Boston Children's Hospital, Thriving blog, Amelia Stern from
… “She made it through the Olympics with a lot of work and gritting of her teeth. For her it was a huge personal victory just to get through a short program,” says Geminiani. She adds that it’s not uncommon for athletes to play through pain, seeking treatment only after their athletic event. Indeed, after the Olympics, Aimee returned to Boston Children’s to meet with Geminiani in person.
Right away, Geminiani and Aimee made a game plan. “For us, it was about refining and pinpointing the nature of the problem that she had not been able to define previously,” says Geminiani. Because there was so much damage done to her foot, their first goal was pain management. “It’s a trial and error thing. My goal right now is to just focus on getting better,” says Aimee.
The North Carolina Courage are not about to sneak up on anybody. Not after setting league records for wins (17), goals (53), points (57), goals against (17), and losses (1). Their roster is stocked with top players, including former MVPs Lynn Williams and Crystal Dunn, 2018 MVP candidate McCall Zerboni, plus last year’s Defender of the Year, Abby Dahlkemper.
There is one player, however, who does not get the accolades of her teammates, even though she wears the captain’s armband and never came off the field in 2018. That player is Abby Erceg.
“Every thing she does are things that a leader should do,” goalkeeper Katelyn Rowland says of Erceg, who is referred to almost exclusively around the team as “Kiwi.”
… Minnesota’s Moore, Sylvia Fowles, Lindsay Whalen and Seimone Augustus were all on the 2012 and 2016 Olympic teams, although Fowles hadn’t yet joined the Lynx in ’12. They’ve all played in the World Cup, as well. Participation on the senior national team by at least one of these four players started in 2006, when Augustus was on the World Cup team after her WNBA rookie season.
But retirement (Whalen), plus injury/fatigue (Moore, Augustus, Fowles) have kept them all off the 2018 World Cup roster. The same goes for players such as Dallas’ Skylar Diggins-Smith and Los Angeles’ Chelsea Gray. The Sparks’ Candace Parker wasn’t selected to the 2016 Olympic team, and that essentially ended her relationship with USA Basketball.
The number of women competing in powerlifting — a sport in which competitors have three attempts to squat, bench and deadlift as much weight as possible — doubled between 2015 and 2016, according to industry insider Dave Tate, co-founder and CEO of EliteFTS.
What’s more, many women have discovered that strength training is not only enjoyable, but empowering. As a result, communities of lifters have emerged to help other women discover it for themselves.
The following five women and female-led organizations are only a small sampling of the strength communities that aim to (and do) challenge stereotypes, inspire others and elicit positive personal and social change through weightlifting.
… ask striker Lynn Williams, who’s now in her third season under Riley. Her first was 2016, when Western New York won the NWSL championship in its last year of existence. The year before that, Williams was a rookie on a Flash team that finished seventh.
“That first meeting we had with Paul, he said, ‘I have the easy job: I just have to find out what each one of you does well and make sure you guys do it to the best of your abilities,’ ” she said.
Now they have not just that 2016 title on their résumés, but the last two NWSL Shields as well.
“Paul has shown us that he believes in us and he trusts us,” Williams said. “When you show your players that you trust them, in turn we started to trust him and know that he would do anything for us, not just on the field but off the field.”
Nikki Huffman’s lifelong love of sports started at home in Connelly Springs, N.C. Duke and North Carolina basketball, along with college and NFL football, were staples on the family TV, and she often watched games with her dad, Russell, even as she developed into a talented athlete in her own right. Though somewhat unsure about the specifics, she knew from a young age that she eventually wanted to make a career for herself in the industry.
By the time Huffman was playing basketball at East Burke High School, she had already taken an interest in athletic training. One of her senior-year projects was a silent film that imagined what would happen to the school’s teams without a trainer. Then one day as she and her dad were watching a football game together and the training staff came on the field to tend to an injury, she turned to him and said, “You know what? I want to do that. I think I could do that, and maybe that’s how I can stay around sports my whole life.”
“My dad was like, ‘Really?’” she recalls now. “And I was like, ‘Yeah.’ He said, ‘OK, well go do it then.’”
New analysis suggests that women’s success in STEM Ph.D. programs has much to do with having female peers, especially in their first year in graduate school.
Learning to code can be an exciting journey, but having to overcome stereotypes along the way makes it a more difficult one. Girls deal with this all the time, so perhaps it’s not surprising that Barbie has had the exact same problem. In 1992, Barbie told the world that she wasn’t good at math, and maybe this is part of the reason it took almost two more decades for her to get her first job in the tech industry. In 2010, Barbie took on her 126th new career, as a computer engineer. However, as for many women in STEM careers, her trials didn’t end with landing a job.
