BIRMINGHAM, Ala. – The Samford soccer team and its members have accomplished many impressive feats over the last decade. On the field, the program has won or shared nine-straight Southern Conference regular season titles and has earned several trips to the NCAA Tournament. The program's student-athletes have always maintained high grade-point averages as well, and two of the program's current student-athletes recently earned an even more elusive honor.
 
Seniors Mary Raymond and Taylor Yount recently had their second peer-reviewed manuscript published, a rare feat for a Samford student. Christopher Ballman, an associate professor in the kinesiology department, said it is rare for a student to have even one published manuscript, making the two this pair had produced even that more impressive.
 
"Mary and Taylor are two of the most driven students in the classroom, in the lab and on the field," Ballman said. "They are special and just a different breed of hard workers. I could not be more thankful and proud of their leadership. They make just as much impact on the field as they do in the classroom. They represent our lab, department and all of Samford with excellence."
 
Raymond's and Yount's most recently published work, which appeared in Oxygen, an international, peer-reviewed, open access journal on the whole field of oxygen research published quarterly online by MDPI, was entitled "Effects of Acute Red Spinach Extract Ingestion on Repeated Spring Performance in Division I NCAA Female Soccer Athletes." The work was published on March 9, 2023, and Raymond and Taylor served as co-first authors on the manuscript.
 
The first study published was a part of a group research effort with other students in a class called Ergogenic Physiology. They helped to lead that study as research assistants. During this study, they were trained on completing high-intensity exercise testing, psychophysiological assessments, blood collection and biochemical analysis of hormones/metabolites during exercise.
 
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