Hi everyone, my name is Sarah Buck and I'm a first year MBA student at MIT Sloan. It is my pleasure to introduce our panel, the future of peak performance, Clara Wu and John Donahoe. Our panelists today are Clara Wu, governor and owner at the New York Liberty and John Donahoe, athletic director at Stanford Athletics. Our panel will be moderated by Jessica Gelman from Kraft Analytics Group. The panel will run for 40 minutes and we will leave five minutes at the end for questions. Please submit questions via our Cadence app. And with that, I'll turn it over to you, Jessica.
Thank you so much. Good morning. All right, this is I've said this a few times, but this is the panel I'm most excited about for the I know we we were like on top of each other. Because you both of you as partners, as leaders are literally changing the future of sports and we'll get into to why, but it thank you both for being here. Very busy schedules. Both of your first times at the conference. So, welcome to the 20th. So, I'm going to start with you, Clara, and you you know, you've obviously transformed the Liberty and you won your first crown last year. Congratulations. And and you know, you only purchased the team about six years ago, 2019. And you have led the Liberty to the highest valuation of any women's professional sports franchise. So I what I wanted to start with is kind of the origin of each of you and then we'll get into all of the great work that you're you're doing together. But what are the structural changes that you've made in with the Liberty that you believe led to this meteoric rise?
I think the most transformative thing that we did was to move the team from Westchester to to play at Barclays Center in Brooklyn. And once we did that, you know, I mean it was it was logical to do that because of course the fan base was in New York City and a team of that caliber should be playing in New York. But so moving them there was the most transformative thing I think we did. And then after that we just started to make investments in the team in the same way that we make investments in our men's team. Right? So we upgraded the facilities, we upgraded performance, every aspect of the player experience. And I think that commitment to player care allowed us to attract key talent starting with Breanna Stewart who was the top free agent in 2023 and she led us to be able to attract more stars. And then we started to win. And at the same time we leaned into Brooklyn culture, the music, the fashion, the art. You know, our our mascot Ellie embodies all of that. And then we also just were very mindful of our entry points and we kept it affordable so that young fans and longtime supporters could be in the building. And then as we started to win and as we continued to win, Liberty Games just became the place to be.
Well, I've actually been to a couple of your games and the first time I went was it's awesome. It's if you haven't been to it, it's it it l it's I mean, how would you It's like you're on stage. Everything's dark. And now a lot of teams, we've done some work with the the Timberwolves and the Lynx and with Alex Rodriguez coming in as the owner. That's one of the things that they that they are kind of borrowing from you. So sincerest form of flattery, but
Yeah, I don't mind being the play I mean, you know, we are I think a lot of people are looking into that playbook of
You know, I went to in my prior life at Nike, I went to a lot of lot of professional sports and college sports games and the Liberty game was I I think you were so right. It has such an energy and such an excitement. It's distinct
And a lot of like important like famous people are at the games too. So you're drawing in people. Okay. So John, you have led and had an amazing career leading disruption at a lot of different companies including eBay, Service Now and most recently Nike. So, help us understand your decision to join Stanford during such a time of massive change in college athletics. Like we we could say disruption.
Yes, it's disruption. Well, Jessica, you know, it frankly it wasn't on my radar screen. Even a year ago, I I I retired from Nike. I was 65. My wife had been in the Biden administration. We both moved back to the Bay Area and thought, "All right, next stage of life. we want to stay active, but we were done with full-time roles. And I was talking to Tara VanDerveer about teaching a class together at Stanford Business School on leadership and lessons from sports. And so, literally last summer, I get a call from Tara who I figured it is to talk about the talk about the class. and she says, "John, we've just been doing this this search for a new athletic director at Stanford and we've got some finalists, but as we sit down, we realize that college athletics is going through this crazy period of disruption. We don't know where it's going to land. Therefore, we aren't exactly sure what skills an athletic director of the future needs. Would you consider coming back and helping us navigate through this for the couple of years?" And then, this is Tara, who's a master recruiter. She said, "By the way, this would be a nice way to serve Stanford. Didn't you say you like servant leadership?" Like, "All right, Tara, you had me at hello." And and you know, Jessica, it's been it's been great. It's it's a chance for me to serve a university I care deeply about, serve a cause. I think college athletics plays such an important role in our society. I'll tell you that I'm five months in. It's been the most nourishing role I think I've had of my career being around these student athletes, being around these coaches. There's a purity of purpose and frankly college athletics if we don't make some changes. There are significant portions of it, Olympic sports, women's sports that are at risk at the moment. And so, real sense of cause. So, I'm I feel quite grateful to be able to be part of this.
