Going into Sunday’s 2019 National Women’s Soccer League Championship, one has to wonder if we’ve finally run out of things to say about Sam Kerr.
This year, she won her third consecutive NWSL Golden Boot, she’s considered a front-runner for league MVP, and she’s led the Chicago Red Stars to the first final of the club’s history. All of these things have been well documented, as has her ascension to the international elite — both in terms of her on-the-field accomplishments and the rampant speculation rising up around her as the end of the NWSL season looms.
And yet, even now, American soccer culture has not fully reckoned with the legacy of one of its brightest stars. At this moment, Kerr is both a beacon of the potential of a stable league and a reminder that evolution is still necessary to ensure that light keeps shining.
Kerr isn’t necessarily the highest-profile international to play in the NWSL — for that distinction, she’s competing with the likes of Marta and Amandine Henry — but she’s unique in that her star has risen through years of playing in the NWSL itself. She has a history in this country, and it has molded the way that she plays.
A decision looms for Sam Kerr – and the NWSL
In a 2014 video for the Western New York Flash, then-teammate Carli Lloyd joked that “sometimes people need to think in order to get better. Sam plays great and does unbelievable stuff when she doesn’t think (even) one percent.”
Kerr’s first two years in the league saw her figuring out life as a professional in a new country as a teenager, learning from seasoned pros like Lloyd and Abby Wambach. Her talent was undeniable, but she was an up-and-coming player with fewer heavy expectations than her American counterparts, tucked away in relatively isolated Upstate New York, playing in a league that hadn’t quite gotten its foothold yet.
Before the 2015 season, Kerr was traded to Sky Blue FC, in a move that included the draft pick that eventually led to Sam Mewis playing for the Flash (now Chicago’s opponent in Sunday’s final). If her time in Western New York evoked the life of a teen prodigy, Kerr’s time at Sky Blue was the college experience. Many of the squad’s top players lived together in a house on the Jersey Shore. They hung out at the beach, and they fostered a dog. They briefly adopted a watermelon they found on the side of the road.
And in 2017, after dealing with a period of injuries, Kerr exploded. She set the single-season NWSL scoring record with 17 goals, and she put up wild numbers up against playoff-caliber teams, scoring four goals against the Seattle Reign in one match (a record) and winning her first Golden Boot.
Subscribe to Extra today for the all our premium content
*Offer good only through NWSL playoffs.*
But that team was a far cry from a serious one, both on and off the pitch. The individual talent was there, but Sky Blue as a club was a mess — one that turned into something much darker the following year. Kerr was clearly a generational talent, but she was going to have to go somewhere with more support if she wanted to take her work on the pitch to a new level.
So, Kerr took a look around her, and made some moves. Some of these were distinct to the experience of a star soccer player, specifically the massive three-team trade that brought her and Nikki Stanton to the Chicago Red Stars, and also sent both Christen Press and Carli Lloyd to Utah Royals FC (eventually) and Sky Blue, respectively. This was a major step, unique to a special player, but it also mirrored the normal life changes of many people her age. She got a better job in a new city; she moved in with her partner. She started fostering many more dogs.
And if there were any concerns that Kerr wouldn’t be able to fit into a playoff-caliber squad, she dispelled them with another Golden Boot-winning campaign. Early in the 2018 season, the Red Stars struggled to find ways to support their new star on the field, but over time, the dependable connection between Kerr, Yuki Nagasato, and Vanessa DiBernardo started to form in new and exciting ways.
Much has been said about Kerr’s background in Aussie Rules Football — the sport she first loved, taking after her father and brother. The athleticism underlying her game supports the comparison. But her style for the Red Stars has emphasized less her background back in Australia and more a sport deeply ingrained in the city she currently represents.
Sam Kerr plays soccer like a basketball star.
She makes runs off the ball with her hands down, creating pick plays that make space for her teammates to run in on. She takes shots out of Steph Curry’s playbook; the goal this season that broke her own NWSL scoring record was an across-the-body, no-look effort. And while she somehow didn’t get any with the Red Stars this year, she prizes goals scored with her head above all else. Sam Kerr lives to dunk.
… Scally, who’s been playing with U.S. Soccer since the U-14 level, is one of three NYCFC academy products on the U-17 roster, along with Tayvon Gray and Andres Jasson, however he’s the only one of those three on a professional contract and the closest to contributing to the first team. Scally made his professional debut in a U.S. Open Cup game last June, but didn’t appear during NYCFC’s club-record season in 2019 following hip surgery in May that kept him on the injury report until September. Still, that didn’t stop him from helping when he could in training and enjoying the ride with his teammates.
