… Last season, she became the first NWSL player to play 10,000 regular-season minutes.
“To see her on the verge of her first World Cup is just fantastic. She has followed a long and winding path but that process has made her the player and person she has become,” Courage coach Paul Riley said. “If you do enough small things right, big things can happen. She has been relentless and when she steps out on the greatest stage in women’s soccer it will signify what work ethic, determination, natural ability, never-say-die attitude can do.”
… Austin was no under-the-radar player. The Fredericksburg, Va., resident, who played for two years at Colonial Forge High School before transferring to Riverdale Baptist School in Upper Marlboro for her senior season, was a McDonald’s All American and the No. 4 overall player in the 2018 class, according to ESPN. She credited her father, David, with helping her prepare for the leap to the collegiate level.
“My whole senior year was dedicated to being prepared for Maryland, and I felt like all of the work I put in is just showing right now,” she said. “It’s nothing really spectacular. Just knowing that all of the hard work I put in is paying off, and just knowing that I’ve been able to make an impact in my first year has been great.”
At 23, most people are just entering the beginning years of their career. For Missy Franklin, it was supposed to be the beginning of hers too.
The five-time Olympic gold medalist was set to be the heir-apparent to Michael Phelps after she dominated the 2012 London Games, becoming the first woman to win four golds in a single Olympics in any sport.
It wasn’t meant to be.
In 2015, Franklin began to suffer from intense shoulder pain. Diagnosed with severe chronic tendinitis of the rotator cuff and biceps, Franklin underwent surgery on both of her shoulders in January and February 2017.
This study examined sex differences in head kinematics and neck muscle activity during sudden head perturbations. Sixteen competitive ice hockey players participated. Three muscles were monitored bilaterally using surface electromyography: sternocleidomastoid, scalene, and splenius capitis. Head and thorax kinematics were measured. Head perturbations were induced by the release of a 1.5-kg weight attached to a wire wrapped around an adjustable pulley secured to the participant’s head. Perturbations were delivered in 4 directions (flexion, extension, right lateral bend, and left lateral bend). Muscle onset times, muscle activity, and head kinematics were examined during 3 time periods (2 preperturbation and 1 postperturbation). Females had significantly greater head acceleration during left lateral bend (31.4%, P < .05) and flexion (37.9%, P = .01). Females had faster muscle onset times during flexion (females = 51 ± 11 ms; males = 61 ± 10 ms; P = .001) and slower onset times during left lateral bend and extension. Females had greater left/right sternocleidomastoid and scalene activity during extension (P = .01), with no difference in head acceleration. No consistent neuromuscular strategy could explain all directional sex differences. Females had greater muscle activity postperturbation during extension, suggesting a neuromuscular response to counter sudden acceleration, possibly explaining the lack of head acceleration differences.
Journal of Sports Medicine & Physical Fitness from
BACKGROUND:
Previously, it was shown that elite soccer teams were 24% more likely to win matches if their passing effectiveness were increased by 1%. However, research interventions aiming to improve passing performance are scarce. The current study aimed to investigate the effect of a short technique-intense training period on side-foot kick performance among elite female soccer players. METHODS:
Four side-foot kick tests were completed before and after a training period: kicking a stationary ball using match-relevant (SBRS) and maximal ball speed (SBMS), passing the ball on the move using match-relevant ball speed (RBRS), and repeated side-foot kicks onto a rebound-box with continuously increasing passing distance (RRB). The players were assigned to either the intervention group or the control group. The training intervention consisted of six 55-min training sessions with five side-foot kick exercises. Within-group and between-group differences were investigated using paired-samples t-test and Mann-Whitney U test, respectively. RESULTS:
The intervention group improved the performance in the RBRS and RRB tests (both P < 0.05), but no differences were found for the SBRS and SBMS tests (both P > 0.05). No improvements were found for the control group independent of test condition (all P > 0.05). Significant between-group differences were found for the RBRS and RRB tests (both P < 0.05), whereas no differences were found for the SBRS and SBMS tests (both P > 0.05). CONCLUSIONS:
The fundamental soccer skill of passing a moving ball was improved in elite female soccer players by a short technique-intense training period.