In 2014, writer Pamela Ribbon blogged about a book she’d encountered, Barbie: I Can Be a Computer Engineer. Unfortunately, an idea with such promise — a narrative about Barbie’s STEM career that might inspire girls to see themselves in it as well — not only failed to live up to this promise, but was so poorly executed it provided a negative message instead. In the book, Barbie explains to her sister that though she’s creating a game, she is only coming up with “design ideas” and will need Steven and Brian to turn it into a “real game.” She then infects both her and her sister’s computers with viruses — though not to fear, there is a happy ending when the boys both fix the computers and do the actual coding on the game. Not only does this narrative perpetuate stereotypes, illustrated by Barbie laughing at the idea that she might be capable of creating a game, but it portrays Barbie as incompetent at best, and entirely misrepresents what it means to be a computer engineer.
Pregnant women could use a “wearable” app to detect whether they have or are susceptible to a condition that leads to serious health complications for them or their unborn child.
A Purdue University research team, led by Craig Goergen, an assistant professor in Purdue’s Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering, is developing a low-cost automated early detection sensor of preeclampsia, a pregnancy complication that can lead to high blood pressure and cause both organ damage and premature birth.
“We hope this will allow us to predict and prevent preeclampsia and reduce the number of children born prematurely each year. This could also reduce the long-term health complications for mothers,” Goergen said.
Journal of Orthopaedic & Sports Physical Therapy from
The Academy of Orthopaedic Physical Therapy and the American Academy of Sports Physical Therapy have an ongoing effort to create evidence-based clinical practice guidelines (CPGs) for orthopaedic and sports physical therapy management and prevention of musculoskeletal impairments described in the World Health Organization’s International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF). This particular guideline focuses on the exercise-based prevention of knee injuries.
To use narrative inquiry to study disordered eating meanings and experiences of elite female athletes struggle and recovery as socially constructed within stories. Published autobiographies of two high profile elite athletes were explored as socio-cultural sites of analysis to expand understanding of disordered eating struggle and recovery over time. Design
A thematic narrative analysis grounded in social constructionist narrative inquiry was used to identify broad cultural narratives and turning points (i.e., psycho-social life events linked to struggle/insight) within the narratives, in two elite female swimmers’ autobiographies. Findings
Two cultural narratives were identified: performance narrative and struggle and personal growth narrative. These narratives framed key turning points within the stories –body and relationship turning points (linked to struggle) and emotional and body acceptance turning points (linked to recovery). Conclusions
These findings build upon previous narrative and autobiographical research in sport psychology which shows the value in studying elite athletes’ stories as theoretical, methodological and pedagogical resources to learn more about athlete health. The present study expanded understanding of gendered disordered eating meanings of struggle and recovery within elite swimming culture as nuanced personal and cultural processes across two athletes’ careers. Such work further opens up ways to use autobiographies as pedagogical resources to harness relational narratives to facilitate female athlete’s recovery.
… One condition increasingly diagnosed in women who started sports young: femoroacetabular impingement (FAI), a mismatch between the hip’s ball and socket. Teens who play hip-taxing sports often develop extra bone in the socket as growth plates in the joint begin closing. That extra bone can pinch the labrum and, in time, cause tears and eventually arthritis, especially when individuals remain active as adults.
The sexes are equally prone to FAI, but women are likelier to suffer its effects over time, partly because our biology creates the perfect recipe for hip pain of all varieties. Women also tend to have wider hips than men and need extra-strong glutes—especially the gluteus medius, the muscle at the top of the butt—for support and stability. Problem is, many of us spend more time sitting on our backside than strengthening it (no judgment!).
Dallas Morning News, SportsDay blog, Alexa Philippou from
… Boucek joins the Mavericks after spending last season with the Sacramento Kings as the organization’s player development coach, which made her the third-ever female NBA assistant coach, along with Becky Hammon and Nancy Lieberman. Before then, Boucek was a longtime coach in the WNBA.
Boucek said she never wants to get a job, even in the NBA, just because she’s a woman — but that she also never wants to not get a job because of her gender. Luckily for her, she’s found a good fit so far with the Mavericks and on head coach Rick Carlisle’s staff.
“I think the NBA is really blazing the trail of getting women opportunities to being in the conversation,” Boucek said. “We don’t want women anywhere who don’t deserve it and haven’t earned it, but we want to have the opportunity to see if we can be a good fit somewhere.”
… The 2018 season did offer a glimpse of what the future of women’s soccer in the US will be. For good or ill, it’s going to look a lot like the rest of professional sports in this country.
For the most part, that’s good. Women’s soccer is entertaining. Women’s soccer tells compelling stories. Women’s soccer is lucrative. Women’s soccer brings people together. The economic and cultural forces that work to deny the women’s game legitimacy are losing their grip on their gatekeeping powers.
