On Thursday, a female athlete-focused organization, The Women’s Health, Sports & Performance Institute (WHSP), opened its doors with more than $50 million in funding from the company’s ownership group, led by co-founders Dr. Kathryn Ackerman and David and Jane Ott, and Wu Tsai, who began investing in the project back in 2021.
The institute, which works with the International Olympic Committee and the U.S. and Paralympic Olympic Committee, is the first ‘one-stop shop’ to combine female athlete-focused research, education and medical care under one roof. WHSP is also a member institution and research partner of the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, a $220 million collaborative research alliance founded by Wu Tsai and her husband, Nets and Liberty co-owner Joe Tsai.
‘When there’s big announcements like this, people think, ‘Oh, this had to be the time because things are moving so quickly for women’s sports,’ but really, we’ve been working on something like this for a couple [of] decades,’ Ackerman told USA TODAY.
‘This research gap has persisted even as women’s sports are exploding, so we know that this investment in women’s sports now is really moving quickly. It’s going much faster than the investment in men’s sports, so it is a magical time for female athletes, but, really, the research is lacking.’
Wu Tsai’s scientific advisor contacted Ackerman at the beginning of the 2020 pandemic. The Nets and Liberty co-owner was interested in developing a human performance alliance that would study health and performance at a high level and apply the lessons learned to the broader population. Ackerman eventually joined a group of leaders Wu Tsai tapped to write a proposal for a human alliance and was tasked with leading the charge for female athlete health and research discovery. Wu Tsai also gave $220 million to get the alliance off the ground.
From there, the idea of WHSP slowly took shape. With investment from the Otts and Wu Tsai, a physical space was built to continue research that would help solve problems for female athletes that Ackerman says have existed for decades. According to Ackerman, Wu Tsai is interested in ‘big discoveries’ that show how far an athlete can push their bodies, and the Otts are focused on gathering basic information that can be distributed to ‘athlete entourages’ to help prevent injuries.
WHSP plans to address issues related to adolescent, collegiate, professional and postpartum athletes. However, Ackerman shared with USA TODAY that key areas of focus include relative energy deficiency in sports (REDs) for athletes who experience low energy availability or are not getting enough calories in for how much they’re exercising. Additionally, the WHSP team also plans to prioritize postmenopausal women.
‘Success to me is that we continue to move the needle forward, and we can have people cooperating with each other so that we can get answers for them faster,’ Ackerman said.
‘There’s so many silos in medicine and in sports and in care. I think if we really want to see change for women, we have to come together and realize there’s a lot that different people can contribute, and this is going to be a home base for people to work together to do that.’