Female Sports Science newsletter – April 21, 2019

athletes

… “To be honest, I’m upset that I have to take a break,” said Hasay. “I was trying to convince my coach to let me just do a couple miles a day and do sprints, because that’s what I need to work on, my speed…With this buildup, I’m not quite there. In Rome (where Hasay ran 71:06 in the half marathon last month), I felt like I could keep going at [the same pace for] twice that distance, but I certainly can’t run 68:00 [in the half marathon] right now. So again, my speed is still coming around.”

Hasay knows that too much, too soon is the attitude that caused those stress fractures in the first place. Reluctantly, she will take some time off. But her next goal is already firmly in mind: breaking Deena Kastor‘s 2:19:36 American record at the Chicago Marathon in October.

“It’s funny because my first year I ran here and I was so excited about Boston, and Chicago [2017], I was just telling myself it’s a time trial for Boston [2018],” Hasay said. “And then this year, I was telling myself, this is just a time trial — not a time trial, because you know it’s going to be slower — but a good rust buster for Chicago. And I’d like to go after the American record there…I’m walking away excited for the future, which is what our goal was.”

Joan Samuelson’s Chicago Marathon performance last fall seemed off-key for her. It was slower than her usual stellar marathons, and not close to her once-conceivable sub-3:00-at-60 goal. She finished Chicago in 3:12:13. Was Samuelson slowing down? Too many miles and too many hard marathons on her body?

Nah. At today’s Boston Marathon, Samuelson, who turns 62 next month, bounced back with another of her customarily-extraordinary races. She finished Boston in 3:04:00 (3:05:18 gun time) to break the known world record for a 61-year-old woman, previously held by Japan’s Kimi Ushiroda (3:06:36). Samuelson smashed the Boston record in the 60–64 division, set by Barbara Miller (3:11:57 in 2000).

To do it, she had to scramble backwards in the start corrals in Hopkinton from the elite spot she is always granted. First she wriggled from one corral to the next. That proved slow and awkward, so she crawled under the snow fencing, and scampered back at a faster pace—trying to get back into a group more appropriate to her pace today.

Her England career was seven games old when Phil Neville, watching through latticed fingers as his beleaguered Lionesses scrambled for a foothold against Brazil at the SheBelieves Cup, looked to his substitutes’ bench in a final frantic throw of the dice. Within nine minutes, Mead had won the game for him and in doing so unleashed her signature finish onto the world.

Neville later recalled waking up to scores of WhatsApp messages about the footwork of a forward who had been in his side for less than a year and that finish – struck horizontally, from the right side of the 18-yard box, a place she describes as a “perfect position” for beating a slight keeper, swerving like a boomerang into the top corner – trended on Twitter in the United Kingdom for the next two days. With it, Mead was dragged into her own brave new world.

“I hit it literally with everything that I had,” she says. “I couldn’t ever replicate that if someone asked me to. It’s an instinctive thing. The best things come when you do stuff without thinking.” She does not practise a finish she repeated a month later against Liverpool. “I think if I ever did I’d get worse.”

When Claudia Fragapane was called up to the Great Britain squad last month she did little in the way of celebration. Though she had been working towards this moment for months, she could only see a sad irony in taking the place of injured team-mate Kelly Sims. After all, her own season came to an abrupt halt at a similar moment to Sims’ last March, when she tore her Achilles tendon in training.

“It was sad because when I got the call to say I was in the team I really felt for Kelly, I couldn’t be really happy because she’s such a good friend of mine,” Fragapane says. “It did break my heart to take her place but she wished me the best of luck. We try and chat as much as we can to keep her in the loop because I know what she feels like.”

On Wednesday, Fragapane will begin competing in the European Championships in Szczecin, Poland. But just over a year ago she heard a snap in her Achilles which shattered any hopes of reliving the historic four-time Commonwealth champion success she enjoyed in 2014 at the Gold Coast last April.

At age 24, Lee Stecklein has accomplished more than many people do in a lifetime. Playing defense for the U.S. national women’s ice hockey team, she won a gold medal in her second Winter Olympics last year in PyeongChang, South Korea. It was the first U.S. gold since the inaugural 1998 Olympic women’s hockey tournament. Stecklein’s average ice time of 22:27 per game led the team.

Captaining the Minnesota Whitecaps in the team’s first NWHL season, Stecklein also scored the overtime winner against the Buffalo Beauts in the 2019 Isobel Cup final. The Roseville, Minn. native has also won three NCAA championships with the University of Minnesota Golden Gophers and four straight IIHF Women’s World Championships. We chatted with her during the U.S.’s quest to five-peat at the Women’s Worlds in Espoo, Finland, in which she has helped the Americans qualify for the semifinal match after a 4-0 win over Japan earlier today.

training

Do coaches discuss the subject of menstruation with their athletes and do athletes know how to deal with their cycles and where they can find out more about retaining optimum health and performance levels? AW spoke with Dr Rebecca Robinson (pictured above after her third place in the 2014 Brighton Marathon) to find out more.

