Experts see a wide data gap in women's sports science. This WNBA team owner wants to fix it

New York Liberty co-owner Clara Wu Tsai speaks during a WNBA basketball news conference, Thursday, Feb. 9, 2023, in New York. (AP Photo/Jessie Alcheh)

NEW YORK — 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 co-ordinate 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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Doug Feinberg, The Associated Press