Women in Sports (WINS) Study
Advancing elite women athletes’ health, performance, and wellbeing through research and community engagement.
About WINS
The Women in Sports Study (WINS) is research initiative focused on advancing life-long flourishing, health equity, and wellbeing for elite athletes who play women’s sports. Through athlete-centered and community-engaged research, WINS examines how sport environments shape health, belonging, performance, safety, inclusion, retention and long-term sustainability. We believe women athletes deserve rigorous science that reflects the full complexity of their lives. WINS is committed to intersectional research with the potential to transform how elite sport environments understand, support and invest in athletes.
Our Mission
To advance elite athletes’ wellbeing, performance, and lifelong health through research, community engagement and knowledge translation.
Our Vision
A future where elite women athletes are fully represented in research and supported across their athletic career and beyond with the knowledge, care and resources they need and deserve.
Our Values
Engaging with athlete communities to promote meaningful, lasting change.
Promoting sustainable high-performance careers with evidence-based insights.
Translating research into real world solutions and resources.
Supporting fairness in access, treatment, and opportunity for all athletes.
Our Origin Story
WINS was founded on a fundamental belief: elite women athletes deserve rigorous, research that centers their voices, reflects the complexity and intersectionality of their lived experiences, and responds to their real-world needs.
In 2025, a team of athletes and researchers that included social scientists, historians, epidemiologists and neuroscientists, collectively asked: where are the multidisciplinary, longitudinal, and intersectional studies that elite women athletes need and deserve?
After analyzing all the research on elite women athletes over the past 25 years, we reached a grim conclusion: the kind of research athletes deserve doesn’t exist. We decided to change that.
We came to the table with the expertise necessary to fill this gap. Our team has experience leading the largest ever study of NFL players and their families and conducting cutting-edge research on elite athlete health, racial and gender discrimination, head injuries, pain management and opioid use, and the history of sports and sports policy.
Together we are building a comprehensive, longitudinal. multi-sport, multi-method study of elite women athletes. Our findings will provide actionable guidance for optimizing performance while supporting athletes’ mental, physical and emotional health. We will identify best practices for maximizing financial wellbeing and post-career opportunities and help build safer and more sustainable sporting environments.
One thing we know for sure: this research would not be possible without a shared commitment to centering athlete voices and building community-based partnerships with current and former athletes from all walks of life.
Nothing about athletes without athletes. Period.
From our Athlete Science Advisory Board to our Sport Committees, we have assembled a group of athletes, physicians, entrepreneurs, legal experts, community leaders, coaches, and activists who share our mission and vision. Together we will change sports.
WINS officially launched in Spring 2026, with funding from the Women’s Health, Sports & Performance Institute and Harvard’s T.H. Chan School of Public Health.