When 18-year-old Bianca Andreescu, the first wild card to make the final at the BNP Paribas Open, tells the story of her improbable run to the biggest title match of her young career, she won’t lead with her overwhelming upset of two-time Grand Slam champion Garbine Muguruza in the quarterfinal. Nor will she start with her rally from love-40 to hold at 5-3 in the third set of her semifinal win over No. 6 Elina Svitolina on Friday.
Instead, she’ll open by telling the story of the first set of her first match of the tournament.
Looking back nearly a year later as she prepares to help lead the No. 2 Huskies in the NCAA Tournament one last time, Samuelson realizes the significance her injury played in the growth she’s experienced as a senior. Last season was a season of adrenaline, perseverance and caution, and it resulted in the most transformative year of her career. She’s amazed at how her mind helped her block out what was going on with her body and how she’s been able to channel that new mental strength into every obstacle she’s seen this year. She came away with a new perspective, increased physicality and renewed confidence.
That experience will prove critical for her as she readies to push past the pain of her recent back injury — spasms and bruising she suffered at the end of the regular season — to return to the court for UConn’s first round game against Towson on Friday. The Huskies were surprisingly named a No. 2 seed and could have to get past Louisville, a team that beat them earlier this year, just to get to the Final Four.
Carli Lloyd was the guest of honor at Telemundo’s presentation of its women’s World Cup coverage plans Monday. The Delran native’s appearance came with an admission that she doesn’t speak much Spanish (she didn’t have to at this) and a disclaimer that hosts Ana Jurka and Andrés Cantor didn’t ask about the U.S. women’s soccer team’s lawsuit against the U.S. Soccer Federation. But there was plenty else to talk about.
Cantor did not shy away from asking Lloyd about her declining playing time with the national team as the World Cup approaches. Lloyd didn’t shy away from the questions.
“I know that I still have a lot left to give to this team,” she said. “I know physically I’m in the best shape that I’ve been in. … As I’ve seen throughout my career, you never know when that time may come. It’s important to be ready, and I know I’ll be ready, and I want to do anything I can to help the team win.”
Mallory Pugh paws a soccer ball like a panther does its prey. She slinks it back and forth between her hands, staring straight ahead. On the field, she outruns her opponents, gliding the ball gracefully toward the goal as if corralling her next kill. She is lethal, and she is relentless — and she tells herself so.
At 20 years old, Mallory — who goes by Mal — is the youngest to do a lot of things in the women’s soccer world. She’s the youngest American player to score a goal in the Olympics, and the second youngest in the history of the U.S. Women’s Olympic soccer team. When she was 18 years old, Mal became the youngest player to appear in a national game in more than a decade. And in June, Mal will be the youngest member of the U.S. Women’s National Team competing in the FIFA Women’s World Cup in France. But as she approaches the World Cup, Mal isn’t thinking about her age. In fact, unlike most of the coverage about her, she doesn’t care much about it at all.
“I think it was more I’m achieving things,” Mal said when asked if she thought about her age as she hit milestones. “I knew I wanted to be a professional soccer player, but I never knew it would come at the age it did. I’m just taking it and rolling with it. The age part, it doesn’t matter to me. I achieved that, but I have so many other dreams and goals.”
Simone Biles, four-times world champion, winner of three individual Olympic gold medals and arguably one of the greatest gymnasts of all time, is 4ft 8in, but this is not how she appears when in flight. In the hangar-like space of the World Champions Center, a gym complex in a suburb of Houston, Texas, she stands at the end of a padded runway. All morning, Biles has been hanging out with squad gymnasts, some as young as six, who are already training full-time at the facility and are so accustomed to seeing Biles, says her mother, they barely look twice. (Occasionally, says Biles, “We’ll have a new kid come in and just stare. Other than that, it’s normal.”) For her part, Biles trains with the off‑hand style of the preternaturally talented, that almost louche kind of grace you see in top tennis players knocking up or sprinters stretching before a race, and behind which lies extraordinary powers. And then she starts running.
