as well.
“We trust Mike,” freshman guard Jordan Nixon said Tuesday of Szemborski, who is the third strength and conditioning coach for women’s basketball in four years. “He’s a great guy and a great strength coach. He knows what he’s doing, and really, whatever he says is what we do, what we go with. We trust that he’ll get us where we need to be.”
Syracuse University, The Daily Orange, Matthew Gutierrez from
It’s 11:27 a.m. on Jan. 16 and Katie Kolinski had a lot on her mind. She walked through the sliding doors into Wegmans on Transit Road, grabbed a shopping cart and rehearsed her list: oranges, juice boxes, water bottles. At the front of the store, she stopped at a small mountain of orange crates, scanned a few options and lifted one that looked good.
“I wear a lot of hats in this job,” she said. She drove her cart into the produce section. “This is where I play manager.”
Kolinski, the director of operations for Buffalo women’s basketball, does a little bit of everything.
National Women’s Hockey League players and officials faced off with Nashville girls who love the sport on Saturday morning at Ford Ice Center.
The league’s All-Star Weekend began with the Play Like a Girl Leadership Summit.
“When you are breaking new barriers, you need persistence to keep going,” NWHL founder and commissioner Dani Rylan told girls and their parents at the event. “That forward momentum is so important.”
Nearly three-quarters of biomedical studies fail to report whether outcomes differ for men and women, according to a study which raises concerns about gender bias.
Analysis of more than 11.5m medical research papers published between 1980 and 2016 found a majority overlooked the role of sex differences in genetics, physiology and the way the body responds to drugs.
“Female participants have often been underrepresented or excluded from research, with grave consequences,” said Vincent Larivière, of the University of Montréal, the paper’s senior author. “The inadequate consideration of sex differences … has led to disastrous results.”
Relative energy deficiency in sports, or RED-S was first described in the 2014 IOC consensus statement (and updated in 2018). It refers to the situation in which an athlete has insufficient energy intake relative to the amount of training being undertaken.
Just to stay alive while lying in bed all day requires energy from food intake. This caloric number is roughly equivalent to your resting metabolic rate. Exercise (training) requires additional energy from food intake — the energy from everything you eat is partitioned by your body to cover these two demands. When we subtract the energy needed to cover the demands of exercise training from the energy consumed, the residual energy is known as energy availability (EA) and is expressed as kcal/kg of lean body mass.
The exact EA value to maintain health will vary between individuals depending on their body composition and age, but if EA falls below the minimal level required for an individual, the body goes into a state of low energy availability (LEA), or essentially energy-saving mode. Imagine a mobile phone with a low battery, which will switch off non-essential apps to save energy.
For females in LEA, the obvious clinical warning sign is the disruption and cessation of menstruation. This is probably why LEA was first described as part of the female athlete triad, which is comprised of disordered eating, menstrual disruption, and deterioration of bone health. The female athlete triad excludes half the population (men), and the consequences of LEA are not limited to menstruation and the skeletal system. This is why RED-S is a better clinical model, which includes male exercisers.
High school athletes in the Tri-State could soon be getting some extra hands-on training.
The team at St. Elizabeth Sports Medicine announced the launch of the region’s first program to help athletes reduce injury risk by tracking trends from each team. They hope to keep athletes in the game for life.
By the time Allison Gribben, a sophomore at Thomas More University, came in to see sports medicine specialist Dr. Michael Miller, her time on the women’s basketball court had already taken its toll.
… “My goal was to go to the Olympics since I was seven,” [Kendall Coyne] said. “We want to continue to fight to grow the game. If (the NWHL) was available when I was a kid, I would have aspired to be a part of it. When I was a little girl all I knew was the NHL, and you wanted to win the Stanley Cup. Then I saw a gold medal and I knew I wanted to win one of those.”
The teams played again the next day at HarborCenter, the Sabres’ practice facility and the Beauts’ regular home rink. But playing where the men’s team plays added an extra level of validation in the eyes of hockey world, seen mostly through the male gaze.
… Hefford is looking to leave her imprint as a hockey executive. In August, she became interim CWHL commissioner, a gig she could take on full time. Hefford has big aspirations to grow the game, and knows the key is likely forming one league. In an interview with ESPN on Ice, Hefford discusses what the one league would ultimately look like (and what level of NHL involvement she’d like to see), impressions from the CWHL’s presence in China, the challenges of promoting superstars and when we might see a female general manager or coach in the NHL.
ESPN: What has surprised you about this job?
Jayna Hefford: A lot has surprised me. I was excited about the opportunity to have an impact on the women’s game at a high level. Hopefully, keeping the players in mind and knowing how I thought as a player and what I thought I wanted to happen, and where I feel like the game should go. But along with that comes the business side of the game and the political side of things, working through contract negotiations, there’s all sorts of aspects to it. We’re sending teams to China, and the implications of that, and just the travel that our teams encompass. So I’m learning, but I’ve got a lot of good people around me that are guiding me through.