We know this because fans and media are demanding better from the league. The NWSL has been beset by controversies in 2018— some typical of any professional sports organization, some that could only happen in this league. Two NWSL teams from 2017 did not survive to see 2018; FC Kansas City was moved to Utah and rebranded as the Royals, while the Boston Breakers were unceremoniously wound up. The saga with Sky Blue FC concerning the club’s treatment of players and general operational malpractice remains a black mark on the league, both for allowing things to get this bad in the first place and for their tepid and inadequate response once the stories went public. Several games held in Seattle and Portland last month were forced to go ahead more-or-less as scheduled despite much of the Pacific Northwest being blanketed in wildfire smoke. And barely a fortnight ago, the league dragged their feet on making a decision regarding the playoff semifinal between North Carolina and Chicago as Hurricane Florence bore down on the Eastern Seaboard. All of these problems were made worse by a literal lack of leadership at NWSL headquarters.
When I met Melody Fairchild at Steens Mountain Running Camp in Oregon in 2006, I was a sub-elite runner in the throes of recovery from disordered eating, exercise bulimia and distorted body image. As a Division I student-athlete, I’d wrestled with what collegiate coaches, peers and, well, every magazine told me about thin and athlete-specific ideals. Plagued with injuries, I had osteopenia, the precursor to osteoporosis; amenorrhea, the absence of menstruation; and depression — all consequences of what’s now recognized as Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport, or RED-S, a condition that impairs physiological functioning.
I clung tightly to a cultural narrative — be thin, be fast — because it seemed simple. It clear-cut an apparent path to success through the messy thicket of my life.
But Fairchild questioned it. She addressed high school girls and camp staff and asked, “What makes you happy?”
The answer, I’ve discovered, is Fairchild’s secret sauce. It is neither how an athlete’s body looks nor sky-high expectations, but what she calls the fire in the athlete’s belly. With that, she and others redefine success.
This has been a HUGE request from coaches across the league, and mitigates some tricky issues for players 20-24+ who essentially train all year without compensation.
The Equity in Athletics Data Analysis Cutting Tool is brought to you by the Office of Postsecondary Education of the U.S. Department of Education. This analysis cutting tool was designed to provide rapid customized reports for public inquiries relating to equity in athletics data. The data are drawn from the OPE Equity in Athletics Disclosure Website database.
Before it introduced Shannon Doepking as its new softball coach earlier this month, Syracuse University Athletics hadn’t hired a female head coach in more than a decade.
The hiring broke a streak of 12 consecutive male head coaches hired by the school, including eight to lead women’s programs.
Syracuse had just one female head coach in 2017-18. According to the University of Minnesota’s Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sports, only two of the 347 Division I schools in the country had fewer.
In a concession to women’s soccer, FIFA will start funding business-class flights for some of the Women’s World Cup teams traveling to France for next year’s tournament.
Total prize money will also “significantly increase” from the $15 million shared among 24 teams at the 2015 tournament, FIFA official Emily Shaw said Thursday at the Women In Sports Law conference.
The total sum will be confirmed by the FIFA Council, which meets Oct. 25-26 in Rwanda, she said.
The number of girls competing in high school wrestling across the country has increased during each of the past 28 years.
That national trend has been perhaps most noticeable over the past six winters, when the roster of schoolgirl wrestlers has grown from 8,235 in 2012 to 14,587 for the 2017-18 season, according to an annual survey compiled by the National Federation of State High School Associations.
The recent girls wrestling boom has not been nearly as robust in Maine, but supporters of the sport hope the first girls-only individual state championship tournament sanctioned by the Maine Principals’ Association planned for February 2019 will spur increased interest.
“The hope is more girls will participate,” said MPA assistant executive director Mike Bisson.
Harvard University continues to expand on its commitment to prevent and respond to instances of sexual and gender-based harassment, including sexual assault, introducing several new initiatives this fall to serve students, faculty, and staff.
These initiatives, being rolled out by the University’s Title IX Office, include a student liaison committee to engage students in educating their peers about Title IX policies and resources on campus; hiring an education program manager to head the initiative and expand on the university’s training efforts; development of new required online training for all faculty and staff, as well as faculty and staff Title IX liaison committees; and the launch of a bystander intervention training program.
These efforts are being supported by more than 50 Title IX coordinators University-wide, up from 35 in 2014.
On September 5, the World Surf League announced a major milestone: equal prize money for male and female surfers at every WSL event in 2019 and beyond. It was a watershed moment for a sport with a history of treating women as second-class athletes.
“Bravo to the WSL for their commitment to equal pay,” says Bianca Valenti, a San Francisco–based pro who conquered 20-foot waves to win Latin America’s first big-wave surf competition this summer. There, she won $1,750—a quarter of the $7,000 men’s purse. “Maybe we’ll find we have created equity not just in surfing, but for all sports.”