Body-positive content on social media aims to challenge mainstream beauty ideals and encourage acceptance and appreciation of all body types. The present study aimed to investigate the effect of viewing body-positive Instagram posts on young women’s mood and body image. Participants were 195 young women (18–30 years old) who were randomly allocated to view either body-positive, thin-ideal, or appearance-neutral Instagram posts. Results showed that brief exposure to body positive posts was associated with improvements in young women’s positive mood, body satisfaction and body appreciation, relative to thin-ideal and appearance-neutral posts. In addition, both thin-ideal and body-positive posts were associated with increased self-objectification relative to appearance-neutral posts. Finally, participants showed favourable attitudes towards the body positive accounts with the majority being willing to follow them in the future. It was concluded that body-positive content may offer a fruitful avenue for improving young women’s body image, although further research is necessary to fully understand the effects on self-objectification.
… So, how do you manage a workout that’s not working out?
I tend to slow and stubbornly finish the prescribed reps when I’m having a bad day. However, on those odd bad days where I’m missing times, my form is really bad, and my breathing is too loud, my coach will cut the workout short. If we aren’t too far in, we may scrap it all together and try again after an easy run or two. I realize not everyone’s days may be this flexible, but it can be literally refreshing when a workout schedule isn’t beholden to squishing everything into the calendar week.
This option to reschedule the effort is hard to call in the moment, but I find the main reason for a bad workout is fatigue, so it usually fixes the problem.
… It does take a while to get going after giving birth, so be patient with yourself. Keep in mind that you may not get back to your regular running routine or pre-pregnancy body, and that is okay. Furthermore, it will take at least a year before you start to feel like your old self again.
More than four years ago, the soon-to-be freshmen on the Maryland’s women’s lacrosse team made their official campus visit. Megan Taylor remembers climbing up the football stadium’s stairs on crutches because she was recovering from a torn ACL, and she knows she had double-fried rice at a Chinese restaurant during the trip.
Taylor already knew just about everyone in her recruiting class. Some played for her club team, M&D Lacrosse, and many came from the Baltimore-Washington area. Before arriving at Maryland, the group of players had also spent the night at Meghan Doherty’s house, where Jen Giles mainly remembers eating lots of food.
Before they had ever all played together, Giles could tell their personalities meshed well. They were different but the same, she said. Because the group was heavy on in-state players — like the team as a whole — they knew before they arrived the level of talent that surrounded them. But when Giles first spent time with her recruiting class, she didn’t think much about lacrosse or what the group might accomplish on the field.
Despite recent progress, the baseline facts about women-founded startups remain startling. Just 2.5 percent of all venture-capital-backed startups have an all-female founding team. Only 9 percent of the venture capitalists investing in tech startups are women. And even today, only slightly more than one-fifth of all American VC investment goes to startups where at least one of the founders is a woman.
To put this in context, in the United States, women make up more than half (52 percent) of the highly skilled creative class; comprise more than one-third (36 percent) of business owners; and make up 30 percent of all high-tech employment.
Psychological responses after anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury and ACL reconstruction (ACLR) have been identified as predictors of return to sport but have not been investigated in relation to further injury. Purpose/Hypothesis:
To determine whether psychological readiness to return to sport is associated with second ACL injury. It was hypothesized a priori that at both preoperative and 12-month postoperative time points, patients who sustained a second ACL injury would have lower psychological readiness than patients who did not have a second injury. Study Design:
Cohort study; Level of evidence, 2. Methods:
Patients who had a primary ACLR procedure between June 2014 and June 2016 completed the ACL–Return to Sport after Injury (ACL-RSI) (short version) scale before their ACLR and repeated the scale at 12 months after surgery to assess psychological readiness to return to sport. Patients were followed for a minimum of 2 years (range, 2-4 years) after surgery to determine further injury. The primary outcome was the relationship between ACL-RSI scores and the incidence of second ACL injury. Results:
In 329 patients who returned to sport after ACLR, 52 (16%) sustained a second ACL injury. No difference in psychological readiness was observed at the preoperative time point, but patients who sustained a second injury trended toward lower psychological readiness at 12 months compared with noninjured patients (60.9 vs 67.2 points; P = .11). Younger (≤20 years) patients with injury had significantly lower psychological readiness to return to sport than young noninjured patients (60.8 vs 71.5 points; P = .02), but no difference was found in older patients (60.9 vs 64.6 points; P = .58). In younger patients, receiver operating characteristic curve analysis revealed a cutoff score of 76.7 points with 90% sensitivity to identify younger patients who sustained a second ACL injury. Conclusion:
Younger patients with lower psychological readiness are at higher risk for a second ACL injury after return to sport.
