In a recent interview with Diana Taurasi, the greatest woman to ever play the game of basketball said emphatically that UMMC Ekaterinburg in Russia — affectionately referred to as Ekat — is the best club in the world.
It takes greatness to recognize greatness, but if Taurasi’s proclamations are insufficient for the dubious, her Phoenix Mercury and Ekat teammate, Brittney Griner, offered some details in a recent interview with the Associated Press that provide eye-widening confirmation.
Having returned to the US after clenching EuroLeague and Russian titles with Ekat, Griner described the treatment women basketball players receive in Russia as being on par with the high-esteemed care NBA players have grown accustomed to receiving from their teams.
Before she became a rising track star at Cal, Deshae Wise first had to escape a world in which her mom was beaten and used against her will daily for six years.
When Nicole Hensley and Alex Rigsby attended the U.S. Women’s National Team Goaltending Development Camp in 2015 and 2016, they had the opportunity practice under the tutelage of Olympians.
Two-time Olympic silver medalists Brianne McLaughlin and Jessie Vetter were at the camp supporting the up-and-coming U.S. goalies, including Hensley and Rigsby.
Now Olympic gold medalists, Hensley and Rigsby got their own chance at helping mold the next great American goaltenders. The current U.S. Women’s National Team goaltenders were mentors recently at the fourth annual U.S. Women’s National Team Goaltending Development Camp at the Schwan’s Super Rink in Blaine, Minnesota.
… And while some might expect Felix to be slowing down at 32, she believes she can take a leaf out of Roger Federer’s book by taking it easier this year in order to prepare herself for the buildup to Tokyo 2020, where she hopes not only to compete in her fifth Olympics but win more gold medals.
That would be some achievement. It was back in 2004 that Felix emerged on to the track and field scene by winning Olympic 200m silver in Athens, aged 19. Yet she keeps managing to hit the high notes across multiple events, including the 200m, 400m, 4x100m and 4x400m.
Lindsay Whalen had already secured her legacy in the state of Minnesota.
She led the University of Minnesota women’s basketball team to a Final Four as a player, after growing up in Hutchinson, Minn., about an hour’s drive from campus. After a successful tenure with the Connecticut Sun, she returned to Minnesota in 2011 to join the Lynx, and served as point guard for four W.N.B.A. championship teams and two other trips to the finals, a vital cog in the most sustained success by any group in league history.
And yet there was a new reason to cheer this month when Whalen joined her teammates on “Minnesota Lynx Night” at Target Field before a Twins game against the Toronto Blue Jays.
Whalen became the women’s basketball coach at Minnesota in April, and will continue to be the primary point guard of the defending champion Lynx for the W.N.B.A. season, which begins Friday.
Her two offices are about three miles apart, and a source of some emotional whiplash.
Los Angeles Sparks champion Candace Parker and her daughter, Lailaa, will have to share her special day. That’s because this year, Mother’s Day falls on May 13 — Lailaa’s ninth birthday.
And Parker has a big surprise planned.
“Lailaa doesn’t know. See, she’s a zoo person,” Parker told The Undefeated. “She loves animals. We have two dogs. We had a pig. So we’re going to San Diego. We’re going to do a little private tour of the zoo to meet some kangaroos and do all that stuff. She doesn’t know yet.”
Parker was a 22-year-old newlywed when she announced her pregnancy just after being named the 2008 WNBA Rookie of the Year. Like dozens of other WNBA moms before her, including Lisa Leslie, Tina Thompson and Sheryl Swoopes, the 6-foot-9 forward/center’s career continues to flourish.
“I like to say my daughter chose me,” Parker said. “I feel like I’m lucky from that aspect that she’s in such an important part of my career.”
