Kerri Walsh Jennings will call it a career in beach volleyball after the Tokyo Olympics in two years.
She has big plans before her days on the sand are done, and for improving the long-term health and growth of the sport well into the future by creating new playing opportunities in the U.S.
The three-time Olympic gold medalist absolutely expects to go out with another gold around her neck from the 2020 Games after she and partner April Ross wound up with bronze at Rio in 2016, a heartbreaking disappointment that still stings for Walsh Jennings yet fuels her at the same time.
One might assume that Kara Goucher has always been a confident runner. After all, the just-turned-40-year-old is a two-time Olympian and world-champion medalist. She’s been on the covers of Women’s Running, Runner’s World and Competitor a number of times and is the face of Oiselle, Skechers and other big brands. She has 140,000 followers on Instagram and will host her fifth annual sold-out running retreat in September.
Turns out, however, that despite all her successes, Goucher has often struggled with a lack of confidence. “I’ve always had a lot of self doubt and negative self chatter as far back as high school,” she says. “I have worked with a sports psychologist since I was young.” Shortly after she graduated from college, Goucher connected with sports psychologist Stephen Walker, who encouraged her to document her positive thoughts and feelings. So she did. And still does.
“I keep a confidence journal alongside my training journal,” Goucher explains.
Britain’s most successful Winter Olympian spent four months on medication due to an ongoing back condition but she is hopeful a spinal operation will enable her to finally enjoy her success
… “I just pretty much cut out all the long 2s,” Taurasi said, adding: “I’m taking 3s or I’m taking layups; either the foul line, or I’m taking open 3s. That was my mind-set coming into the season. I think that’s just black and white, and it’s really helped me just be more aggressive,” while providing clearer direction on where she wants to get her shots.
She continued, “It’s opened up things for a lot of people, and just made it a little bit easier for me to score.”
The change has catapulted Taurasi’s effectiveness from inside the arc to 53.4 percent, which would be the second-best mark of her career, and the more efficient combination of shots has lifted her true shooting percentage to 64.4 percent. She should also soon pass Tamika Catchings as the career leader in offensive win shares. Put simply: The league’s best offensive player is having her best offensive year at an age when most W.N.B.A. players have retired.
A warm-up is an important period before training or competition to prepare an athlete for the physical demands of subsequent activity. Previous research has extensively focused on the effects of warm-up in relation to various jumping performance attributes; however, limited research has examined the biomechanical nature of landings after common warm-up practices. Twelve female, collegiate-level volleyball players performed unilateral landings on the dominant and nondominant limb before and after dynamic warm-ups and combined dynamic-static (CDS) warm-ups. Kinetic variables of interest were measured at the hip and knee during the landing phase of a volleyball-simulated jump-landing maneuver. A significant 3-way interaction (warm-up × limb × time) for peak internal knee adduction moment was observed, as this kinetic parameter significantly increased (p = 0.01; d = 0.79) in the nondominant limb at 1-minute post-CDS warm-up. No other warm-up differences were detected; however, significant main effects of limb were determined for dominant-limb internal hip abduction moment (p < 0.01; d = 1.32), dominant-knee internal rotation moment (p < 0.01; d = 1.88), and nondominant-knee external rotation moment (p < 0.01; d = 1.86), which may be due to altered hip and trunk mechanics during the jump landings. This information provides strength and conditioning professionals with biomechanical information to determine warm-up protocols that reduce the risk of injury in female volleyball athletes.
… On the football field, she says, she seldom thinks about any trail she’s blazed. But there have been conversations with Raiders coaches, men who have daughters. They’ve thanked her for embodying how their girls can do whatever they want in life.
“That’s when it started to hit: ‘Oh, wow. This is a big deal,’ ” Martinez said. “To be an inspiration for them is huge to me.”
Martinez is an example of how initiative and work ethic can lead to an NFL opportunity at age 26. She also happens to be a woman. Part of an organization that has broken race and gender barriers in its history, the strength and conditioning assistant is the Raiders’ first female assistant coach.
Soccer America, Arlo Moore-Bloom and Mike Woitalla from
… SA: What do think is most important to the USA’s approach going forward?
