… her dreams of linking up with Seattle Reign were thrown into disarray when she was told that she had already been ‘discovered’ by North Carolina.
Unbeknown to Kellond-Knight and most of Australia’s other top-line talent, America’s professional soccer league uses a :discovery” system that allows clubs to spot talent and effectively ‘dibs’ them.
This can happen with the player having no idea they have been “discovered”.
Ski racer Julia Mancuso was only 15 years old when she made her World Cup debut in 1999. Since then the Squaw Valley, California, native has gone on to achieve a lengthy and decorated career as one of America’s most talented ski racers. She dominated the Junior World Championships in her teenage years, then went on to win seven World Cup races, four medals in the winter games and five World Championship medals. This winter, at the age of 33, Mancuso announced her retirement after a hip injury proved impossible to come back from. We called up Mancuso, or “Super Jules,” as she was nicknamed on the U.S. Ski Team, to talk about what she plans to do next.
You announced your retirement at a World Cup downhill race in Cortina, Italy, in January. How did you know it was time to call it quits?
The decision to retire was both the hardest thing I’ve ever done and the easiest. I’d been struggling with my hip basically my whole career. After my last hip surgery, in November 2015, I was naive about my recovery. I thought I’d just bounce back like I did from the last surgery. But with this surgery, I was having a hard time even walking. It took me a year to ski again. I was hoping one day it would just all click, but it wasn’t coming together. In Cortina, I was at this crossroads—I skied the downhill race and hit a bump and felt really sore. I knew it was time.
… With a World Cup that has the expectations of defending a title one year away, how important is having an event like this to build up chemistry on the pitch and test yourself against teams that, in all likelihood, you’re going to have to beat if you want to defend next summer?
I think it’s huge and invaluable for us, especially with the squad we have now. There’s a lot of players that don’t have Olympic experience, don’t have a ton of international experience, or World Cup experience. Don’t know what it’s like to play in a must-win, knockout round game. These kinds of experiences are invaluable to those players in gaining that collective experience, but kind of that know how and that kind of intangible sort of thing.
When you get into a tournament, you have to deal with the travel and the performances and maybe you’re not happy with the performance before, but you have to put it together for the next game. Being able to play, and obviously playing three of the best teams in the world, back-to-back-to-back, is sort of a nice little simulation of a quarterfinal, semifinal, final in a World Cup or an Olympics, so it’s a huge stepping stone for a lot of these players and just gaining that experience and gaining that confidence. You can’t replicate a World Cup or an Olympics, but hopefully it will feel a little bit familiar when we get there next time.
When it comes to sport, research has shown that women could have a psychological advantage over men — particularly in high pressure situations.
Researchers from the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland analysed 8,200 games from Grand Slam tennis matches. Specifically, they looked at the performance of the server in every first set played at the 2010 French, US, and Australian Opens and at Wimbledon.
They found that men’s performance deteriorated more than the women’s when the game was at particularly tense moments, such as in sets that went to 4-4. After reaching the tie, the results showed the number of men’s serves that were broken rose by more than 7%.
Haley Archuleta had the finish to her prep soccer career mapped out. The Gonzaga commit and most of her Real Colorado teammates were planning to again play for the program’s Elite Clubs National League team and for their high schools this spring. As the seniors who had already earned Division I scholarships, there wasn’t much left for them to prove.
But Archuleta, one of the leading scorers on Arapahoe’s Class 5A state runner-up team last year, didn’t get a say in the matter.
As a result of the launch of the U.S. Soccer Girls Development Academy, which is in its inaugural season, Archuleta and more than 70 of the best varsity players throughout Colorado were forced to pick between participating for their high school team or their club team that was under the academy’s jurisdiction.
What’s followed has been a siphoning of talent from the best high school teams, and the Girls Development Academy’s rigid participation rules have created a wide divide between U.S. Soccer and its grassroots stakeholders on a nationwide scale.
Oiselle Running Apparel for Women, Jasmine Blocker from
Hey everyone! So I’m always asked how exactly a long sprinter trains. Do I just run 400 meters over and over again? My answer is no, it’s a bit more complicated than that.
The 400m dash is interesting because it requires a high level of speed over a (rather ridiculously) long period of time. While no one has ever claimed the 400m to be an easy event, science and proper training can always help you get you physically prepared.
In a nutshell, my coach dedicates Monday to speed endurance, Tuesday to lactic acid tolerance, Wednesday to active recovery and general fitness, Thursday to speed work, explosiveness, and block work, and Friday to intensive tempo work. On top of this, I do Olympic and accessory weight lifting on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Building strength in the weight room increases the amount of force I apply to the ground, which in turn propels me down the track faster.