Well, thank thank you because I I share your concerns and having leaders such as yourself. Obviously, you have very deep Stanford roots yourself to try and solve this and also I want to get into a little bit about the the Wu the Wu human performance alliance because it's really impactful. But I think specifically with John's arrival, you have a a very dynamic leader who understands the opportunity and really the platform that Stanford allows. So maybe you can provide a little bit of perspective that how his arrival changed how your and we'll get into a little bit more but how it change how you thought about a change to the partnership.
Well, Stanford was the natural home for the alliance just because of the strong research capabilities and a strong culture of interdisciplinary collaboration and proximity to Silicon Valley so that engineering and medicine and athletics and data science can easily be integrated so that we can accelerate that translation between discovery and application which is really what this is all about like research into application.
And Stanford also has a strong history of athletic achievement. We won the Director's Cup 25 years straight and by the way about I think 59 Stanford a combination of students and alums 59 went to the Paris Olympics. So you know that that in itself is sort of the context of Stanford and then John of course led science and innovation at Nike. So when he got to Stanford, he immediately saw the alliance as an asset. And so together through this like we have this shared commitment that every Stanford athlete will have the best science behind them. And we also share this commitment that whatever we learn at Stanford will flow back to the wider population.
So, I mean, obviously is you're you're you're living a good life, not working so hard, and and then and then Clara comes in. And so, how did her involvement factor into your decision to actually say, "Okay, I want to do this."
Well, Clara and I first met when I was at Nike. We had a dinner, you remember it, up in Portland and Joe was there and John Slusher and others, but we ended up sitting next to each other and spending the whole dinner almost shutting everyone else out talking about human performance, women's sports and the need to to use bring link research with actual performance and and and it was a passion of mine at Nike and and I met Clara and so that's when I first you first introduced me to Scott Delp then.
So when when I ended up at Stanford what was just great was a couple things were clear. One, there's really strong alignment at Stanford right now around athletics. Our trustees, Clara is a trustee, our president, John Hennessy, a deep commitment to athletics. And so that's I think incredibly important if we're going to make advances. And then and then the commitment of something like Wu is what a gift if you're an athletic director. And so very early on we talked to when I that first trustee barbecue, Scott and I met the next week and we just clarified we're working together in 40 areas. That's great. Which are the ones we're going to punch through and absolutely lead on. And so we picked a couple areas and we'll talk more about those, but but it's if you're an athletic director to have Wu on your campus is a just a huge a huge opportunity to build frankly competitive advantage to make to make it whether as a recruit or one of our athletes feel like I'm getting something here at Stanford I can't get anywhere else.
Well, and I think also reinforcing how important college athletics is to understanding what is happening and and it's a petri dish in many ways that of course it's athlete focused for now, but it extends so much more broadly and that that is I think the beauty of the partnership. So, let me let me go in to a little bit for the folks in the audience to explain what the human performance alliance is. So it's a multi-institute science-driven initiative that is discovering biological principles to optimize human performance and catalyze innovations in human health for all for all. Five years in the alliance has grown into one of the largest and most integrated research ecosystems in the world with seven core institutions, hundreds of collaborations, more than 500 publications and multiple therapeutics advancing toward FDA approval. So really, you're just getting started. And so we're going to share this and and this again, this is why I'm so excited. So Clara, you know, what inspired the creation of this? I mean, you obviously acquired the Nets and the Liberty in 20 in 2019 and then in 2020, you launched this.
Yeah. Okay. Well, yeah. So I guess owning the teams revealed to us that even at the highest levels of sport, there is so much that we don't understand about the human body. And for professional athletes, their health, their performance, their career longevity, that's like their greatest asset. But yet so much of modern health research is focused on studying disease rather than peak performance. And so we saw an opportunity to invest in research that could predict injury, accelerate rehabilitation, and optimize performance. And yes, to extend pro athletes careers, but also generate knowledge that should benefit the wider population. And so the the human performance alliance, it was created to study people at peak health. And the big question is what can we learn from top performers about how the body moves, adapts, fatigues, recovers, and then how does that translate into practical tools? And since we're at the sport, the Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, I do want to mention that some of the most promising work that we're doing in the alliance is at the frontier of sports analytics and that's causation and prediction. And you know we're working on these digital twins which are based on models that are grounded in biomechanics and physiology. And these models can predict injury and personalized training and simulate performance scenarios. And by the way, they're all based on very simple video recordings and software that basically turns two iPhones into a mini biomechanic.