Athletics Weekly: Female athletes are affected by their menstrual cycles but can you tell us in what ways?

Dr Rebecca Robinson: Every female athlete will have a menstrual cycle unique to themselves and its impacts will be individual. We know enough now from research to see some trends. From my work in sport, I see some women for whom the cycle doesn’t have an impact they’re aware of at all, many who find the cycle reassuring that they’re fit and healthy, and some who struggle with heavy or absent periods. At the ends of the age spectrum, being an athletic teen can delay the onset of periods, and after the menopause, some women need support to feel fit and healthy into athletic later life.

… Rather than selecting a coach with a more impressive résumé, such as Louisville’s Jeff Waltz, Tennessee turned to a former Lady Vol, as then-Kellie Jolly served as point guard for the back-to-back-to-back title-winning teams of 1996, 1997 and 1998. For the folks calling the shots in Knoxville, restoring Rocky Top as the summit of women’s college basketball appears to require entrusting the program to one who won with and learned from the legendary Summitt.

technology

All eyes are on femtech. Women’s health technology has taken the startup world by storm in recent years, introducing cutting edge health technologies and garnering over $241 million in venture capital funding so far in 2019. What was seen just a decade ago as a “niche” category is projected to grow to a whopping $50 billion by 2025. So what changed? Although the growth numbers are staggering, the need for innovative healthcare solutions for women is anything but new. At roughly half the global population, women make up a market of 3.73 billion prospective customers worldwide.

… I’m a tech journalist, so perhaps I am extra-sensitive to the dangers of the internet. But my concerns are widely shared by other women.

Several studies have found that women are more concerned about privacy risks online than men and are more likely to keep their profiles private and delete unwanted contacts. Female Italian college students are less likely to share their political views and relationship status than men and are more concerned about risks posed by other users and third parties. Norwegian women post fewer selfies than Norwegian men.

Menstruation may be commonplace, but it presents ­extraordinary challenges to ­people living in lower-income countries. According to UNICEF, at least 500 million women and girls worldwide lack adequate facilities for managing menstruation. And comfortable, effective menstrual supplies aren’t available to everyone with a period.

People who care about ­menstrual health management want to change that. And the International Menstrual Health Entrepreneurship Roundup ­(IMHER) is tracking their efforts.

The new website, developed by Dartmouth College’s Global Girls Forward Lab, is an information hub created by a research team with no financial stake in menstrual health. The stakes of the issue, however, are high. Girls in low- and middle-income countries lack information about puberty and periods, and affordability, availability and disposal challenges mean that many ­people go without adequate ­hygiene during menstruation. It’s an issue in the United States, too, where “menstrual equity” is a growing policy issue.

sports medicine

It was not until the 1990s that researchers fully began to include both genders in health research. Sara Magelssen Vambheim has contributed with valuable new insights in her study of gender differences in pain experiences.

For people who have torn their ACL, the physical recovery can be a struggle. But what is even more troubling is the mental struggle athletes looking to get back in their game face during that time.

It can be hard to feel mentally ready to play when coming back from a major knee surgery, so former professional soccer player Jordan Angeli decided to create a support group to help get athletes back on the field.

“I wanted to create a community that brought light to this club,” Angeli said. “You know, we’re these scarred warriors. If you see somebody with a scar on their knee, you kind of feel like you know a little piece of their journey and it connects you in that way.”

analysis

… Heart Size
Men’s hearts are 20-25% larger than women’s, particularly in the left ventricle. This increases the ability to pump oxygenated blood around the body to be used in the muscles, making it easier for males to run faster for longer.

Hormones

The primary male hormone is testosterone, which stimulates muscle mass development. The female primary hormone is estrogen, which stimulates fat accumulation. Testosterone also increases the concentration of red blood cells, and hemoglobin, both critical for transporting oxygen around the body.

This means that on average male blood can carry around 11% more oxygen than female blood to increase efficiency to run faster.

… There’s strong support for the women’s game among fans and club members, with an embryonic but strong interest in club products, including foundation memberships to support women’s teams.

For the public, league success also depends on key visible measures – one of which is attendance. And despite the AFLW maintaining free entry as a feature, regular season average attendance per game dropped 25% in 2019. This is not surprising. Many new leagues around the world have enjoyed hugely popular inaugural seasons, followed by a downturn as the novelty wanes.

Much like any start-up, however, judging a new league purely on commercial outcomes in its early years is unwise.

Women’s football has a feelgood glow to it. There is a buzz as the World Cup approaches, record league attendances are being set across Europe, and, from Barclays to Boots, brands are throwing their weight behind the sport sensing the potential for rapid growth.