Canada Sport Information Resource Center, SIRCuit from
The rise of girls’ and women’s participation in physical activity and sport, including at the high performance sport level in Canada, has been encouraging. Unfortunately, this increase in participation rates of females has not been matched by an increase in females in coaching positions. In 2015, the Government of Canada cited that only 25% of all coaches in Canada were female. More specifically, across 54 national teams, only 16% of head coaches and 18% of assistant coaches were female. Within the Canadian Interuniversity Sport system, where most of the full-time coaching positions exist, there has also been a decrease in females in head coaching positions from 19% in 2010-11 to 16% in 2014-15. At the Olympic level, Canadian female coaches also represent a minority of coaches. Proportions of female coaches at the Summer Games were 20% in Rio (2016) and in London (2012) and were even less at Winter Games, ranging from 13% in Vancouver (2010) to less than 10% in both Sochi (2014) and PyeongChang. At the recent Paralympic Games in PyeongChang, only one coach was female. Not only are these statistics disconcerting, but they do not mirror the advancements in gender equity seen in other sectors such as medicine, business, politics, law, engineering, and higher education. Clearly, the advancement of women in coaching lags far behind the progress observed in other sectors.
One strategy recommended to help recruit, advance and retain women in coaching is mentoring. Mentorship, defined as a relationship in which advice, information, guidance, support or opportunity are offered for professional development, has been implemented successfully in non-sport domains such as business, administration, health care and higher education to retain and advance women. The main elements of mentorship include: a focus on knowledge acquisition; personal and direct interactions; the provision of support and assistance with career and professional development; and benefits for both the mentor and mentee.
Jennifer Gardner became the first woman in Wyoming history to serve as head coach of a high school football team after Big Horn County School District No. 2 selected her Monday to run Lovell High School’s program.
Gardner’s promotion comes after she served three seasons as an assistant coach, specializing in the offensive and defensive lines.
“I’ve always loved football. I’ve always loved teaching,” Gardner said Wednesday. “I’m looking forward to coaching the boys and having a team of my own.”
Numerous studies have investigated anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury risk by examining gender differences in knee and hip biomechanics during a side-step cutting manoeuvre since it is known that ACL injury often occurs during such a task. Recent investigations have also examined lower extremity (LE) biomechanics during side-step cutting in individuals following ACL reconstruction (ACLR). Common research practice is to compare knee and hip biomechanics of the dominant limb between groups but this can add considerable complexity for clinicians and researchers. At this time, it is not known if there is a difference in LE biomechanics between the dominant and non-dominant limb during side-step cutting. Three-dimensional kinematics and kinetics were collected while 31 healthy participants performed five, side-step cutting manoeuvres with the dominant and non-dominant limbs. Knee and hip variables examined are those commonly investigated in ACL injury literature. There were no differences between limbs in all but one variable (knee internal rotation). These results demonstrate that healthy individuals exhibit little side-to-side differences in certain LE biomechanics when performing a side-step cutting manoeuvre. These findings can be utilised by clinicians when conducting dynamic evaluations of their ACLR patients and when developing injury prevention and rehabilitation programmes.
… It was then that [Katy] Hover-Smoot began dreaming of launching her own brand as a way to solve a dilemma she was encountering firsthand as a woman who mountain bikes: “The big issue was that nothing fit. Women who are on their bikes a lot have thighs and asses—you don’t want to be going uphill in tight shorts. You need lighter, more durable fabric and something that moves with you,” Hover-Smoot says. Then there was style. Women’s mountain bike clothes generally fell into one of two categories: basic black or loud colors and prints. “I wanted something in the middle,” she says.
MIT Hacking Medicine, Mount Sinai Department of Rehabilitation from
“The Mount Sinai Department of Rehabilitation Medicine is proud to announce a partnership with MIT Hacking Medicine to bring you a unique opportunity.” … “Up to $500,000 in in-kind prizes through a Shark Tank style pitch competition for startups looking to win a fully-funded Clinical Trial of their product at the Mount Sinai Department of Rehabilitation in exchange for 0.5-5% equity depending on the size and scope of the trial.” Deadline for submissions is May 12.
At the University of Alabama, Lizzie Hibberd, PhD, LAT, ATC, Assistant Professor in the Department of Health Science, conducts research on how to prevent injuries among developing athletes. An article from the Alabama NewsCenter explains that while working on her doctorate, Dr. Hibberd noticed many college student-athletes had developed bad physical adaptations over the years.
