Description of Potential Gender-Specific Factors Influencing Injury and Performance in Professional Female Football Athletes

INTRODUCTION: The Women’s Football Alliance (WFA) is a professional Women’s American football tackle league. This is an understudied population and no study, to date, has reported on female football players. The purpose of this study was to describe variables related to performance and injury risk in professional women’s football teams and compare these variables. METHODS: Eighty-seven female football players (age: 32.56 ± 7.47 years) from the WFA league participated in the study. A survey was administered through Qualtrics with questions pertaining to sports participation and injury, menstruation, contraception, mental health, and nutrition. Independent sample t-tests and Fishers exact tests were used to assess associations between variables. Frequency distributions were also used to assess trends present in the population. RESULTS: Frequency distribution of respondents for Division I was 48.3%, Division II with 31.8% and Division III 37.9%. Participants were from the Northeast (40), Midwest (32), South (9), and West (6). Most participants (37.9%) had less than one year of experience playing professional football and 50.6% of participants sustained an injury between April 2019 and February 2022. Age was not significantly different (p=value: 0.624) between injured and uninjured participants. Almost half had a mental health disorder with anxiety being the most frequent. There were no statistically significant differences (p-value: 0.060) between proportion of respondents with a diagnosed mental health disorder among regions. There were no statistically significant differences between proportions of respondents with mental health counselor access among divisions (p=value: 0.391). Just over half used contraception at some point throughout their life with the pill being the most common form. Over 50% of the participants rarely or never ate oily or white fish, so some nutritional deficiencies, like omega-3 fatty acids, may be present in the diet. CONCLUSION: The results of this study provide insight to sex-specific characteristics related to health, injury, and performance in a female football athlete population. Future research should prospectively investigate the relationship of these variables with injury and performance in order to optimize training and resources for these athletes