So it's a digital twin of the athlete.
Yeah. And they can see it and as well as doctors and
Yeah. And coaches and coaches. Yeah. So that's that's predictive analytics is you know the future the present the future of sports analytics.
That's really cool. So I I mean John obviously you're there and and as you as you alluded to you were very excited about it. Maybe you can give us a little bit of perspective about how you have enhanced what Stanford Athletics is doing in the space.
Well, again, one of the things I think that makes Wu's Alliance so distinct, it's it's the commitment to both cutting edge research and actionable practical insights for athletes, their coaches, and their trainers. And so, when Scott Delp and I sat down, we identified two areas there was real need that we could really push through. ACL injuries, preventing them, and then treating them, and hamstring. And so, I'll just I'll I'll tell an example of how this works. So we can take our our our women athletes from our basketball, volleyball, soccer, lacrosse, field hockey sports where ACL injuries are a concern because it's today ACL injuries still plague it's still plague athletics in particular for women which are somewhere between I looked it up on ChatGPT it says four to six times more likely. It varies by sport and there's not been a lot of progress on this. So the way the the the technology works is we take one of our athletes and they get high-speed video film them and it takes 10 minutes and then there's a creation of a digital athlete a digital twin AI empowered digital twin that takes the actual biomechanics and physiology of the athlete one of our athletes and says this is her propensity for an ACL injury and by the way the propensity may be high it's because the right hip is a little twisted out. Another one, another athlete, it may be that the propensity is medium, but you gota you got to build out the left knee. And so this insight is then shared with the athlete and their trainer so that they can begin training to strengthen or adjust the the the conditions that will reduce the likelihood of an ACL injury. And so it's been it's a it's too early to measure if there's been a measurable decline because we're only a year in it. But but our athletes love it. Our coaches love it. And the trainers now can offer more personalized training. There's a comparable thing with hamstring injuries. Hamstrings injuries are one of the the the issues there are reoccurrence. When because someone gets a hamstring injury, they come back, it happens again. And so Wu scientists are now out on the football practice field with our football team. And again, in a 10-minute exercise by videoing them through going through a series of exercises, they can predict the digital twin can predict the likelihood of hamstring injury or hamstring reinjury or where they are in their recovery and rehab process. And that again is shared with the athlete and their trainer. And so it's a it's something that's very tangible. It's having an immediate impact on and personalizing training and rehab as well as I think overall on our teams. I think we're going to see fewer injuries and more sustainable rehab and recovery.
Well, and it's interesting because I feel like the athlete will sometimes know that something feels off and now the the trainer can actually see it and they can be aligned on it and work together. And I I mean, as a one-time athlete who happened to you know, strain my muscles quite a bit, this it would have been incredible to have this type of information. So, that's really I'm excited to see the impact of it on on the future. So, just as we're as we're kind of getting into this, a shared question for either one of you or both of you, but I mean, we've talked, you obviously are doing some work with with football, but a lot of the focus is on on the female body, for this alliance, right? But traditionally, sports science is only focused on on the male body. And so that has led to misdiagnoses and and kind of underserved knowledge of the of of female athletes. How are you thinking about trying to close that gap and what lessons should the broader research and sports community take from the work that you're doing? Like how would you like to see it extended?
Yeah. Well, it's true. One of the most important priorities of the alliance is to close the gender gap in human physiology and performance knowledge. The only 6% of sport science studies are done exclusively on women. But female athletes deserve the same depth of scientific understanding that historically have only been available to men. And so you know to that end we are creating a very large research network focused on female health and performance and it extends across the entire alliance and beyond. And there's such a pent-up demand for this you know for the research but also the application of it. And so a big focus is not just the research but also translating it through education and clinical studies. We recently launched the Women's Health and Sports Performance Institute. It's called WISP and I think you were at the launch and it just launched in January in Boston. It's run by Dr. Kate Ackerman and it's the first organization to unite research, education and clinical studies under one roof. And in Kate's specific instance, she's going to study female physiology, hormonal cycles, metabolism and bone health. And through WISP and the work that they do there, it will definitely help to close that gap. But we basically need more WISPs in the world. So, hopefully, you know, as that gets underway, there'll be other other groups that want to start something like that.