“I’ve been putting more emphasis on finding characteristics in youth athletes and how those relate to injuries,” Dr. Hibberd said. “When do they develop certain physical characteristics? How does their participation in training influence those characteristics, and how and when can we intervene?”
To help answer those questions, Dr. Hibberd created the Athletic Training Research Lab at Alabama. Its equipment includes a diagnostic ultrasound, inclinometers to measure range of motion, dynamometers to assess a strength test number, high-speed video cameras, and GoPro cameras. The best part about these tools is Dr. Hibberd can take them anywhere.
Despite increasing efforts to remove practices preventing women from moving up the organizational hierarchy, women remain underrepresented in senior management positions. There is still talk of limited social mobility, unequal opportunities and the importance of smashing glass ceilings holding back women.
Several explanations have been put forward for this enduring gender gap. One argument that has recently received considerable attention is that women do not have the same access to career enhancing networks as men. Networks, defined as informal relations connecting individuals and groups of individuals, are increasingly relevant in organizations. A recent report published by the British Psychological Society (BPS) revealed that of those women who made it to the top of the corporate chain, their ability to build, maintain and use social capital was the key to their success. Academic studies have shown that establishing powerful networks is beneficial for many reasons including increased motivation, social support, performance and individual career opportunities. Crucially, these studies provide evidence that men and women differ in the structure of their personal networks, as well as in the rewards gained from them. For instance, men often have a greater number of instrumental ties, relationships that provide job-related resources, while women have a greater number of expressive ties, relationships that provide emotional and social support. Consequently, women tend to have smaller networks of stronger relationships, while men see their networks as a way to get ahead and are more interested in what the relationship can yield. Women like to get along with others, men ahead of others.
Take well-intentioned coaches, skeptical parents, a federation rebounding from an election that laid bare a lot of fissures, and a bunch of different opinions on how to develop elite women’s soccer players. What do you get?
A train wreck? A turf war? Or healthy competition and discussion?
That’s the underlying question in the quest to develop the next generation of college, professional and international players. Perhaps choice and competition are good, but will the next Mallory Pugh be overlooked because she opted to play high school soccer? Or will the next Becky Sauerbrunn miss a chance to play for her favorite college because she chose to play in the “wrong” league?
Healthy or not, the competition is well underway. This spring, several clubs have announced they will move their top girls’ teams from U.S. Soccer’s Development Academy to the U.S. Club Soccer-sanctioned Elite Clubs National League (ECNL) after just one year in the DA. The DA has a few clubs lined up to join, but it’s still swimming upstream against the firmly entrenched ECNL, which is adding more than 10 new clubs on top of the DA defectors and has consistently produced high-level players.
Shannon Miller spotted a familiar face on a billboard in March on the way to her federal discrimination trial. It was Josh Berlo, the University of Minnesota Duluth athletic director who removed the five-time NCAA champion as women’s hockey coach in 2014.
With Berlo set to testify in the trial, UMD had posted the billboard along Duluth’s Central Entrance, celebrating his selection nationally as one of 28 winners of the Under Armour Athletic Director of the Year Award. Miller viewed it as another sign of the power struggle for women in coaching.
“Give me a break,” she said. “They picked the road many jurors would have to drive down to get to the courthouse.”
A week later, Miller’s case became the third in as many years to follow a pattern: an outspoken, successful female coach won a judgment or settlement for her firing, while the man who oversaw the dismissal received a national award and a higher salary.
Becky Hammon is on track to be the first woman head coach of an NBA team. Tamika Catchings, meanwhile, could be on track to be the first woman to lead an NBA team’s front office.
Matina Kolokotronis is the Chief Operating Officer for the NBA’s Sacramento Kings. Spending over two decades with the Kings, she is the only woman in the NBA to hold the titles of both COO and President of Business Operations. Ahead of Mother’s Day, she is sharing her story as a female executive in a predominantly male environment to bring attention to the progress women have made in the sports industry and the steps all of us can take to drive change.