Last year, Biles returned to gymnastics after 12 months off and she is still adjusting to the demands of her schedule. After the training session, we sit in the office that overlooks the vast floor of the gym, Biles with a tracksuit thrown over her leotard, and talk about what it is like to be 21 and at the top of her game, the pressures of being the best in the world and just how Biles knows where she is when she’s airborne.
Women's Sports Foundation, The She Network, Kristen Gowdy from
… The skills competition was not the first time Coyne Schofield has made history. She and her U.S. National Women’s Hockey teammates threatened to boycott the 2017 Women’s Ice Hockey World Championships, citing gender inequities within USA Hockey. Eventually, the groups reached a deal that saw improved pay and treatment toward the women’s team and a year later, they won the team’s first Olympic gold in 20 years.
WSF caught up with Coyne Schofield to talk about her history-making moments, paving the way for the next generation of hockey stars and Women’s History Month.
As women in the sports and fitness world, sometimes it can feel like we have something to prove — that we can train, grow, and recover with the rest of ’em. But our female physiology isn’t a weakness, and it certainly doesn’t have to impede our training goals. Just like anything in the natural world, our bodies and hormones go through cycles, which can be monitored and adjusted to accordingly.
While we recognize that every woman is different when it comes to her cycle, we can use science to better guide our training choices. Let’s take a closer look at how we can work with our bodies instead of against them in the gym.
Balance is important for injury prediction, prevention and rehabilitation. Clinical measurement of higher level balance function such as hop landing is necessary. Currently no method exists to quantify balance performance following hopping in the clinic. OBJECTIVE::
The objective of this study was to quantify the sacral acceleration profile and test-retest reliability during hop landing. PARTICIPANTS::
Seventeen university undergraduates (Age 27.6(5.7) years, Height 1.73(0.11) m, Weight 74.1(13.9)kg). OUTCOME MEASURE::
A trunk mounted accelerometer captured the acceleration profile following landing from hopping forwards, medially and laterally. The path length of the acceleration traces were computed to quantify balance following landing. RESULTS::
Moderate-to-excellent reliability (ICC 0.67-0.93) for hop landing was established with low-to-moderate standard error of measurement (4-16%) and minimal detectable change values (13-44%) for each of the hop directions. Significant differences were determined in balance following hop landing from the different directions. CONCLUSION::
The results suggest hop landing balance can be quantified by trunk mounted accelerometry.
… While the Matildas, who are grouped with Italy, Brazil and Jamaica for their pool games, are widely expected to reach at least the last eight, the Socceroos, who lost narrowly to eventual champions France, drew with Denmark and were beaten in a dead rubber by Peru, were up against it from the moment their draw was made.
Milicic is expected to name his squad for the April 4 friendly against the USA – one of only two pre-World Cup international warm-up games pencilled in before France – later this week.
If you’ve been following along in American soccer these past few weeks, you’ve probably seen a few stories about Richie Burke – DC United’s former under-23 PDL coach – who was recently hired by the Washington Spirit, a struggling NWSL team. Since the Spirit hired Burke, countless allegations have been made against the coach, generally describing him as a serial verbal abuser, bully and all-around bad guy. Stephanie Yang’s fantastic article on Black and Red United accounts a lot of these charges, using the testimony of a former player.
… “At Quinnipiac, it’s been really amazing to see how women are celebrated,” Turner said.
For the past 11 years, Turner has been an integral part of the team, leading the charge since 2015.
“I really want the women in our program to believe they can do anything and to feel like when they’re here, they learn those lessons that are going to help them to accomplish anything in their life that they want,” Turner explained.
“If you fully want to realise your potential, you’ve got to have reality checks on a regular basis. And if you don’t have those reality checks, you’re going to have an excuse. STATSports Apex Tracker helps you eliminate that excuse.”
When Anson Dorrance – Head Coach of the University of North Carolina’s Women’s Soccer Program and one of the most successful coaches in the history of US sports – speaks, you need to listen up.