Love it. John, you you you also convened an event in the fall at Stanford. You want to share a little bit more about that?
Yeah. Well, I I think we were just talking about this backstage. I I I think one of the extraordinary things that Clara is doing is Wu is becoming a a vehicle to convene and to invite others in. And we had a we had an event at Stanford that we we co-sponsored with Wu where we invited 400 400
400 came. Yeah. Probably invited more but
But it was stunning. We weren't expecting it was full all day long. The excitement people from all different walks and you know and it's interesting because when I was at Nike we were working on women's sports things women's sports initiatives and things and there's WISC and there's all sorts of organizations. This brought everyone together to talk about how do we work together to to drive impact and and you know one of the the there's an organization at Stanford as part of Wu called FASTER that Emily Krauss leads Emily might even be here today and it's Emily I'm going to get this right Female Athlete Sports Science Translation Research and it's it's the translation and what was happening there is you'll There were these amazing famous doctors and orthopedists and others in medicine. There were research labs that are working on women's sports and athletics research. There were coaches and trainers and practitioners. And it's the power is coming together and working together. And I think the convening power that Wu has and then Stanford can be part of that convening power. And then we can be a lab. We have 900 student athletes. So we can be a lab to actually focus on applying the insights, applying the learning.
Well, and you have some pretty remarkable former Stanford athletes, Katie Ledecky, Julie Foudy.
Yeah, exactly. Mendoza. Yes. The list goes on and on.
Well, I think like when when we were kind of connecting in advance of of this, you mentioned when you started the interest from the professors at Stanford and the multidisciplinary nature of what you're doing. Can you can you share that because to me that is part of the magic of what you're doing.
Well, what's great about the way and I don't know if Scott started this or you and Scott the way Wu works at Stanford is Stanford is this extraordinary university with with medical schools and and world-class faculty in so many different disciplines and so I think the numbers now over 200 different faculty are involved in working with Wu around some dimension of sport science and research and what is so exciting is faculty that otherwise wouldn't work with each other. So, I'll I'll give a I'll give an example. We're beginning initiative on mental wellness and health, right? Because athletes are performing, they're they're under extraordinary pressure, the pressure of their lives. The the inner game is almost as important as the outer game now. And Scott was saying that he's getting faculty from the med school, from the department of psychology, from the department of psychiatry, brain sciences working together on this issue in ways they hadn't worked together before. And so so Wu becomes the the sort of hub of interdisciplinary research and and we all know some of the best insights particularly I think in athletics come when you when you look at something end to end and when you do it in an interdisciplinary way.
Yeah. And I I mean I think you're using the full the full power of of Stanford. I want so I want to just because we I want to just talk a little bit more about the college athletics at Stanford and specifically how you're managing the disruption what we're seeing between football, basketball, maybe the Olympic sports and how you're approaching that to kind of try and ensure that there's you know that we continue to be able to support all of the different parts of what makes sports in college sports so powerful. What how are you thinking about it?
Well, college first is a very calm, predictable study environment right now. You know, look, Jessica, let me maybe I just a thought or two on college athletics and then what we're doing at Stanford. So, I I've spent most of my career in disruptive industries and and and industries being disrupted. And when the what happens in disruption is you have a a rule set a prevailing rule set that worked for some period of time. And college athletics has been a relatively stable environment for the last 30 or 40 years. And then something happens that triggers disruption. In this case, it was a series of court cases around paying athletes, eligibility, around a variety of things. And you know, eventually you're going to have you're going to have a modern set a new set of rules that then that then prevail. It's in the middle that you live in this lawless middle. And that's where we are now where there's some rules being proposed. is not clear what those rules are, who's following them. No one really is certain what they believe in. And so we're in that lawless middle. And the challenge is the implication is that what's happening is the arms race in football threatens women's and Olympic sports. And I'll come back to how we're dealing with that at Stanford in a minute. What we're doing, and actually I'm going down to a meeting at the White House later this afternoon. There's a group that's trying to say how do we bring the modern set of rules for college athletics and what's needed is relatively straightforward. We can just turn to what the NBA and WNBA have done and what the NFL has done is I would say three simple things. One, you need eligibility rules. It makes no sense if you're going to have college athletics. It makes no sense for a 28-year-old that's played three years of pro or is in their ninth year of eligibility to be playing in college athletics. So, we need eligibility rules the same way the WNBA and the NBA have eligibility rules. Second, transfer portal free agency. Right now, they can transfer every single year. So, student athletes are transferring three, four, sometimes five times and they're not getting their educations. They're not getting