WNBA medical providers enter 2025 season with new professional associations

In January, a group of NBA team physical therapists announced the launch of the National Basketball Physical Therapy Association. Their initial aim was to organize the physical therapists of the NBA, G-League, and WNBA. Historically, physical therapists are not included in existing NBA groups for their athletic trainers or strength and conditioning coaches unless they held additional certifications that made them eligible.

What do medical staffs look like?

A medical staff in the WNBA includes doctors and surgeons, athletic trainers, and numerous specialists to keep athletes healthy and available to compete at the highest level. Athletic trainers respond to injuries immediately and are prepared to manage life-threatening conditions. All teams are required to provide this important service to their players. Management of an injury typically requires longer-term care than the initial injury response. Physical therapists and strength and conditioning coaches are key members of the performance and rehabilitation team, working alongside the athletic trainer to guide injured athletes back to the basketball court as quickly as possible. They collectively work to prevent injuries, as well.

WNBA medical providers were highlighted in the past for the high-quality work they perform. Every WNBA team has an athletic trainer and a team doctor, but after that, there is variability in what specialists each team employs or hires as consultants. During the 2024 WNBA season, rosters listed 19 athletic trainers, with several teams including both a head athletic trainer and an assistant athletic trainer. Hiring people who have expertise in two areas of practice, known as dual-credentialing, is a common approach in the WNBA. Four WNBA head athletic trainers were dual-credentialed as physical therapists. Those head athletic trainers worked for the Connecticut Sun, Indiana Fever, Las Vegas Aces, and Phoenix Mercury.

Strength and conditioning coaches, though technically not medical providers, are performance specialists and important contributors to athlete injury prevention and recovery. Every WNBA team has a strength and conditioning coach now, though that has only been the case for the past few seasons. There were five dual-credentialed strength and conditioning coaches who were also physical therapists last season: two in Las Vegas, and one each in New York, Phoenix, and Los Angeles.

All in, the pool of medical staff members, including strength and conditioning coaches, working in the WNBA is very small. There were a total of 36 staffers listed on rosters across all 12 teams, an average of three apiece last season. Only three physical therapists in the WNBA were not dual-credentialed in 2024. That’s a small group of people working in a similar role who can collaborate to aggregate data, pool their resources, and improve player health in a league that has faced injury woes. Some WNBA teams that did not employ their own physical therapist partnered with community clinics or their medical sponsors to support their rehabilitation needs. The expansion teams will provide a few more spots for highly coveted positions in professional sports beyond just the space for basketball players.

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Organizing the specialties

In an effort to help each group grow, the specialties have built networks, uniting them across teams to share resources and education. The National Basketball Athletic Trainer’s Association (NBATA) and the National Basketball Strength Coaches Association (NBSCA) websites provide membership lists, a rare glimpse into how massive medical and performance staffs around the NBA are in comparison to the WNBA. These groups, along with team rosters, identify about 200 medical providers in the 30 NBA teams. That’s an average of 6.67 people working in player performance per team. Nearly all the team’s physical therapists are absent from that list, but it’s estimated that the teams collectively have about 50.

While the NBATA and NBSCA do not permit any WNBA members to join, the WNBA athletic trainers have worked towards making an official group for many years. They’ve held Spring medical meetings informally, learning that virtual meetings were less successful than in-person gatherings. There was a temporary hiatus during the 2020 and 2021 seasons, but since 2022, the WNBA athletic trainers have been meeting in person. The 2025 meeting was their first official meeting to develop their bylaws and launch their association. There are fewer physical therapists around the WNBA, and while they also collaborate, their numbers may currently be too small to organize into a group on their own.

The WPBATA

The Women’s Professional Basketball Athletic Trainer’s Association is led by Minnesota Lynx head athletic trainer Chuck Barta, who serves as their president. The vice president is Natalie Trotter, lead athletic trainer for Athletes Unlimited. Head athletic trainer for the Atlanta Dream and also an athletic trainer for Unrivaled, Katie Buria, will be the association’s secretary, and New York Liberty head athletic trainer Terri Acosta, who also covered Team USA in the 2024 Paris Olympics, will serve as the treasurer.