Menstrual periods are a barometer of healthy hormones. The evolutionary purpose of ovulation is to reproduce. Furthermore the carefully biologically choreographed variation of hormones that occurs during an ovulatory menstrual cycle is crucial to health and athletic performance.
… cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death globally for both sexes, and women are more likely than men to die of a heart attack.
During a heart attack, women are more likely to present without pain, or with uncharacteristic symptoms. Treatment guidelines, however, are based on data collected primarily from men.
Sexism in cardiovascular research means that not only are heart attacks often missed in women, but women are also less likely to receive recommended therapies, interventions and rehabilitation opportunities.
Pew Research Center, Juliana Menasce Horowitz and Nikki Graf from
… Girls are more likely than boys to say they plan to attend a four-year college (68% vs. 51%, respectively), and they’re also more likely to say they worry a lot about getting into the school of their choice (37% vs. 26%). Current patterns in college enrollment among 18- to 20-year-olds who are no longer in high school reflect these gender dynamics. In 2017, 64% of women in this age group who were no longer in high school were enrolled in college (including two- and four-year colleges), compared with 55% of their male counterparts.
In many ways, however, the long-term goals of boys and girls don’t differ significantly. About nine-in-ten or more in each group say having a job or career they enjoy would be extremely or very important to them as an adult (97% of girls and 93% of boys say this). And similar shares of girls and boys see getting married (45% and 50%, respectively) and having children (41% and 39%) as priorities for them, personally, when they grow up. Still, boys are considerably more likely than girls to say having a lot of money would be extremely or very important to them (61% vs. 41%).
… As the right-hand man to both Tony Popovic and Ange Postecoglou, [Ante] Milicic has worked with two of Australia’s most gifted contemporary managers. And the skillset he has developed – working as a player scout, working closely with video analysts – marries modern football analytics with the old school ways of work ethic and basic toughness that you get from coming up both as a player and a coach through the NSL.
All of this is of course coming from the context of men’s football – with not unreasonable concerns being raised about Milicic’s limited experience in and around the women’s game; after all he has never coached a women’s football team, and now he has been tasked with taking perhaps the most talented generation of Australian footballers ever assembled to potentially win a World Cup.
Consider these three incidents: the Chelsea midfielder Drew Spence cynically scything down Arsenal’s Kim Little, breaking one of Little’s legs, but picking up only a yellow card; David McNamara’s rock, paper, scissors debacle; and Phil Neville questioning two penalty shouts and a disallowed goal against Australia.
This season the standard of refereeing in the women’s game has been under the microscope. Except now, with a fully professional top division and more televised coverage than ever, there are a lot more eyes peering through that microscope.
FIFA will still decide the host of the Women’s World Cup in secret, unlike the new open vote held last year for host of the 2026 men’s tournament.
The 2023 Women’s World Cup bidding process was launched Tuesday, and FIFA adopted many of the rigorous checks and scrutiny that prospective men’s hosts now have to go through.
But the final decision is a very different process.
Following corruption investigations into the vote for men’s hosts in 2018 and 2022, FIFA removed the decision from its ruling committee and gave it to all member associations. When it came to deciding the 2026 men’s hosts last year, the votes were made public after the FIFA Congress chose the joint bid from the United States, Mexico and Canada over Morocco’s entry.
… There are more female doctors and pilots that ever before. And in January, we welcomed the most women into the US congress than ever before.
And yet, women still only earn 80 cents for every dollar earned by a man.
So you can imagine my excitement when freelancing platforms such as Upwork, started to appear. Since one of the biggest barriers to women’s earnings is flexible work, I was hopeful that these platforms might level the playing field.
… By understanding gender-based expectations at work, some women were able to overcome them. From the 1970s into the 1990s, women made serious progress in the workplace, achieving higher positions, closing the gender wage gap and moving into male-dominated fields. Then that progress stalled, especially at the top. Why?
To answer that question, I talked with two experts who direct centers for leadership: Katherine W. Phillips, a professor of organizational management at Columbia University, and Shelley Correll, a sociologist at Stanford. They’ve known each other for a long time; they went to graduate school together.