Groundbreaking

(source)

I love a Women's World Cup summer, don't you? What I wouldn't give to be flying back and forth between Australia to New Zealand seeing the US Women's Team and their fierce competitors. (side note: check out the We Can Do Hard Things podcast, World Cup episode)

A recent article in Wall Street Journal, This Performance Coach Once Helped Patrick Mahomes. Now He’s Working With Australian Women’s Soccer, was one of many giving a peek behind the tournament. But this para made me smirk:

None of it would have happened without the initial realization that trying to run a women’s program with the same approach as a men’s team was a mistake (emphasis mine). It required an understanding of different biological factors, including menstrual cycles and a potentially higher predisposition to knee injuries. And the rapid professionalization of women’s soccer over the past decade meant that players in their late 20s now have seen their number of matches and practice sessions explode since they were teenagers, simply because leagues are better organized and fewer players need to work jobs on the side to make their soccer careers viable.

“We were really putting them in danger, particularly given their age group and where their training age was,” Steinfort says. “All of a sudden, in the space of three or four years, we might have doubled the number of matches they’re playing per season. That’s a significant spike. And it’s not necessarily a huge surprise, there are more injuries.”

We should train men and women differently because they are, in fact, different.

GROUNDBREAKING.

I am incredibly proud of the enormous changes in policies in the short 9 years since I have been retired from the Air Force regarding polices that adversely impact women. It turns out, body armor and other important safety gear designed for men, even in smaller sizes, doesn't fit women properly. The requirement to wear long hair in a bun impacts the efficacy of helmets. The policy to cease flying the moment a female pilot receives a positive pregnancy test (even though it is safe to fly during the second trimester) adversely impacts careers. The height requirement for certain aircraft results in significantly reducing the pool of women that can qualify to fly them. These are things that are finally, finally changing thanks to the DAF Women's Initiative Team. Awesome!