ANSON DORRANCE: I’ve always believed that one of the coolest things about the United States is we’re such a massive country. Maybe the way we develop our players is the way someone advises you on the assembly of your stock portfolio. You don’t pull all of your eggs in one basket and invest in bonds or just in foreign stocks or something, but you put a little bit into this and you put a little bit into that.
So why not give the reins to coaches across the country to have the freedom to experiment with what they feel the best thing for player development is, within their hamlets, or regions, or states, or leagues, and start to develop a sort of a national identity and personality. Let’s embrace all the different ideas. Let’s embrace our wonderful diversity and certainly try to correct it with discourse and with leadership. But let’s not put some have sort of a one dimensional look at what’s going on. And use that as a formula to protect ourselves against our own failure. Let’s allow all these different ideas to flourish and let’s keep coming back to the table with our best practices.
… I felt like I fit in with the boys (even if I really didn’t at all – I was still a girl after all and they never forgot that). Growing up in the game with the opportunity to play with boys at every level of my life – from elementary school recess to town soccer to training with premiere teams to pick up with the Penn State men to training with every boy’s club team in the state of CT as a pro – I cannot imagine my development as a player without them. I was comfortable being uncomfortable with them.
I realize now that times are different in youth soccer. Girls don’t always have the same opportunities that I had to play with the boys. Back then, there weren’t many girls who wanted to train with boys, so it was easier.
If there is one piece of advice that I can give young girls who want to get to the highest level though, it’s to try to find boys to play with. Their game is different, their approach is sometimes different and we can learn from them.
In this session, we discuss the experiences of various leaders in the field of sport performance — who happen to be female — and the challenges they have (or have not) faced throughout their careers. There were some great insights provided by all involved.
After showing out at the ICC, other teams commented on how the ladies of the Courage were some of the fittest, fastest, and most athletic players. Here is a highlight of the on-field training from last weeks session.
According to a 2015 statistic, the leading causes of death among adolescents in the US are unintentional accidents, suicide, and homicide. However, many scientists struggle to engage adolescents in research programs to study the behaviors that lead to these devastating outcomes. In this piece, we shed light on the work of Dr. Sarah Wiehe and her innovative approach to community-based research, highlighting how working with the community transformed a project on the health behaviors of teenage girls.
Women face an uphill battle in biomedical science, on many fronts. There is bias in hiring and in how other scientists view their research. Fewer women are chosen to review scientific papers. Men still outnumber women at the ivory tower’s highest floors, and of course, women in science face harassment based on their gender. But once the top of the hill is in sight — once a female scientist gets a coveted major research grant — the playing field levels out, a new study shows. Women who get major grants stay funded and head their labs just as long as men. The hitch? Women must reach the top of the academic hill and apply for those grants in the first place.
“We’ve known from the data that’s publicly available that women are getting approximately 50 percent or more of the biomedical Ph.D.s, but when the time comes to apply for grants, the number drops precipitously,” says Judith Greenberg, the deputy director of the National Institute of General Medical Science in Bethesda, Md. Less than one-third of first-time applicants for the big grants from the National Institutes of Health are women.
“Coronary heart disease is also a woman’s disease, not a man’s disease in disguise,” wrote the cardiologist Bernadine Healy back in 1991. In a rousing editorial, Healy lamented that decades of research that focused almost entirely on men had “reinforced the myth that coronary heart disease is a uniquely male affliction and generated data sets in which men are the normative standard.” As a result, women’s symptoms went underappreciated, their medical problems were misdiagnosed, and their lives hung in the balance.
Three decades on, these problems still persist. In the United States, women are less likely than men to survive the years after a heart attack, even after accounting for age. And, according to a new study, that’s partly because of how women are treated—and the gender of the doctors who treat them.
… Muslim women face complex discrimination in terms of both faith and gender, with 58 per cent of reported cases of Islamophobic discrimination in the UK concerning women. This is particularly true in terms of racially-motivated attacks: Muslim women are more visible in their faith and also seen as easier targets. “Counter-radicalisation” strategies put in place by the government have done nothing to help, with policies such as Prevent only serving to further stigmatise and alienate an already-discriminated group from their peers.
