How the Washington Spirit’s Performance, Medical, and Innovation Department is Changing the Game
Have you heard of the following phrases? “Training women as women” and, “We don’t want to train our players based on a manual designed for the white, 70kg male.”
If you have, there’s a good chance you heard it from Washington Spirit owner Michele Kang, who recently announced her mission to develop the “global blueprint for female athlete support” through her global venture, Kynisca.
Dawn Scott – the Spirit’s Vice President of Performance and Innovation and recently appointed Global Director of Performance and Innovation of Kynisca Innovation Hub – is the brainchild behind these taglines. The former United States Women’s National Soccer Team (USWNT) and English Women’s National Football Team (Lionesses) physical performance manager made a reputation for being the foremost leader in female athletic health and performance support following a decades long career in women’s soccer. This included supporting the USWNT in back-to-back World Cup wins in 2015 and 2019.
These taglines were borne from a two decades-long career in elite women’s sports where even the most privileged women’s sports organizations, like the USWNT and Lionesses, lacked dedicated insight, knowledge and resources to address female-specific health, physiology and performance.
In 2022, Scott was approached by Kang, and soon, the two formed a perfect marriage in navigating towards unchartered territory when it comes to unlocking female athletic potential. Scott pitched Kang a model and plan for how this could be accomplished, but for Scott – at the time the Director of Performance at Inter Miami FC – she needed reassurance that this opportunity would provide her the chance to do things differently.
In order for the plan to work, the Spirit would need to be bereft of the limitations that held back every other sports team. Kang understood the assignment, investing serious firepower to turn words into action. And it helped that Scott’s vision aligned perfectly with Kang’s outspoken mission for the Spirit to become the preeminent sports organization in the world.
Scott’s vision crystalized in the form of the Spirit’s Performance, Medical, and Innovation (PMI) department. It is arguably the team’s foundational tool, its secret weapon. Scott was the first domino to fall, and soon PMI staff members were hired in droves and positions never before heard of at the Spirit – or in women’s professional sport – filled across PMI’s four main tenants of physical performance, mental performance, female health and innovation, and medical. This is underpinned by integrated data analytics, led by Director Seungbeum Lee.
This 18-person team is charged with comprehensively caring for each individual player’s health and performance, while also driving research and innovation that has made the Spirit one of the world’s standards in sport performance and athlete care.
PMI’s goals can be simple to understand – at times, almost too simple that it distorts the supreme attention to detail and specificity that goes into optimizing health and performance of each player.
Starting with Performance, led by Director of Performance and Innovation, Kirsty Hicks and overseen by Physical Performance Manager, Adam Forrest, the mission is simple: physical preparation and development to maximize player availability and subsequently optimize player performance on the pitch. In a perfect world, players are available and ready to play their absolute best.
The Performance and Medical team apply intensely methodical planning to each training – for example, pre-training activation for players is originally crafted each day based on the theme of the field session. Training is tactfully periodized to meet the tactical demands of the technical coaches. Meanwhile, the lift in the gym is segmented in a way that accentuates and compliments the demands of each unique training session. All of these processes are individualized for each player based on numerous unique health factors – including wellness checks submitted by players every day – and later analyzed next to tangible and objective data.
Forrest said that there is an “individual plan for every player at every moment,” and it’s true of every focus of support.
Director of Mental Performance, David McHugh, works to educate and empower players and staff on mental performance and mental health, enabling them to resiliently manage stress and understand how to unlock their game in a variety of circumstances. He also helps ensure players are supported from a mental health lens through individual meetings and, where necessary, external referrals to a mental health practitioner.
McHugh applies different mindset training based on skillsets demanded by each position group. A forward, for instance, utilizes different mental performance tools in finishing shots than a goalkeeper would use to stop shots. Team captains utilize different mental performance leadership skills and disseminate messages to players differently than a coach would. Furthermore, McHugh carefully strategized and implemented mental performance mechanisms to assimilate players and staff to the arrival of a new coach midway through the season.
Director of Medical Eric Marchek says the medical team is focused on offering comprehensive medical care both in-house (i.e., treatments or rehab) and externally (i.e., chiropractor or dentist) to ensure optimal player health.
In practice, this requires managing every external partner ensuring each athlete has quick and exemplary care to fit their health needs. The medical staff leads return-to-play rehab progressions, in collaboration with the performance staff, encompassing training, nutrition and mental performance elements. Physical treatments are also curated to each player.
Before the season even begins, the performance and medical staff execute individual injury reduction screenings. The medical team, in collaboration with the performance team, customize individual programs week-to-week to ensure players are optimally preparing for training and matches, including considerations of any female health symptoms, overseen by Hicks.
The Female Health and Innovation team is dedicated to optimizing the Spirit’s performance and recovery, while simultaneously staying at the forefront of cutting-edge physical performance technology, strategies, and techniques, according to Hicks.
This collaborative support is focused on the individual needs of the player, and this is done through a combination of self-report data, objective data from wearables, as well as verbal and visual interactions with each player. At times, this might include tailoring a player’s nutrition, movement preparation, and recovery throughout the week to proactively manage the frequency and severity of female health symptoms, empowering players to train and perform on any given day.
Under this umbrella is a fully integrated fleet of PhD Performance Scientists who provide data driven insights, enabling the Spirit to both manage players and look towards uncovering pioneering research and development. They are developing groundbreaking insights to address topics such as sleep characteristics, impact of menstrual cycle symptoms on health and performance, and establishing acceleration and deceleration thresholds unique to elite female athletes.
While each element of the PMI Department must put its own practices under a microscope, clarity is only achieved when understanding the collective findings and viewpoints of the group. Each discipline works together to provide comprehensive care for each athlete, or what PMI staff calls, “360-degree care.”