It’s hard to make a living from just one thing. The champion middle-distance runner, cofounder of Picky Bars, coach, and mother of two lets us in on how she juggles it all.
… Staley is suspicious of easy; she feels in her gut that effort rewards, laziness kills and discipline is the lover that will never let you down. She favors a tough row, savors the character it builds. To Staley, going soft is as foolish as pants on a pig.
“It’s a pet peeve,” she acknowledges. “If a player shows signs of weakness, I sometimes have to walk away. Because I don’t understand. And you’re not going to make me understand. You got cramps? You had a hard test today?” She laughs. “I know I can come off as being not empathetic. I have mean looks.” Staley pulls an exaggerated grimace, laughs again. “I just know how I would handle things, and it’s wrong for me to project, but that’s my mode.”
Her players can attest to that.
“If she tells me to do something on the court and I’m out of it, she really can’t stand it,” explains Wilson. “She likes to yell. I could do something great, she’s still yelling.”
“Twenty-four female Grade 11 students from across Canada will be immersed in life as an AI researcher on SFU’s Burnaby campus from July 8-20.” Deadline to apply is April 3.
Return-to-sport criteria after anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury are often based on “satisfactory” functional and patient-reported outcomes. However, an individual’s decision to return to sport is likely multifactorial; psychological and physical readiness to return may not be synonymous. OBJECTIVE:
To determine the psychosocial factors that influence the decision to return to sport in athletes 1 year post-ACL reconstruction (ACLR). DESIGN:
Qualitative study. SETTING:
Academic medical center. PATIENTS OR OTHER PARTICIPANTS:
Twelve participants (6 males, 6 females) were purposefully chosen from a large cohort. Participants were a minimum of 1-year postsurgery and had been active in competitive athletics preinjury. DATA COLLECTION AND ANALYSIS:
Data were collected via semistructured interviews. Qualitative analysis using a descriptive phenomenologic process, horizontalization, was used to derive categories and themes that represented the data. The dynamic-biopsychosocial model was used as a theoretical framework to guide this study. RESULTS:
Six predominant themes emerged that described the participants’ experiences after ACLR: (1) hesitation and lack of confidence led to self-limiting tendencies, (2) awareness was heightened after ACLR, (3) expectations and assumptions about the recovery process influenced the decision to return to sport after ACLR, (4) coming to terms with ACL injury led to a reprioritization, (5) athletic participation helped reinforce intrinsic personal characteristics, and (6) having a strong support system both in and out of rehabilitation was a key factor in building a patient’s confidence. We placed themes into components of the dynamic-biopsychosocial model to better understand how they influenced the return to sport. CONCLUSIONS:
After ACLR, the decision to return to sport was largely influenced by psychosocial factors. Factors including hesitancy, lack of confidence, and fear of reinjury are directly related to knee function and have the potential to be addressed in the rehabilitation setting. Other factors, such as changes in priorities or expectations, may be independent of physical function but remain relevant to the patient-clinician relationship and should be considered during postoperative rehabilitation.
The challenge of an ACL tear is twofold. There’s the immediate surgery and yearlong rehab that’s plainly visible when an elite athlete is stricken, but research has shown that roughly half of patients suffer persisting problems in the knee years after the original injury.
“What you don’t often see is that, about a decade later, they start to develop signs of osteoarthritis in that joint. By that time, they’re not household names necessarily anymore,” Michael Zabala, an assistant professor in mechanical engineering at Auburn, said, adding: “The reality is that the physician that treats your initial injury is probably not going to be the physician that treats your long-term osteoarthritis. There’s another source of disconnect that makes it difficult.”
Zabala began pursuing biomechanical prevention research while writing his Ph.D. dissertation at Stanford and in the past year has begun using Vicon motion-capture cameras for a comprehensive research project with university athletes, focusing on women’s soccer and basketball where the incidence of prevalence is high (and, recently, including those playing those sports at the club level to increase the research population).
… SOCCER AMERICA: How has Mexican women’s soccer evolved over the years?
CHRISTOPHER CUELLAR: With the growth and success of the women’s and youth national teams, the response of the people has grown. They get excited for matches when we’re in the World Cup and they see how close we’ve been, getting to the quarterfinals, it’s an initiative that people can support and can help the team take the next step.
Definitely since the 1990s the culture has changed. With the initiative of the Federation there is a youth amateur league for girls U-13 and U-16, a professional league, and more spaces for girls to play together. Before, girls were playing with men’s teams, youth rec leagues, very amateur opportunities. Now it’s more organized, there are more fields, refs, leagues, and teams, many more opportunity for girls now.
FIFA President Gianni Infantino will ask members of his executive council to approve plans for a new global women’s league this week.