“It’s been an amazing year, even with the injury, that didn’t hold me back from being with the team, I was still with them every day,” Scally said. “So being there to witness what we did this year was unbelievable. I know we can do the same next year.”
Scally is just two years into his professional career, but according to Reyna, head coach Domènec Torrent and Scally’s NYCFC teammates, the only thing holding him back from already contributing to the first team was the injury.
Ryan O'Hanlon, No Grass in the Clouds newsletter from
… While Pulisic has spent the last few seasons playing in the Champions League for Borussia Dortmund, Mount spent the last two seasons on loan with the sixth-best team in the Dutch first-division and the sixth-best team in the English second-division. Given their pedigrees and experience, Pulisic was supposed to be the one who slotted into Chelsea’s starting eleven from the jump, while Mount would, presumably, get some playing time here and there as he eased into his first-ever season of high level soccer. Instead, Mount has started every game — it can’t hurt that the current Chelsea manager, Frank Lampard, was also his manager in the Championship last season — while Pulisic has been in and out of the lineup and occasionally even been a healthy scratch from the bench.
Mount had played every minute of every Premier League match — until the body/face-swap mentioned above during this past weekend’s game against Newcastle. Pulisic nearly scored soon after coming on, and then he, as the USMNT Twitter account put it, gleefully, “provid[ed] the hockey assist” to give Chelsea a 1-0 lead they would not relinquish. He also created a tap-in for Tammy Arbaham — only for his USMNT teammate Deandre Yedlin to deflect the shot wide at the last moment.
Athletes push themselves to the limit to produce PBs, but it is possible to push too hard. John Shepherd talks to Scott Laidler about how to avoid overtraining
Athletes need to push through barriers in order to adapt and there is always going to be some degree of overtraining, in fact
it is needed. However, health and fitness expert Scott Laidler clarifies this by introducing the notion of overtraining versus overreaching: “Overtraining is a condition we might find ourselves in when our bodies become over-compromised …. from over-exercise or under recovery from exercise,” he says. “It’s actually a syndrome comprised of a series of symptoms. Over-training ostensibly is a negative.”
Strength and conditioning has become a data-driven enterprise. Innovative devices and software help coaches understand their athletes’ limits, monitor progress and assist in recovery. They’ve ultimately reinvented the way coaches train their athletes.
In this year’s strength coaches roundtable, we ask some of the best trainers in the business about the data they use in their programs and the impact it has made with their athletes. Roundtable participants include Darnell Clark, Cal Dietz, Ryan Johnson, Lewis Caralla and Mike Gentry.
Physiologists, sports scientists and trainers have long used training load monitoring as a frontline tool to help elite athletes efficiently maximize their potential and minimize injury risks. In recent years, the ability to record the impact of your activities has become increasingly available with GPS training watches, smartwatches, cycling computers and other fitness devices.
In this interview, physiologist Aki Pulkkinen, M.Sc., Firstbeat co-founder and current head of consumer products, explains the background of training load and how the insight it provides can help you reach your own personal fitness and performance goals.
Research question Does the Nordic hamstring exercise (NHE) prevent hamstring injuries when included as part of an injury prevention intervention?
Design Systematic review and meta-analysis.
Eligibility criteria for selecting studies We considered the population to be any athletes participating in any sporting activity, the intervention to be the NHE, the comparison to be usual training or other prevention programmes, which did not include the NHE, and the outcome to be the incidence or rate of hamstring injuries.
Analysis The effect of including the NHE in injury prevention programmes compared with controls on hamstring injuries was assessed in 15 studies that reported the incidence across different sports and age groups in both women and men.
Data sources MEDLINE via PubMed, CINAHL via Ebsco, and OpenGrey.
Results There is a reduction in the overall injury risk ratio of 0.49 (95% CI 0.32 to 0.74, p=0.0008) in favour of programmes including the NHE. Secondary analyses when pooling the eight randomised control studies demonstrated a small increase in the overall injury risk ratio 0.52 (95% CI 0.32 to 0.85, p=0.0008), still in favour of the NHE. Additionally, when studies with a high risk of bias were removed (n=8), there is an increase of 0.06 in the risk ratio to 0.55 (95% CI 0.34 to 0.89, p=0.006).
