Whatever they do I’d like the W to lengthen the season, even if the number of games doesn’t go up that much- I presume they will add 4-6 games due to the new teams, but they should decompress anyway. They make these players play too much with not enough time for rest.
There's a very under-studied and poorly-understood aspect of women's sports that desperately needs some research, which is "why do elite female pro athletes get injured at a much higher clip than men's athletes?". And I'm not sure it is just a matter of adding a bit more rest: There is an
absolute epidemic of ACL injuries among elite women's soccer players (and at all levels too, including youth), one that's been very evident for years, despite them playing many
fewer annual matches / minutes than elite men's players.
Generally speaking, women's bodies are "designed better" than men's bodies. Female is the default sex in nature - only by getting bathed in testosterone in utero does a body turn into something else - so genetically, they've ended up more optimized. Women sweat more efficiently than men (can outrun men in ultramarathons, for example), get many kinds of cancer less often, and seem particularly better-protected against common neurological issues (massive gender gap in autism rates, ADHD rates, schizophrenia, all favoring women). The list goes on. Sure, their muscle density and VO2Max is lower than men's - that's the whole point of the testosterone, after all - but that should just make a difference in how hard / strong they can play (when compared to men), not in propensity for injury. There's no reason they should be more
fragile in a sporting environment, indeed the opposite.
The most plausible direction for study that I've seen so far is that training habits (strength training, stretches, routines before/after a practice) have been developed over the decades, really over a century, all geared towards men's sports and what works for men's bodies, as a matter of trial-and-error. And now that women's pro sports are more than a blip on the radar (financially and culturally), the training habits they've inherited are simply transferred over to their sport, by default - that's all we got! and that's all that the professionals available for hire know! - rather than being carefully designed and tested for what's optimal for the bodies of elite female athletes.
Michele Kang, the owner of the Washington Spirit and a major entrepreneur in women's soccer, has
established a collective among her owned clubs (And some others that are participating in the NWSL and around the world), basically in order to study this and devote money and researchers' time to experimentation and publishing the conclusions, because she thinks it's a major blind spot that we have. I certainly wouldn't doubt her on that point. But it's a field full of unknowns, for basketball every bit as much as for soccer and track and other sports. And a bit more rest doesn't seem to explain the difference, or meaningfully lower the risk.
