The New York Liberty Are Setting the Standard for Women's Applied Sport Science
Women's basketball has a data problem — and the New York Liberty are doing something about it.
When Susan King Borchardt, Director of Performance, first started working in the WNBA, she was asking for a budget just to stock bananas in the locker room. Today, the Liberty operate with a full-time sports scientist, a nutritionist, five physical therapists, and an athletic training staff large enough to ensure that every player — from the team's stars to its developmental roster — has someone with them every step of their session. That shift didn't happen by accident. It reflects a deliberate, organization-wide investment in building something that women's professional sports has historically lacked: a rigorous, individualized, data-driven performance infrastructure.
A Field Still in Its Infancy
Applied sport science for women is, by most accounts, still in its early stages. The research base that informs decisions around load management, movement quality, injury prevention, and return-to-play protocols has been built almost entirely on data collected from male athletes.
Ryan Newton, athletic trainer and physical therapist for the Liberty, puts it plainly: the discrepancy isn't just in the volume of research — it's in the quality and design of the studies themselves. Lindsey Elizondo, Director of Health and Medical, uses the word "infancy" to describe where the field currently sits for women. Quin Sandler, Plantiga’s CEO, recalls searching for published benchmarks on things like speed zones, muscle loads, and movement norms for women and finding almost nothing. "Lots and lots of papers on men," he noted. "In women — almost non-existent."
That data vacuum creates a challenge. But it also creates an opportunity. The teams and practitioners who are willing to collect, analyze, and act on first-party data from women athletes right now aren't just improving their own programs — they're contributing to a body of knowledge that doesn't yet exist anywhere else.
The New York Liberty are choosing to be those people.
Building Infrastructure That Matches the Ambition
What distinguishes the Liberty's approach isn't any single technology or method — it's the philosophy underlying how the performance and medical teams are structured and how they work together.
Susan and Lindsey's roles — Director of Performance and Director of Health and Medical, respectively — are intentionally overlapping. They operate as a unit rather than in parallel silos, with the understanding that a player's health and her performance are inseparable. Every athlete receives an individualized plan. Not a position group plan. Not a template. An actual, personalized program built around that specific player's load history, injury history, movement patterns, and recovery needs.
Achieving that level of individualization requires hands. The Liberty recognized early that personalization at scale is only possible with adequate staffing, and made the investment. The result is a training environment where players aren't waiting in line for treatment — someone is with them, working with them, every step of the way.
Using Movement Data in the Real World
One of the core challenges in applied sport science has always been the gap between the lab and the court. Force plates, motion capture systems, and controlled assessments give practitioners detailed, high-quality data — but they measure how an athlete moves in a sterile environment, not during a live practice or a fourth-quarter possession.
The Liberty are using in-shoe sensor technology to bridge that gap. The sensors are worn daily — chips live in the training room, are handed out before practice, collected after, and charged for the next session. The data collected includes total load, distance, acceleration and deceleration counts across different speed zones, and bilateral asymmetries — how each limb is loading compared to the other, in real time, during sport.
That last metric — asymmetry during activity — is one Ryan Newton identifies as particularly valuable. Other technologies can tell you how much work an athlete is doing. Fewer can tell you whether one side of her body is doing significantly more of it than the other, in the context of an actual practice or game. That kind of information changes how practitioners make decisions.
For example, a player may feel healthy and move well throughout the return-to-play process, while the data reveals subtle differences in how they are loading each side of their body. That gives performance and medical staff another layer of insight to evaluate and address as they work toward a full return, while also providing further insights on aspects of recovery that a player may not feel or be able to self-report.”
Personalization Isn't Just a Buzzword
The Liberty don't use a blanket approach to monitoring. Each player's data is reviewed through the lens of her specific history and context.
Lauren, lead biomechanist, explains why this matters: a 12% left-side impact asymmetry might look like a problem worth correcting in one athlete and be completely expected in another who has a prior injury that means she structurally moves differently. Treating those two situations the same way wastes time at best and chases unsolvable problems at worst. The data only becomes actionable when it's filtered through what you already know about that person.
Lindsey describes the same philosophy in practice: for a player who's been relatively healthy, the focus might be load and volume trends. For someone managing a more complex injury history, the lens shifts to asymmetry monitoring and movement quality. The data infrastructure is the same. What changes is how each athlete's information is interpreted and used.
What Athletes Actually Want to Know
Data programs in professional sport can generate friction — players sometimes worry that data will be used to limit their participation rather than support it. The Liberty's staff has been deliberate about addressing that concern directly.
Susan describes having the same conversation with every player on the roster: the goal is not to find reasons to hold you out. It's to keep you healthy enough to play 44 games, because when you're playing, everyone wins. The data is a tool for optimization, not restriction.
The athlete response, across the board, has been curiosity more than resistance. Some players want granular detail. Others want a simple summary: was I in the green today? What they share is an interest in understanding what the data means for them, which requires the staff to do the work of explaining the why — not just presenting numbers, but building enough understanding that athletes can engage with the information meaningfully.
Contributing to Something Larger
The New York Liberty are not just building a better program for themselves. Every practice session, every return-to-play progression, every season's worth of load data is contributing to a growing dataset that women's sport science has never had access to before.
Ryan Newton frames the broader need clearly: the field needs more universal normative data for women — position-specific baselines, load benchmarks, movement expectations across different phases of the season. That data doesn't come from research labs. It comes from practitioners like the Liberty's staff, working in real environments with real athletes, collecting information systematically over time.
The WNBA's recent moves to allow in-game data collection — something that has not been possible until now — will accelerate this significantly. What the Liberty are doing with in-practice data today will be part of a much larger picture as game data becomes available.
Lindsey sees it as both an opportunity and a responsibility. More data means more information to interpret, which requires more rigour about how inferences are made. Not everything that can be measured tells a clean story. Sleep quality, personal stress, emotional state — these are real factors that influence how an athlete's numbers look on any given day, and no sensor captures them. The value of the data depends on the wisdom of the practitioners who contextualize it.
A Different Kind of Standard
Susan King Borchardt describes a moment that captures what the Liberty are building toward. She spoke with an elite athlete — national team level, playing overseas, well into her career — who had never heard of bilateral movement monitoring. When Susan explained what the Liberty are doing and why, the athlete's response was immediate: why isn't everyone doing this?
That's the question the Liberty's staff is quietly answering with every practice. Not by claiming to have everything figured out, but by building the infrastructure, staffing it appropriately, collecting the data, and using it — carefully, contextually, individually — to take better care of their athletes.
Women's applied sport science is early. The research gaps are real. But the teams that are doing this work now, rigorously and without waiting for the literature to catch up, are the ones shaping what that field will eventually look like.
The New York Liberty are among them.