But what about the foundations? What is this growth, at domestic level, being built on? What does rapid commercial growth and an acceleration of professionalism mean to the balance books? And, crucially, is it sustainable and, if not, how do we get it there?

We are a year away from being able to analyse the financial implications of full-time professionalism on every top-tier club. There have already been indications, such as the points deduction of Yeovil – who stagger to the season’s close on the promise that they will revert to part-time status following a pre-season fundraising effort to try to stay at the level at which they have earned the right to play on the pitch – that some clubs are feeling the negative effects.

… The league has been in transition for some time now. Franchises that have failed to meet standards, like the Boston Breakers and FC Kansas City, have folded or been replaced by more committed owners, like the Utah Royals. The league recently named a new president, Amanda Duffy, who has kept operations going, but it still lacks a growth-oriented, future-focused commissioner. And the NWSL recently ended a partnership with the Lifetime Channel, which had been a strange place for broadcasting soccer games anyway, as it moves to Yahoo Sports’ app and desktop streaming.

It’s not unusual for a young league to face growing pains and changes along the way. But as women’s soccer explodes around the world, the NWSL can’t be caught flatfooted as opportunities arise. The window to capitalize after the Women’s World Cup will be finite, and given the league’s top-level quality, it should be in prime position to do so.

… We’ve been through seasons without top players before, and there will still be other stars to shine in 2019. But along with the sadness being expressed over Stewart’s injury, anger is evident on social media. The 6-foot-4 Stewart was hurt playing in the EuroLeague Final Four championship game for Russian team Dynamo Kursk on Sunday, and people are pointing to the almost year-round basketball schedule for women as the culprit.

Whether that’s a factor is unknowable, of course. Achilles and ACL injuries are the two scourges of basketball, and they can happen any time to players of all ages in a game or in practice.

Stewart — whose surgery and rehab are covered by her WNBA health insurance — is far from the first WNBA player to be injured while playing overseas. But considering the league and the players’ union are in the process of negotiating a new collective bargaining agreement, will this situation — a player of such stature hurt while playing outside of the WNBA — make a difference going forward?

fairness

No women made it onto Forbes’ most recent list of the world’s 100 highest paid athletes. And last month, members of the top-ranked US women’s national soccer team sued the US Soccer Federation for gender discrimination.

But California is aiming to combat the gender pay gap in professional sports.

A bill in the state’s legislature would require athletic contests to award equal prize money to men and women.

… [Lara] Price appears just ahead of Susan Williamson, the vice president of business operations and, as a collegian at Virginia, the first female head manager for the Cavaliers’ men’s team — which, of course, means she’s a happy Hoo these days.

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Tyneeha Rivers is the VP of human resources and also is the mother of former Villanova and current Suns player Mikal Bridges, whom she raised as a single parent as she took a decade to earn her undergraduate degree, one class at a time. Annelie Schmittel, a former college high jumper, is director of player development and travels with the team. Katie O’Reilly, the chief marketing officer, just returned from maternity leave in time to reignite the #PhilaUnite playoff campaign. The Sixers stole Amy Hever from the prestigious Smithsonian Institute to head their community engagement wing.

Ivana Seric, a 6-foot-2, five-position player from Split, Croatia, started all four seasons at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, where she received PhDs in basketball and math. Now she helps compile and present the daily analytics report that Brett Brown and his staff use to prepare for opponents, and she was on the bench as an assistant during the NBA summer league in July, one of the first to do so in NBA history. The Sixers are so progressive, they didn’t bother to tell anyone. No big deal.

And then there’s [Lindsey] Harding, a former Duke star who went No. 1 overall in the 2007 WNBA draft. She was the third female scout in league history and the only one this season. She evaluated pro personnel, which was an especially big deal this season: She helped the Sixers revamp their rotation by adding Jimmy Butler, Tobias Harris, Mike Scott, Jonathon Simmons, James Ennis, Greg Monroe and charismatic giant Boban Marjanovic.

For the first time in its history, the World Surf League requires that cash prizes be uniform for men and women. But gender inequality isn’t completely eradicated from the sport.

… One of the worst areas for the gender data gap is sport science. In 2014, the European Journal of Sport Science published a paper entitled: “Where are all the female participants in Sports and Exercise Medicine research?” Well, wherever they are, they certainly are not in the research, the study concluded. A 2016 review found the same problem: 27 per cent of studies were all-male, while for the 73 per cent of studies that involved at least some women, “some” was the operative word.

The March 2016 issue of the Journal of Sports Sciences had a “dismal” female participation rate of only 12 per cent.

This leaves researchers who do take an interest in women complaining of a “limited understanding” and an “inadequate number of published studies”. There is “much less information” on female bodies and “several fundamental questions remain unanswered”. A perennial cry of the sports scientist when it comes to women is: “We just don’t know.”