Addressing the Needs of Female Professional and Amateur Athletes

This study fills a major gap in the development of the dialogue around women's sports, a report that for the first time articulates female athletes' sense of the most pressing issues they face as competitors today. The results show that while many improvements have been made in U.S. women's sports, especially since the 1996 Olympic Games, there remains a consistent cluster of issues that needs to be addressed. This report outlines those issues and serves as the basis for policy recommendations and to facilitate communication about athletes' needs

Affective Infrastructures: Toward a Cultural Neuropsychology of Sport

Recently there has been a turn toward considerations of embodiment, cognition, and context in sport studies. Many researchers have argued that the traditional focus on clinical psychology and performance enhancement within the discipline is incomplete, and now emphasize the importance of athletes’ social and familial contexts in a research paradigm that examines interconnections between movement, cognition, emotion, and the social and cultural context in which movement takes place. While it is important that the sport studies focus is being expanded to consider these interactions, I will argue that this model is still incomplete in that it is missing a fundamental variable – that of our evolutionary neurobiological roots. I will use the work of affective neuroscientists Jaak Panksepp and Stephen Porges to show that because sport so clearly activates neural systems that function at both proximate and ultimate levels of causation, it can be seen to serve fundamental needs for affective balance. A neurobiology of affect shows how the evolution of the mammalian autonomic nervous system has resulted in neurophysiological substrates for affective processes and stress responses, and has wide-ranging implications for sport studies in terms of suggesting what forms of coaching might be the most effective in what context. I propose the term cultural neuropsychology of sport as a descriptor for a model that examines the relationships between neurophysiological substrates and athletes’ social and familial contexts in terms of how these variables facilitate or fail to facilitate athletes’ neuroceptions of safety, which in turn have a direct impact on their performance. A cultural neuropsychological model of sport might thereby be seen to elaborate a relationship between proximate and ultimate mechanisms in concretely applied ways

Her Life Depends on it III: Sport, Physical Activity and the Health and Well-being of American Girls and Women

Her Life Depends On It III is the Women's Sports Foundation's comprehensive report that reviews existing and emerging research on the links between participation in sport and physical activity and the health and wellbeing of American girls and women. As with the previous editions in 2004 and 2009, this study also confirms that physical activity and sport provides the critical foundation, in no small part, that allows girls and women to lead healthy, strong, and fulfilled lives. Ten years since its first publication, the updated Her Life Depends On It provides an even more comprehensive review of the ever-expanding body of research that demonstrates how important it is for girls and women to participate in sport and physical activity. The report's contents reflect the review of 1,500 studies, nearly 400 covered since the previous edition

Her Life Depends On It: Sport, Physical Activity and the Health and Well-Being of American Girls

This report is a comprehensive compendium of research that points to physical activity and sport as fundamental solutions for many of the serious health and social problems faced by American girls. An appreciable mass of evidence-based knowledge about girls' involvement with sport and physical activity has been generated during the last decade. The amount and quality of this research are uneven and varied. For example, a good deal of research examines the associations between physical activity and risk for coronary heart disease, but studies that focus on risk for Alzheimer's disease are just beginning to issue. Researchers have verified links between high school athletic participation and teen pregnancy prevention, although more longitudinal research is needed to thoroughly confirm the connections. Overall, however, this report shows that the current state of knowledge on the relationship of physical activity to the health and social needs of American girls warrants the serious attention of public health officials, educators and sport leaders

Her Life Depends on it: Sport, Physical Activity and the Health and Well-Being of American Girls

By Don Sabo, Kathleen E. Miller, Merrill J. Melnick, Leslie Heywood.https://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/bookshelf/1166/thumbnail.jp