Behind the scenes of women’s basketball’s boom, there’s tension brewing over footwear.
Entrepreneurs and researchers want more shoes to be developed for the shape of the female foot. Currently, experts say, most basketball shoes marketed to women are still designed using lasts (the mold shoes are formed around) based mainly on the average male foot, which has a wider heel and flatter arch than a typical woman’s, among other differences.
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Improper kicks might lead to discomfort or worse, according to female hoopers cognizant of women’s increased risk of sports injuries.
“Companies are making shoes fit for the male foot form, and they’re labeling them unisex,” said Natalie White, the founder of women’s focused basketball shoe brand Moolah Kicks. “And it’s not fair to the customer. It’s not fair to female athletes. … It’s a marketing ploy.”
However there are benefits to the unisex approach. In recent years, New York Liberty stars Breanna Stewart and Sabrina Ionescu have gotten their own signature shoes with Puma and Nike respectively, ending a 12-year drought for WNBA players. In each case, the new models have courted both men and women.
“Something Stewie actually challenged us with from the start was to create a product that any basketball player could wear,” Max Staiger, Puma’s global head of basketball, said via email.
Stewies and Sabrinas have been popular across genders, even earning converts among NBA players. But some women are still left wanting a fit of their own.
With A’ja Wilson and Caitlin Clark poised for new signature Nike lines, debate continues over the specific shape they should take.
It’s Gotta Be the Shoes?
Yale head team physician and orthopedic surgeon Dr. Elizabeth Gardner has been tracking the shoe design discussion for a while now. Injuries once derailed her field hockey and lacrosse careers as a Bulldog, setting her on a path toward medicine. Since then, she’s seen numerous studies showing her experiences were far from unique.
Women’s basketball players have been found to sustain injuries at almost twice the rate of men, while female athletes in general have shown somewhere between a three- to eight-fold increase in ACL injury risk specifically.
For a time, women’s “hips and hormones” were blamed for the health gap, a suggestion that their physiologies left them more vulnerable. “There was a lot of talk about how women’s bodies were unfit for sport,” injury prevention expert Sheree Bekker recently told The Guardian.
But maybe sports have let down women, too. The quality of surfaces that girls train on could be a contributor, as could the training work assigned to them. For a counterfactual, some point to ballet, where ACL injury counts between men and women do not diverge so sharply. Then there are the shoes.
“If we’re going to be having a conversation about any of these injury patterns,” Gardner said, “something as blatantly obvious as shoes should be something in which we look at the differences in men’s and women’s feet and how that relates to the upstream mechanics.”
Nicole Demby’s path began much like Gardner’s. She was limited to buying boys’ basketball shoes as a high schooler in the 2010s before tearing her ACL. “Whether you want to or not, you end up learning a lot about the mechanism of that injury,” she said.
She went on to study mechanical engineering and sports product design, writing a thesis in 2021 focused on “the effects of underrepresentation in basketball footwear.” Demby, who now works on the problem as a member of Adidas basketball’s innovation group, argued that a lack of girls-specific footwear contributes to the fact that they are twice as likely to drop out of sports by the age of 14 as boys are.
Beyond the potential for serious injuries, women cite general discomfort and blisters as the result of wearing what they see as scaled-down men’s shoes. Designers believe an alternative shape and lighter construction could also benefit certain men in sports as well.
New Kicks on the Block
Adidas launched a women’s fit model last year, the Exhibit Select, with college star Hailey Van Lith debuting the silhouette. The shoes have since been spotted on 2023 WNBA top draft pick Aliyah Boston, 2021 WNBA Finals MVP Kahleah Copper, WNBPA president Nneka Ogwumike and seven-time All-Star Candace Parker, according to kixstats.com’s records. In May, Adidas announced Parker would become the company’s president of women’s basketball following her retirement from the WNBA.
Nike did not respond to a request for comment, while Adidas declined to comment for this story.
White, meanwhile, founded Moolah Kicks in 2021 after seeing one too many advertisements where WNBA players hawked men’s players’ shoes. The company—now backed by Mavericks co-owner Mark Cuban and Dick’s Sporting Goods’ investment arm—has designed its shoes to fit women and used its boxes to highlight both the growth of women’s hoops over the last two years as well as the remaining inequities.
Brand ambassador and Minnesota Lynx guard Courtney Williams is representing Moolah in the WNBA Playoffs, having specifically praised the shoes’ shorter break-in process.
“We accept bad-performing sneakers as quote-unquote normal,” White said in a company profile last year, “and it’s not.”
Gender-specific fits have also become more common among runners and soccer players, though they still aren’t the norm. Insiders suggest it’s a matter of market size driving increased investment in certain categories. In the meantime, many praise the success of the unisex Sabrinas and Stewies as a step in the right direction.
The shoe fight represents one of several frontlines as believers push for women’s sports to match the men when it comes to TV exposure, brand backing, press coverage, travel accommodations and training quality, to say nothing of pay.
And more research is likely needed to determine just how big an impact different shoes might have.
“We’re just recognizing more and more the fact that a lot of what we quote-unquote ‘know’ [in medicine] has been ‘well, we know that in men,’” Gardner said. “Oftentimes it is the same in women, but we need to have an understanding and an appreciation for identifying those times when maybe that doesn’t hold true.”
Women’s ACL injuries, Gardner added, offered one of the first such lessons in the orthopedic community, where sports science could push the broader field forward.
This much, then, is already clear: A slight change in shoe form factor has the potential to leave a massive footprint.
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