Apps to track menstruation cycles and fertility are being marketed as tech that helps people take better care of their bodies. But who stands to reap the real benefits?
… how do we begin to change the narrative of how women’s pain is perceived, understood, and treated? How might we validate the experiences of women who have been repeatedly and systematically ignored, dismissed, and blamed by medical professionals and society at large? How do we treat pain without inflicting further physical and emotional harm?
I don’t think there are easy answers, but we can work to support initiatives dedicated to create lasting change to correct data that demonstrates the pain of women — affected even further by factors such as race, class, and weight — is routinely disbelieved by medical professionals. We can examine the language used to express and treat women’s pain, and work to find a vocabulary that allows us to rewrite the current narrative. We can listen carefully to women with histories of pain who write or speak about their experiences and heed their calls to action.
Concussions can vary in symptoms and severity but researchers often don’t understand why. So, in an attempt to resolve a clear-cut relationship between physical trauma and concussion diagnosis, researchers at Stanford University choose to focus on one specific area of the brain — the corpus callosum, a thick bundle of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain and plays a role in coordination.
This structure, they suspect, may be the key to understanding concussions associated with symptoms of dizziness and vision problems.
“Concussion is a big, vague term and we need to start breaking it down,” said Fidel Hernandez, PhD, a former graduate student in bioengineering, in a Stanford News press release. “One way we can do that is to study individual structures that would be likely to cause traditional concussion symptoms if they were injured.”
Oiselle Running Apparel for Women, Sarah Lesko from
If working hard was the only factor in running fast, we would all be elite.
Ultimately, peak performance is a function of nutrition, recovery, training, and sleep, which can make the multiple-moving-parts aspect of running frustrating, but also very exciting. For me, one of the biggest factors in peak performance has been ensuring my ferritin levels are sufficiently high.
I’m not a doctor, and I can’t give medical advice, but I can share some of my personal experiences with navigating the iron issue, as well as a few tips and tricks I’ve learned along the way.
England has overtaken the United States as the best place in the world to play women’s football, according to Chelsea manager Emma Hayes.
Women’s football has traditionally been dominated by the U.S., who have won three of the sport’s seven World Cups and will go into the 2019 edition in France as defending champions, while the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) has regularly attracted some of the world’s best players.
But the profile of the Women’s Super League, England’s top flight, has risen dramatically since its formation in 2011, leading to an influx of top foreign talent. Hayes pointed to this as a sign that England has surpassed the U.S. as the world leader in the growth of the women’s game.
University of Illinois computer science professor Sheldon Jacobson has always loved data.
For the past seven years he’s had a men’s NCAA Tournament bracket simulator. After getting many requests, Jacobson decided to put together one for the women’s tournament. It’s believed to be the first of its kind for the women’s tournament to predict all 63 games.
“People would send me emails, saying great data and they would start saying what about the women’s game,” Jacobson said in a phone interview. “We didn’t have the bandwidth support to develop it right away.”
This year, though, he was able to put one together using data from the past 25 years.
On the important occasion of International Women’s Day, FIFA is pleased to announce that a Global Women’s Football Convention will be held this June in Paris, ahead of the kick-off of the eighth edition of the FIFA Women’s World Cup™ in France.
Taking place on the 6th-7th of June, the first FIFA Women’s Football Convention will assemble leaders from the worlds of sports and politics for the first time, to discuss key issues around the development and empowerment of women in football.
Cheryl Cooky, associate professor of American studies at Purdue University and co-author of the book “No Slam Dunk: Gender, Sport and the Unevenness of Social Change,” which explores the ups-and-downs of gender equality in sports over the last 50 years. Cooky also is co-author of a 30-year study on the quality and quantity of men’s and women’s sports coverage on local TV news programs and sports news and highlights shows
A refusal by ESPN and other mainstream sports media outlets to cover women’s sports and associated issues equitably is at the heart of yesterday’s debacle. In this edition of Hoops Happening, a look into the issues at ESPN, Natasha Cloud’s tweets about the leak, and more.