To this end, the project looks to tackle misconceptions that surround Muslim girls, and provide them with a different narrative about their future and skills to tackle the challenges they face, both now and in the future.
A recruit’s résumé is like that of a job applicant. Multiple areas combine to create a package coaches can evaluate. These on-court candidates are judged mainly on performance, character and academics, two which can be judged accurately and consistently.
But that character part? That’s tricky. To delve into that, coaches must refer to the references section, and that’s where the difficulty comes.
Just like a job candidate, an athlete’s best references will most assuredly praise them when college coaches call. Everyone is “the best.” Everyone has a “terrific work ethic.” Everyone is “coachable.”
… To date, after six years of compiling the WCCRC, very few institutions have received an above-average grade of A or B. In fact, far more Fs have been assigned than As and Bs. Over the course of the last five years, we were often asked, “What are the A and B schools doing to hire and retain women?” We didn’t know the answer. For the limited number of institutions who received an A or B, no data existed as to what these “above average” Athletic Administrators (ADs) and institutions were doing to recruit, hire and retain women head coaches. This study aimed to fill this gap in the knowledge. In essence, we wanted to learn from ADs that have a track record of success and “doing it right” (i.e., were awarded an A or B on the WCCRC) in terms of hiring and retaining a majority of women coaches for their women’s teams.
Maternal metabolic health during the prenatal period is an established determinant of cardiometabolic disease risk. Many studies have focused on poor offspring outcomes after exposure to poor maternal health, while few have systematically appraised the evidence surrounding the role of maternal exercise in decreasing this risk.
The aim of this study is to characterize and quantify the specific impact of prenatal exercise on children’s cardiometabolic health markers, at birth and in childhood. Methods
A systematic review of Scopus, MEDLINE, EMBASE, CENTRAL, CINAHL, and SPORTDiscus up to December 2017 was conducted.
Randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and prospective cohort studies of prenatal aerobic exercise and/or resistance training reporting eligible offspring outcomes were included.
Four reviewers independently identified eligible citations and extracted study-level data. The primary outcome was birth weight; secondary outcomes, specified a priori, included large-for-gestational age status, fat and lean mass, dyslipidemia, dysglycemia, and blood pressure. We included 73 of the 9804 citations initially identified. Data from RCTs was pooled using random effects models. Statistical heterogeneity was quantified using the I2 test. Analyses were done between June and December 2017 and the search was updated in December 2017. Results
Fifteen observational studies (n = 290,951 children) and 39 RCTs (n = 6875 children) were included. Observational studies were highly heterogeneous and had discrepant conclusions, but globally showed no clinically relevant effect of exercise on offspring outcomes. Meta-analyzed RCTs indicated that prenatal exercise did not significantly impact birth weight (mean difference [MD] − 22.1 g, 95% confidence interval [CI] − 51.5 to 7.3 g, n = 6766) or large-for-gestational age status (risk ratio 0.85, 95% CI 0.51 to 1.44, n = 937) compared to no exercise. Sub-group analyses showed that prenatal exercise reduced birth weight according to timing (starting after 20 weeks of gestation, MD − 84.3 g, 95% CI − 142.2, − 26.4 g, n = 1124), type of exercise (aerobic only, MD − 58.7 g, 95% CI − 109.7, − 7.8 g; n = 2058), pre-pregnancy activity status (previously inactive, MD − 34.8 g, 95% CI − 69.0, − 0.5 g; n = 2829), and exercise intensity (light to moderate intensity only, MD − 45.5 g, 95% CI − 82.4, − 8.6 g; n = 2651). Fat mass percentage at birth was not altered by prenatal exercise (0.19%, 95% CI − 0.27, 0.65%; n = 130); however, only two studies reported this outcome. Other outcomes were too scarcely reported to be meta-analyzed. Conclusions
Prenatal exercise does not causally impact birth weight, fat mass, or large-for-gestational-age status in a clinically relevant way. Longer follow up of offspring exposed to prenatal exercise is needed along with measures of relevant metabolic variables (e.g., fat and lean mass). [full text]