Conclusions Programmes that include the NHE reduce hamstring injuries by up to 51%. The NHE essentially halves the rate of hamstring injuries across multiple sports in different athletes. [full text]
After the first serves are struck Oct. 27 at the WTA Finals in Shenzhen, China, once the world’s top women players attempt their first returns and passing shots, a wealth of previously untapped data will be at their fingertips, made possible by a new tool in the SAP Tennis Analytics platform.
Patterns of Play was unveiled by the Women’s Tennis Association (WTA) and multinational software giant SAP on Oct. 16, and will make its official debut at the WTA Finals, the last big tournament of the year on the women’s professional tennis tour.
It’s the latest update to the SAP Tennis Analytics platform, which was first developed when SAP and the WTA joined forces in 2012 to create an analytics tool for players and coaches on the WTA Tour.
Sports Lifestyle & Health Group, Department of Public and Occupational Health of the Amsterdam UMC from
Another thesis that is approved and about to be defended before the committee. Caroline Bolling gave voice to athletes and artists in her work entitled “Who Me? I thought you would never ask!” in which she applied qualitative methods in sports injury prevention research. You may have seen some of her work already floating around Social Media where it was picked up by several clinical colleagues. Please find below the summary of her thesis, and drop us a line of you would like an electronic copy of the full book.
… Extensive medical research shows there is a 100 percent survival rate if a person with heat stroke is immersed in ice-cold water within 10 minutes. The body can be brought to a safe temperature in 15 minutes.
But on that day, there was no tub. Nor was there an athletic trainer on site.
If you work in a hospital and you’re not a security professional, IT professional, or executive, you probably never even think about cybersecurity. And that’s exactly the problem.
… Anyone concerned about a result from a DTC genetic test might turn to their general practitioner (GP) or other primary healthcare provider for advice. This practice pointer aims to help clinicians in this scenario and explains what sort of health information is provided by these tests, their limitations, and how clinicians can respond to common questions about them. [audio, 38:29]
How do we combine others’ probability forecasts? Prior research has shown that when advisors provide numeric probability forecasts, people typically average them (i.e., they move closer to the average advisor’s forecast). However, what if the advisors say that an event is “likely” or “probable?” In 7 studies (N = 6,732), we find that people “count” verbal probabilities (i.e., they move closer to certainty than any individual advisor’s forecast). For example, when the advisors both say an event is “likely,” participants will say that it is “very likely.” This effect occurs for both probabilities above and below 50%, for hypothetical scenarios and real events, and when presenting the others’ forecasts simultaneously or sequentially. We also show that this combination strategy carries over to subsequent consumer decisions that rely on advisors’ likelihood judgments. We find inconsistent evidence on whether people are using a counting strategy because they believe that a verbal forecast from an additional advisor provides more new information than a numerical forecast from an additional advisor. We also discuss and rule out several other candidate mechanisms for our effect.
… Pressuring the quarterback and effective pass coverage are interconnected. It’s probably unsurprising that when quarterbacks aren’t pressured, their passes are worth significantly more than the throws they attempt when under pressure. What’s more interesting is why those unpressured passes are more valuable.
It turns out that the pass attempts that really end up hurting a defense are the deep shots taken by an offense when its quarterback has time in the pocket. Throws with target depths of 20 air yards or more are significantly more valuable3 than those thrown short (from 1-to-10 yards), and unpressured quarterbacks with time in the pocket tend to attempt more of them. The Patriots have a low Pass Rush Win Rate, so we might expect them to have seen quite a few deep passes attempted against them this year — and that’s just what we find. No other team has had more passes of 20-plus yards thrown against them this season.4
arXiv, Physics > Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability; Sid Redner from
We discuss the “hot hand” paradox within the framework of the backward Kolmogorov equation. We use this approach to understand the apparently paradoxical features of the statistics of fixed-length sequences of heads and tails upon repeated fair coin flips. In particular, we compute the average waiting time for the appearance of specific sequences. For sequences of length 2, the average time until the appearance of the sequence HH (heads-heads) equals 6, while the waiting time for the sequence HT (heads-tails) equals 4. These results require a few simple calculational steps by the Kolmogorov approach. We also give complete results for sequences of lengths 3, 4, and 5; the extension to longer sequences is straightforward (albeit more tedious). Finally, we compute the waiting times TnH for an arbitrary length sequences of all heads and Tn(HT) for the sequence of alternating heads and tails. For large n, T2nH∼3Tn(HT).