“The biggest thing is to improve the care of the athletes. By working together with these meetings, which we’ve been doing without the education piece, is to work through the challenges we all have.” Barta said, “When we were all flying commercial, how do we travel with modalities if we want to bring modalities? And now we’re flying charter and want to know what new things are open to us. So we can all discuss this to make care better for the athletes.”

In addition to collaboration, there will be new access to educational opportunities. As a group, they can organize a conference and bring in speakers in a more affordable way, something that has historically been cost-prohibitive individually. Working with a unique patient population – professional women’s basketball players – they will now have increased opportunity to discuss case studies and navigate the complexities of high-performance athletes’ injuries. It’s also possible that having a collective voice will allow the WNBA athletic trainers the opportunity to negotiate deals for medical equipment and supplies.

“I think the league has done a good job as far as taking care of the players with us, and this is another layer that, from our standpoint, we can add to what the league has done,” Barta explained. “If we did something in the fall, like a medical conference or summit, where you have the physicians come in, the physical therapists come in, the strength performance coaches come in, it’s not around a league mandated protocol, but it’s a ‘let’s get better, together’ program.”

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The NBPTA

The National Basketball Physical Therapist’s Association (NBPTA) is taking a different approach. Serving as a hub for physical therapists across professional basketball, the NBPTA has invited WNBA and G-League physical therapists to join their ranks, along with their NBA counterparts. Though the group was founded by five NBA physical therapists, and there aren’t any WNBA representatives in the organization’s leadership, there could be an opportunity in the future.

As the group gets organized, their first priority will be to build their membership. They anticipate around 50 PTs in the NBA eligible to join, in addition to about a dozen in the WNBA. A review of NBATA and NBSCA membership and team rosters identifies about 200 staffers across the 30 NBA teams. That’s an average of 6.67 people working in player performance per team, double what the WNBA uses.

NBPTA founder and president Stefania Rizzo has been with the Brooklyn Nets as their director of performance and rehabilitation for seven years. She, alongside physical therapists working at four other teams, banded together to build a set of bylaws, become an established entity, and launch the association.

“We started talking about what we wanted to offer our members and how did we want to add value. From my perspective, there were three over-arching areas that I wanted to be the foundation for our group,” Rizzo said. “First, a sense of community in the league for physios with access to one another. Maybe you’re in another city and you need to know about a medical supply store… This can provide an immediate point of contact where we can ask other people who do our work and understand what we need.”

Rizzo continued, “It’s very hard working in professional sports to do any sort of professional development or education that’s worth your time… I wanted to create some sort of valuable, high-quality educational resources for PTs in the league that related to the work and to concepts outside the immediate day-to-day job.”

“The third, and probably most important thing,” Rizzo added, “is giving us an identity in the league. Everybody knows what athletic trainers in the league do… but we (physical therapists) have no identity or voice. We offer a specialized skill set to the athletes we work with.”

Historically, athletic trainers and physical therapists have faced challenges because their job descriptions overlap. The development of an association for physical therapists is not intended to compete with the existing NBATA, but rather to provide a home for the providers who aren’t currently eligible to participate. While NBA physios are left out, currently, there is no group for any WNBA provider to go to. An invitation to unify these medical providers could open doors to new research, technology, employee development, and collaboration that have previously not been available to anyone in the WNBA.

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The past, present, and future

In the WNBA, there have been past efforts for the athletic trainers and strength and conditioning coaches to create their own groups for similar purposes, so far without formal success. In the NBA, where medical staffs are much larger, there are still people who are left behind, unable to join the existing groups because their education doesn’t match the criteria to join the existing groups. The WPBATA is a groundbreaking opportunity for the athletic trainers of the WNBA and a new path to grow sports medicine for professional female athletes. The NBPTA will be a welcoming home for physical therapists, and they will provide a service long overdue to the WNBA.

“In the long run, what we leave behind when we’re out of the league will be another wave of physios who can carry the torch for physios in professional sport,” Rizzo said.

These groups are just getting started. The members of the WPBATA will be fairly obvious at the beginning, coming from the WNBA teams. Membership enrollment has started for the NBPTA, but the WNBA physical therapists who were contacted haven’t yet received any specific information about joining.

In the future, both groups have plans around education and collaboration that will allow them to grow and develop. Hopefully, launching these groups will help to reduce injuries. It might also build a bridge between the NBA and WNBA to provide access to optimal medical care for the best women’s basketball players in the world.