A professional psychologist, Stephanie Harrison knows a thing or two about mental health. And as part of her studies, she learned that competing in sports offers several psychological benefits for women.
“Oh gosh, there’s so many,” Harrison said when asked to describe the advantages.
“Women, and girls, we grow up in this culture that really forces us to focus on and think about what our bodies look like. But sports allow women and girls to focus more on what their bodies are capable of, and what their bodies can do,” she said. She also added that playing sports improves overall mental health and reduces rates of depression and anxiety.
That realization led to Harrison, a former collegiate soccer player, founding Steel City FC in 2014 to provide post-graduation opportunities for female soccer players.
Honey draws on her experiences in football to highlight the disconnect between sports having the power to create opportunity for women and female professionals and players having access to equal opportunities and rights within the sports industry.
As Co-founder and first ever Captain of the Palestinian Women’s National Football Team, Honey is an advocate for the transformational power of sport to break social and political barriers.
… The most recent report from LeanIn.org and McKinsey bore this out on a larger scale. It revealed that women are less likely to be hired into manager-level jobs, and even less likely to be promoted into them. For every 100 men promoted to manager, only 79 women receive those promotions. This is why men end up holding 62% of manager positions, while women hold only 38%. Further findings in the report indicate that if promotions and hires continue at this rate, the number of women in management will increase by just 1% over the next decade.
Five years ago, most conference organizers didn’t have the option of turning to a database of female researchers in their discipline. For the most part, they relied on their knowledge of the field and on recommendations from colleagues, which leaves the process susceptible to bias. “The first names that pop into our minds are typically going to be men because there are unconscious biases at work,” says Greg Martin, a professor of mathematics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, who has written about the underrepresentation of female mathematicians at conferences. That’s why databases can be helpful, he says—they put names of people who might otherwise be overlooked directly in front of organizers.
Today, databases such as [Kate] Hoy’s are available for microbiology, chemistry, ecology, soil science, machine learning, computational biology, and a host of other disciplines. Just last week, a group of plant scientists started a new database for women, members of underrepresented racial and ethnic minority groups, people who identify as LGBTQ, and people with disabilities; as of today,
… “We’ve been pushing for equality for a while; this isn’t a sudden decision,” Goldschmidt said in that news conference. “This has been something that we’ve been working on for years.” I asked Goldschmidt what role the Committee for Equity in Women’s Surfing played in pushing the World Surf League toward equal access and pay. Goldschmidt said that the committee had a strong opinion but that the World Surf League consulted many groups and individuals. I pressed her to name one, but she declined. Governor Newsom had no such reservations. In an email referring to the Committee for Equity in Women’s Surfing, he said: “I applaud the courage of the athletes and activists who fought for this victory, and I am hopeful that this will inspire the next generation — of daring athletes and activists with the audacity to challenge the status quo.”
The first surf contest to offer equal cash prizes for men and women ended up taking place at Jaws this past November. Before dawn that day, in a misty downpour, 50-foot waves broke with exceptional power, and forecasters called for waves to reach a terrifying 80 feet. Even male big-wave surfers, watching from the cliff, worried that conditions might become unacceptably dangerous. An argument had also been raging in big-wave circles about whether World Surf League judging criteria — for contests and the annual Big Wave Awards — were encouraging surfing that was too risky. Grant Washburn, who sits on the athlete-selection committee for the Maverick’s contest, called the constant emphasis on “commitment,” combined with cash prizes, akin to “dangling a carrot over a volcano” — championing what amounted to suicidal BASE jumps in pursuit of money and glory.
The Washington Post, Lauren MacIvor Thompson and Samira K. Mehta from
Last month, the British National Health Service issued new guidelines concerning contraceptive pills. Many common brands of birth control instruct women to take one pill each day for 21 days, then finish the month with seven days of placebo pills, to still have their period (or, more accurately, withdrawal bleeding that mimics a period).
The new British guidelines, however, are upending this decades-old pattern. Researchers and physicians have long said the seven-day “break” is not medically necessary, so the NHS has changed its recommendations to say that women can, in fact, take hormonal birth control pills continuously and safely, no dummy pills needed.
In explaining the decision, John Guillebaud of the NHS’s Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Health repeated a common refrain, telling the Telegraph that gynecologist John Rock concocted the break to win over the pope and thus anti-contraceptive Catholics. “Rock thought if it did imitate the natural cycle then the pope would accept it,” Guillebaud explained, before asking, “How could it be that for 60 years, we have been taking the pill in a sub-optimal way because of this desire to please the pope?”