03/06/26 07:14:00
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03/06 05:00 CST Experts see a wide data gap in women's sports science. This
WNBA team owner wants to fix it
Experts see a wide data gap in women's sports science. This WNBA team owner
wants to fix it
By DOUG FEINBERG
AP Basketball Writer
NEW YORK (AP) --- New York Liberty owner Clara Wu Tsai has a vested interest in
getting the most out of female athletes. What she found when she took over the
team in 2019 was a major gap in data and training compared to what's available
for men.
She jump-started efforts to change that by funding the Human Performance
Alliance five years ago, and halfway through the 10-year project, she sees a
bright future.
"Most of the sport science research has been on male subjects and findings
applied to women," Wu Tsai said in a phone interview. "More girls are playing
sports and those female athletes do deserve the same scientific understanding
that has been available to men."
Her goals for the remainder of the 10-year project are to be able to predict
injuries before they happen, individualize training and recovery, and close the
data gap in women's physiology.
"This is the kind of work I always wanted to do," Wu Tsai said. "Work that
studies health has never been funded, so I saw this opportunity. You don't do
it if you don't think it will help people."
Women's sports participation has surged over the past five decades. According
to the National Federation of State High School Associations, girls' high
school sports participation has grown from 294,000 in 1972 to 3.4 million today
--- an increase of more than 1,000%. Women made up 48% of athletes at the 2024
Paris Olympics, the highest share in Olympic history.
At the collegiate level, women now represent 44% of all NCAA athletes, up from
15% before Title IX took effect. With all the increased participation of women
in sports, only 6% of sports science studies focus exclusively on female
athletes, according to the Alliance.
A tangible piece of the Alliance was the building of the Women's Health Sports
and Performance Institute (WHSP) in Boston. The full research institute was
opened in January.
"In my mind, it's absolutely valuable," said doctor Kate Ackerman, who is the
cofounder and president of WHSP. "Women are 50% of the population, so if we
want to decrease injuries in half our population, we have to be studying them
appropriately and I am really excited that we're building this team of people
where we're having a really high standard."
Ackerman and the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance is well aware of the
greater number of girls and women who suffer ACL injuries.
Scott Delp, who is the director of the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance at
Stanford has helped develop tools to assess female athletes for injury risks
like ACLs.
"We can take videos of girls or women running and cutting and we can assess how
well they control their torso, the limb alignment," Delp said. "How will they
absorb energy and see if they're at risk? Provide personalized training. We can
tell by the way your torso lags that you're going to get hurt, like you're an
accident waiting to happen and you can train against that."
Delp is one of more than 500 scientists across seven institutions involved in
the Alliance.
Travel, sleep and performance
One of the Alliance's studies is tracking how travel schedules, late games and
circadian disruption impacts performance and recovery in WNBA and Australia's
WNBL players. Early findings have shown that teams perform worse with more
travel mainly by allowing more points on defense. Eastward travel hurts home
team performance likely because its harder to shift your body clock forward.
"This is how you can really scale the impact of this," Wu Tsai said.
"Ultimately you want to bring the academic sector with sports leagues and have
them work in concert to get the broadest impact possible. It's one of the
dreams I'd like to realize somewhere in the next few years."
Wu Tsai said that the Liberty do have an exercise physiologist, who is the
chief innovation officer for the team.
"He can coordinate research outcomes from the Alliance with training
protocols," she said. "There have been some of the best practices we've
developed related to travel, eating, sleeping and life cycles."
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