NEW YORK \u2014 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\u2019s available for men.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cMost of the sport science research has been on male subjects and findings applied to women,\u201d Wu Tsai said in a phone interview. \u201cMore girls are playing sports and those female athletes do deserve the same scientific understanding that has been available to men.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u2019s physiology.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the kind of work I always wanted to do,\u201d Wu Tsai said. \u201cWork that studies health has never been funded, so I saw this opportunity. You don\u2019t do it if you don\u2019t think it will help people.\u201d<\/p>\n
Women\u2019s sports participation has surged over the past five decades. According to the National Federation of State High School Associations, girls\u2019 high school sports participation has grown from 294,000 in 1972 to 3.4 million today \u2014 an increase of more than 1,000%. Women made up 48% of athletes at the 2024 Paris Olympics, the highest share in Olympic history.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
A tangible piece of the Alliance was the building of the Women\u2019s Health Sports and Performance Institute (WHSP) in Boston. The full research institute was opened in January.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn my mind, it\u2019s absolutely valuable,\u201d said doctor Kate Ackerman, who is the cofounder and president of WHSP. \u201cWomen 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\u2019re building this team of people where we\u2019re having a really high standard.\u201d<\/p>\n
Ackerman and the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance is well aware of the greater number of girls and women who suffer ACL injuries.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can take videos of girls or women running and cutting and we can assess how well they control their torso, the limb alignment,\u201d Delp said. \u201cHow will they absorb energy and see if they\u2019re at risk? Provide personalized training. We can tell by the way your torso lags that you\u2019re going to get hurt, like you\u2019re an accident waiting to happen and you can train against that.\u201d<\/p>\n
Delp is one of more than 500 scientists across seven institutions involved in the Alliance.<\/p>\n
Travel, sleep and performance<\/p>\n
One of the Alliance\u2019s studies is tracking how travel schedules, late games and circadian disruption impacts performance and recovery in WNBA and Australia\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is how you can really scale the impact of this,\u201d Wu Tsai said. \u201cUltimately you want to bring the academic sector with sports leagues and have them work in concert to get the broadest impact possible. It\u2019s one of the dreams I\u2019d like to realize somewhere in the next few years.\u201d<\/p>\n
Wu Tsai said that the Liberty do have an exercise physiologist, who is the chief innovation officer for the team.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe can coordinate research outcomes from the Alliance with training protocols,\u201d she said. \u201cThere have been some of the best practices we\u2019ve developed related to travel, eating, sleeping and life cycles.\u201d<\/p>\n