… As we saw last week in the list of top 10 men’s crazy head-to-heads, we can look for mismatches of style by focusing on head-to-heads with the most surprising results, that is, match ups where the player most expected to win on the basis of their overall ability actually loses multiple times.
If we tally up the surprise with each match and limit to head-to-heads with 10 or more matches (enough for any mismatch to be unlikely due to chance alone) we get the 10 most bizarre head-to-heads shown below.
Steffi Graf takes the last two spots, the last being against Argentine Gabriela Sabatini. With a total of 40 professional matches against each other, Sabatini was the player Graf came up against the most in her career. On 11 of those occasions, Graf lost, 7 of those times when Graf was the World No. 1.
… An 11-member project team, supported by IOC staffers, especially Sandra Lengwiler, began an exhaustive study of available resources and interviews were conducted with more than 40 important stakeholders in women’s equality matters. Now, a little more than a year later, the project recommendations have been approved by the IOC Executive Board and accepted by various groups such as the International Sports Federations (IF) and National Olympic Committee (NOC) leaders. The report acknowledges a few of the progressive steps that have been taken including: gender equality in the total number of Olympic participants; offering of leadership development opportunities; advocacy and awareness campaigns; and small increases in the appointment of women to leadership roles.
PLOS One; Jessica Sullivan, Corinne Moss-Racusin, Michael Lopez, Katherine Williams from
While there is substantial evidence that adults who violate gender stereotypes often face backlash (i.e. social and economic penalties), less is known about the nature of gender stereotypes for young children, and the penalties that children may face for violating them. We conducted three experiments, with over 2000 adults from the US, to better understand the content and consequences of adults’ gender stereotypes for young children. In Experiment 1, we tested which characteristics adults (N = 635) believed to be descriptive (i.e. typical), prescriptive (i.e. required), and proscriptive (i.e. forbidden) for preschool-aged boys and girls. Using the characteristics that were rated in Experiment 1, we then constructed vignettes that were either ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’, and manipulated whether the vignettes were said to describe a boy or a girl. Experiment 2 (N = 697) revealed that adults rated stereotype-violating children as less likeable than their stereotype-conforming peers, and that this difference was more robust for boys than girls. Experiment 3 (N = 731) was a direct replication of Experiment 2, and revealed converging evidence of backlash against stereotype-violating children. In sum, our results suggest that even young children encounter backlash from adults for stereotype violations, and that these effects may be strongest for boys.
The Conversation; Foad Hamidi, Morgan Scheuerman, Stacy Branham from
Imagine walking down the street and seeing advertising screens change their content based on how you walk, how you talk, or even the shape of your chest. These screens rely on hidden cameras, microphones and computers to guess if you’re male or female. This might sound futuristic, but patrons in a Norwegian pizzeria discovered it’s exactly what was happening: Women were seeing ads for salad and men were seeing ads for meat options. The software running a digital advertising board spilled the beans when it crashed and displayed its underlying code. The motivation behind using this technology might have been to improve advertising quality or user experience. Nevertheless, many customers were unpleasantly surprised by it.
This sort of situation is not just creepy and invasive. It’s worse: Efforts at automatic gender recognition – using algorithms to guess a person’s gender based on images, video or audio – raise significant social and ethical concerns that are not yet fully explored. Most current research on automatic gender recognition technologies focuses instead on technological details.
Our recent research found that people with diverse gender identities, including those identifying as transgender or gender nonbinary, are particularly concerned that these systems could miscategorize them. People who express their gender differently from stereotypical male and female norms already experience discrimination and harm as a result of being miscategorized or misunderstood. Ideally, technology designers should develop systems to make these problems less common, not more so.
Where you live can be a big deal when it comes to sports—especially if you’re not from a recruiting hotbed or are being recruited by an out-of-state school. However, some people may be surprised to find out that where you’re from makes a big impact on your athletic development long before the college recruitment begins. ESPN’s Kids in Sports study dug deep into the numbers behind youth sports in America and there were some surprising findings that surfaced as a result—such as the statistic that 25% of high school girls from cities have never participated in organized sports. Check out some more in this article.