2018 WNBA Season Update - A Race to Stay Healthy!

Throwback to my Connecticut Sun Days with Allison Hightower, Kelsey Griffin, and Tina Charles

The 2018 WNBA Season is heading into its second trimester.  How quickly time flies when you love watching your favorite teams and favorite athletes who play a short 34-game season (plus some pre-season and playoffs) with most teams around 11 games in.  This season is condensed with the upcoming FIBA World Cup being held in Spain starting September 21st, with a USA National Team that will take the greatest stars from all the WNBA Teams resulting in this abbreviated schedule.  The usual length season, which already felt like a whirlwind, is now a hectic schedule with games practically every other day. This week the Seattle Storm played three home games in six days, but recovering and preparation between games becomes a challenge under these scheduling circumstances. And above all that, if a team is influenced by injury, how does this affect ticket sales and the entertainment on the court?

I've spent many years on the WNBA sidelines, but now that I'm a healthcare provider, my perspective on the league is different.  When I started working for the Connecticut Sun in 2007 as their Travel Coordinator and Equipment Manager, I helped out in the athletic training room, but I was in charge of laundry and buses.  My biggest concern for players' health was if their sneakers were giving them blisters. I also needed to remember to pack uniforms for injured reserve players who generally were not listed on the line-up but could potentially play if someone else got hurt.  At that time, teams could keep a player available to fill an injured player's spot... that doesn't exist anymore.  

From a physical therapy perspective - this season's playoff contenders will likely be the teams that can stay healthy despite the crazy schedule.  Rookie players will need to learn how to take care of themselves in ways they didn't have to in college. When I was at UConn, we had meals as a team that offered nutritious options and salads pretty much daily.  It is easy to see that a new grad WNBA player might not know how to cook because they never had to before.  They also need to self regulate their recovery, figure out what works best for them, and start taking direction from new athletic trainers than the ones they've used for the past four years. It's a little bit of a relationship-building game in a really quick span of time, and it's been really interesting to watch how that develops year after year. 

Veteran players will also need to find ways to take the best care of themselves to recover between games.  There aren't many days off and the need to re-fuel, rest, and feel good through massage or chiropractic care or ice baths or foam rolling need to be well managed and consistently available.  The WNBA could not have picked a better season to get a league-wide partnership with Cortiva, a massage therapy training school, to have more massage therapists available in certain cities.  Recovery will be key this season.

Since I wrote my PT School thesis on women's basketball players' injuries at the college and WNBA level, I've been thinking about player injuries in this league for a long time.  Feel free to be the fourth person to ever read that paper in your spare time. I try to follow what's going on around the league with regard to injuries - and have several ways of doing so. This website and this website (and there are several others that are similar) list WNBA injuries and stay fairly current... but the first website lists injuries as a service for people who are betting (gambling) on women's basketball and the second one is a fantasy sports team database.  They generally seem to be getting their information from news articles so it's not certain how reputable any of the sites are.  There are currently injuries listed on 9 of the 12 teams, with several teams listing multiple injuries.  I also follow numerous writers on Twitter who write about the injured athletes for their local teams.  The schedule has been up for discussion quite a bit more this season than in the past. 

What I keep waiting for is a bigger entity to start organizing this information.  ESPN has an NBA Injury Report page, but no WNBA Injury Report page, CBS Sports has an NBA Injury Report Page but doesn't have one for the WNBA - nor does their header even include a link to the WNBA at all!  Research publications in the WNBA are limited, but this 2006 paper examined WNBA versus NBA injuries and acknowledges that, even at that time 12 years ago, the rates in the WNBA were higher.  So why isn't this information more readily available yet?  Part of the problem is that the NBA has an Athletic Trainer's Association (NBATA)  which reports and tracks their injuries whereas the WNBA Athletic Trainers report their injuries to the WNBA, and then nothing happens with that information (or at least it is not published and made available for public consumption).  This is something I, personally, am hoping to remedy in the future.  

I didn't look to the research for specific data on the impact of fatigue on injuries - but I learned in school that there is a likely correlation, particularly with postural muscles which would include the muscles of the calf and also with reaction time where the brain is slower to react when it is fatigued which could impact injuries.  Since ankle sprains are always considered the most frequent injury in basketball players, it's not really surprising that we're seeing a lot of ankle injuries already this season.  Here's to hoping that these injuries are low grade and the athletes will recover quickly and get back to playing - but there's a lot of basketball left to be played by fatigued athletes.

I'm already trying to prepare myself for the dark ages that will come between the end of the 2018 WNBA Season and the beginning of NCAA Women's College Basketball almost two months later... it's going to be rough.  Fortunately there is time to continue enjoying WNBA basketball right now while it's here.  Good luck to all the WNBA Athletes, Athletic Trainers, Strength Coaches, and team personnel this season.  And a friendly reminder - if you're part of the travel party - you need to take care of yourself too!  Hydrate and recover!