their degrees. that's inconsistent with the academic institutions. So we need to we need to address the portal rules and then we need some form of salary cap and and transparency and so we're working a number of us are working on that. I think there's widespread belief that we need to get to that and I think we will whether it takes months or years I don't know. So that that's college athletics within Stanford. You know, we're we're blessed. We've got 36 sports. We have 900 student athletes, a long legacy in Olympic sports. You know, you talked about the 59 athletes. If Stanford would have been a country in the Paris Olympics, we would have been the ninth or eighth largest country in medal count. And so we have this legacy. Women's sports are really strong. And so what we're what we're trying to think and is segmenting things. Football's professionalizing. It's going to continue to professionalize. We're participating in that. And and how football runs out, will there be a super league or different leagues, we don't know, but we're participating in that. Basketball, I would qu I would college basketball. I I'd see if I don't know if you and I have talked about this. I would characterize college basketball's a third professionalized and two-thirds college. If there's 15 players, you're paying your stars. You're paying two or three, maybe four. most of them know they're never going to play in the WNBA or the NBA, at least in Stanford. And so it's still largely around college. And then the Olympic sports, which is Stanford's heritage, at the very same time others are talking about cutting back on Olympic sports. We are going to double down and invest in Olympic sports and so and investing in our women's sports because we believe that is the that is such an important role to our to our country, to our society, and to the world. And what we're going to do is try to make the economics of our Olympic sports less dependent upon football or less dependent upon other sports, find more sustainable ways to fund that, including we're going to launch a campaign to endow our women's sports and endow our Olympic sports. And so we want to be seen as leaning into those, you know, aggressively at this time and hopefully in in the process doing a little bit with women's and Olympic sports that Wu is doing is inspiring others to participate.
I mean, I love that as a blueprint. I mean, I think it's really important and I hope it's emulated. So, thank you for that leadership and you know, you're you're you have you have a lot of perspective on that as well. I think coming back to the to the human performance alliance and and we can talk about Stanford, we can talk about the other institutions too. But at Stanford there's we talked about the digital twin. That's amazing. But what areas of the research are are you most excited about right now?
Well, I I like the futuristic stuff, like precision exercise medicine. And the scientists at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California are studying the molecular biology of exercise. And so they're identifying molecules that regulate metabolism, appetite, sleep, performance, and all of that will allow us to well that will enable precision exercise medicine. Because right now instead of prescribing to all of us that we should do cardio 20 minutes a day, three times a week or I think the latest is everyone should take 5,000 steps a day. you know, instead of doing saying that, you know, we will be able to tell people what exercise, at what intensity, at what time of day, with what recovery protocol, and for men and women. And that's really exciting to me.
And and and another piece I want to make sure that I also talk about this really important work going on at the University of Oregon around regenerative rehabilitation. And there we're trying to advance breakthroughs in scar-free healing and muscle regeneration and bone repair. And this is important because it's not just for recovery, but it's to figure out how to restore tissue to its original strength and function. And if we do that, it'll have enormous implications for how we age, how quality of life.
Well, I mean, I think if maybe you can help provide a little bit more perspective on how you picked the institutions that you kind of just gave two very good examples, but like why were those the institutions that and and how you merged? This is the area, right? There's no perfect path and and and
And by the way, you know, we have a lot of partners and we welcome new ideas and and and new partners. In fact, we just added Emory University late in the game or not late in the game, just last year. It doesn't mean late in the game. We're still in the game. you know I mean the game was early early early days but the way it started is we had this idea that there was some kernel I had this intuition that there was something here in the space of human performance and so together with my science adviser we gathered a group of people that represented all these different subject areas engineering biomechanics imaging athletics data science like we all got everybody together in a room and this was right before the lockdown of COVID and and we gathered together for a day and a half and just whiteboarded and people and the the excitement in the room these these these researchers were saying this is what I've wanted to do all my life but there was no funding for work like this and so out of that group of 12 I think we then had another session we added a couple of voices that weren't there and then from that people that group of people who were invited the leadership council became Oregon but they you know they do have a they run they're the main people who the main institute that looks after regenerative rehabilitation and Salk because of Sachin Panda who wrote the book on circadian rhythm he looks after all the the molecular work even though all the work is going on really at all the
Yeah I mean so your point on like that you're just you're just getting started and I I mean there's a lot of questions that are out there.