The proposed competition would feature 16 of the world’s top women’s national teams and begin play as early as November 2019. FIFA also plans to add four regional leagues to encourage the development of women’s soccer globally and to allow the best performers from those regions a chance to win promotion to the top division in a system of promotion and relegation.
The move is part of an effort to increase the visibility, quality and appeal of women’s soccer and to boost Infantino’s standing before his bid for re-election next year. Investing in the women’s game was a plank in Infantino’s campaign platform in 2015.
Soon after Alex Varlan was hired as the video coordinator for the University of Tennessee women’s basketball team last summer, he called Aaron Barzilai, a friend and former colleague with the Philadelphia 76ers.
For the previous three years, when Varlan was on the men’s staff at Oakland University, the team had used numerous advanced statistics resources, including the popular KenPom.com website run by the independent analyst Ken Pomeroy.
But when Varlan began looking for similar statistical applications for the women’s game, he was disappointed at the paucity of options. He thought Barzilai, who has provided statistical analyses for N.B.A. front offices for a decade, could help bring the same insights to help women’s teams.
… The mutual support—Rapinoe mentioned the interactions between teams, informal advice through things like Twitter DMs to go over messaging, looking to win public approval for their fights—reflects a new level of strength and power the most successful women have in sports today. And with that comes the long-term question: Do women ultimately need to build their own infrastructure in sports to make it permanent and sustainable?
This is not, to be clear, the tired and pointless idea that “if more women watched women’s sports, it would succeed,” which lays blame for any inequality between men’s and women’s sports at the feet of women alone, while simultaneously ignoring the yawning chasm in things like budgets and media coverage that affect the way both men and women consume sports.
It is, instead, the reasonable question that comes from many years of women’s sports leagues short-circuiting when the disproportionately male power brokers give up or lose interest, often after failing to provide the same level of resources in the first place. Ask the Charlotte Sting or the Cleveland Rockers from the WNBA about this, or the defunct WUSA and WPS professional soccer leagues, to name just a few examples.
… The third great shift – in many ways a product of the first two – is of gender. In 2017, more young women played rugby for the first time than men, the first year in which this has been the case.
Since rugby’s return to the Games was confirmed in 2009, overall participation numbers have doubled, but the gains have been spectacular at women’s level. Participation has soared from 200,000 to 2.6 million since 2009, and 29 per cent of all rugby players are now female. In Africa, the number of female rugby players in Africa rose 50 per cent increase between 2016 and 2017.
Women earn better grades than men across levels of education—but to what end? This article assesses whether men and women receive equal returns to academic performance in hiring. I conducted an audit study by submitting 2,106 job applications that experimentally manipulated applicants’ GPA, gender, and college major. Although GPA matters little for men, women benefit from moderate achievement but not high achievement. As a result, high-achieving men are called back significantly more often than high-achieving women—at a rate of nearly 2-to-1. I further find that high-achieving women are most readily penalized when they major in math: high-achieving men math majors are called back three times as often as their women counterparts. A survey experiment conducted with 261 hiring decision-makers suggests that these patterns are due to employers’ gendered standards for applicants. Employers value competence and commitment among men applicants, but instead privilege women applicants who are perceived as likeable. This standard helps moderate-achieving women, who are often described as sociable and outgoing, but hurts high-achieving women, whose personalities are viewed with more skepticism. These findings suggest that achievement invokes gendered stereotypes that penalize women for having good grades, creating unequal returns to academic performance at labor market entry.
or almost 40 years, women have outnumbered men on U.S. college campuses. They’re accepted to the same schools as men, study in the same degree programs and graduate at higher rates than men. So when female graduates enter the labor force, you’d expect that they would at least find the same opportunities as their male peers, if not better ones.
That hasn’t necessarily happened, though. Male and female graduates of the same college majors tend to veer toward different types of jobs, according to a Bloomberg analysis of American Community Survey data of educational attainment, occupation and income. Women are less likely than men to have careers aligned to their field of study. The jobs many women take typically have lower career earning potential.
… The International Olympic Committee issued a 25-point “roadmap” to achieve gender equity in all levels of the Games, from athletes to officials. The plan, which will be published in full later this month, includes strategies to increase female participation in the Olympics to 50 percent (it was at 45 percent in 2016 and 42 percent in 2018), address gender bias and stereotypes, and increase representation in governance and human resources.
“It is not just the right thing to do,” Thomas Bach, the IOC president, said in a written statement. “It is in the interest of us all—the fans, the families, and every girl and woman who has been able to fully realize her dreams through athletic participation.” Track and field, in particular, is leading the charge with its aspirations to bring more women into the leadership fold.
Similarly, the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), the global governing body for track and field, touted its commitment to increase the female presence in leadership in all areas of the sport.