“Making it digestible and actionable is probably the biggest skill,” said Forrest. “We have unlimited datapoints. The skill is how do you turn a million different points into just one conversation of, “I’m giving you a plan for today: It’s this, this, and this because of this, this, and this.”
Systems like twice-daily, full PMI staff meetings are scheduled to ensure that each athlete’s health and performance is discussed and analyzed in order to provide notes for care or adjustments to training.
“It’s almost like the meme about a group of people inspecting an elephant,” said Forrest. “One is looking at the tail, one is looking at the trunk, and so on. If each of us approached our challenges by only describing what we see from our area of expertise, we wouldn’t get the right solution. It takes the leadership group to zoom out and see how the pieces fit together and what the right thing is.”
It helps that for Spirit PMI, the people inspecting the elephant just so happen to be industry leaders at their respective crafts.
“Previously, in departments I’ve worked in, you have to be a woman of different hats. You’ve got to be the expert across the board and dive into things outside of your expertise,” Hicks said. “I mean it when I say, every single one of us is a leading expert in our own rights and disciplines. We have a fantastic blend of diverse staff in our department who bring so much expertise and lived experiences across the PMI spectrum. That is unique in size and value.”
The intentional, player-first process with a female health-specific lens that PMI operates with is as dynamic as the results it has yielded thus far.
“It’s only 6% of research that is focused exclusively on female athletes. The gender gap or science sex bias is huge,” said Hicks. “By using the same protocols as men, we aren’t training our females optimally.”
Throughout history, it was common for women’s sports practitioners to accept what we now understand as misnomers such as women not being able to train as hard as men. In leveraging science backed from PMI, the Spirit has found there are potential windows of opportunity to train women differently than men due to factors such as differences in fatiguability and recovery from certain types of physical activity.
But if you ask anyone in PMI, the biggest result has been earning the trust of the players.
“It’s what we all want – for players to trust that their medical and performance staff has their best interest at heart and will get them to where they need to be to be their best,” said Marchek. “Having the trust of the players and having them understand the process has been huge. They are vocal about it.”
Not only have the players responded positively to PMI’s process, but they have also begun to own their health and performance. Education is a core element of the PMI’s mission, with the PMI Department aiming to, “empower, educate and develop female players by providing bespoke high performance support, creating a unique and inspiring world-class environment.” Many players seek out additional information to educate themselves on a variety of health or performance topics. Empowerment to understand the “why” behind what PMI is doing has quickly become the norm among players and even coaches.
These massive wins and strong cultural foundation created by PMI can easily be taken for granted, so it is worth noting that this would not have been made possible without investment as intentional as the department it was dedicated to.
“We always have the female lens on, which is unique to our environment. Others, I think, are starting to look at it that way, but we are trying to lead in that way,” said Marchek. “We appreciate it is challenging to do with fewer staff, and we acknowledge that we are fortunate in that respect. It can be done, but not as well. There’s going to be corners cut. There’s going to be resources not had to take care of the player… at the Spirit, we have the support of Michele Kang and the resources to be able to do that.”
The resources available to Scott and the rest of the PMI department are truly rare. The staff is among the biggest in professional football, regardless of gender.
“I don’t think there is a men’s team with innovation embedded in the club like we are able to do,” said Hicks. “At the Spirit, if the PMI department discovers a question, we want the answer to, we have the manual, intellectual, and investment support to answer that question. More importantly, we have the time to try and answer those questions. In an ideal world, everyone is asking and answering questions, but our owner has given us the ability to do it.”
Despite the positive results, ground-breaking process, and overwhelmingly positive feedback and buy-in from players, the PMI Department is not entirely satisfied, a mindset that even impressed McHugh.
The full PMI Department have worked through their collective vision and values, as well as self-reflection on everyone’s personality profile and preferred way of working. The department then completed workshops to raise self-awareness about each other, all aimed at being more cohesive and impactful as a unit.
“Some of the most successful Performance and Medical Departments in elite sport are also the most cohesive, so we have spent a lot of time developing those elements to be more impactful as a department,” Scott said. “No one person is more important or stronger than our whole team, and everyone has a voice and opportunity for input here.”
The group consistently reviews goals and best practices, and they even almost steal the words out of each other’s mouths.
“We are trying to improve every day. It’s a process,” said McHugh.
“It’s still evolving. We’re trying to get it perfect, but I don’t think it will ever be perfect,” said Marchek.
“It’s a process that we are constantly refining. It’s not perfect, but we are getting closer every day,” said Forrest.
“We are continuing to grow, looking how we can finetune our practices and strategies to best support the players,” said Hicks.
The genesis of PMI was to create something that has never been built before – as Scott would say, “Be brave to do it differently.” Through unheard of investment, the Spirit is at the forefront of world-leading innovation and comprehensive care for its players. It’s safe to say PMI is living by the phrases “train women as women” and to develop the global blueprint for female athlete health and performance.
PMI Staff
Dawn Scott, Vice President of Performance and Innovation
Eric Marchek, Director of Medical
Cassi Peck, Athletic Trainer
Alessandro Ciarla, Head Athletic Trainer
Azita Nejaddehghan, Physical Therapist
Rylee Learn, Athletic Trainer
Kirsty Hicks, Director of Performance and Innovation
Taylor Cintron, Performance Dietician
Amanda Gordon, Performance Scientist
Owen Munro, Performance Scientist
Casey Greenwalt, Performance Scientist
Adam Forrest, Physical Performance Manager
Andrés González, Fitness Coach
Kyle Larimer, Strength and Conditioning Coach
Mike Trinh, Applied Sports Scientist
Songmi Kim, Athletic Performance Coach
David McHugh, Director of Mental Performance
Seungbeum Lee, Director of Data and Analytics
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