Distance and Intensity Profiles in Division I Women’s Soccer Matches across a Competitive Season

Abstract

Women’s participation in soccer has increased rapidly. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the physiological demands imposed on women’s NCAA Division I soccer players across a season according to speed, total distance traveled, and numbers of sprints measured via GPS (Polar Team Pro®). Eighteen athletes (19.2 ± 1.1 years, 50.5 ± 6.5 mL/kg/min and 23.4 ± 3.6% fat) participated in this study. The analysis was obtained through 13 official matches. Speed zones were defined as Zone 1 (1.0 to 5.99 km·h−1), Zone 2 (6.0 to 10.99 km·h−1), Zone 3 (11.0 to 15.49 km·h−1), Zone 4 (15.5 to 19.9 km·h−1) and Zone 5 (sprint > 20 km·h−1), with Zones 4–5 considered as high intensity running. Individual differences in playing time and total distance were highly variable due to substitutions. Average distance traveled per game in quartiles was 3.9 km, 5.6 km and 7.4 km in the 25th, 50th, and 75th quartiles, respectively. Relative to playing time, players travelled an average of 113.64 ± 17.12 m/min (range: 93.7 to 143.5 m/min) and ran one sprint every 4.12 ± 2.06 min. When distance was summated and analyzed for the entire team, significant difference between halves was found for speed Zones 2, 3 and 4, with greater values found in the first half. Total distance, high intensity running and sprint distance were significantly less than previously recorded in professional players. These findings suggest that coaches should consider the unique physiological demands and recovery opportunities present in NCAA play when constructing practices and conditioning programs.

Contextual Variation in External and Internal Workloads across the Competitive Season of a Collegiate Women’s Soccer Team

“…Research looking specifically at Division I women's soccer has reported similar relative workloads to those found herein [9,19,21,40], as well as similar positional trends in duration of play [19].…”

“…Relative workloads (PL/min, PL/M, M/min), which are more commonly reported in the literature, fail to demonstrate the duration of the load experienced, which can ultimately demonstrate varying degrees of vulnerability for fatigue. Workloads were assessed by game half to further support how factors such as fatigue or reduced demands may contribute to trends; similar to previous research, both external and internal workloads herein were consistently lower in the second half [9,31,32,43,44].…”

“…While this general area of research is now quite robust, when dissecting through specific attributes of the existing research to better understand variations based on sex and level of competition within a sport, the amount of relevant literature can drastically descend. For example, existing research is exponentially reduced when considering only motion analysis research, all of which widely spans across leagues at the elite and sub-elite level [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. Further reductions occur when identifying research conducted on U.S. collegiate Division I female soccer players [9,10,21,22].…”

“…For example, existing research is exponentially reduced when considering only motion analysis research, all of which widely spans across leagues at the elite and sub-elite level [9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. Further reductions occur when identifying research conducted on U.S. collegiate Division I female soccer players [9,10,21,22].…”

“…While there are many season-long studies on male soccer players [23][24][25], there are far fewer published investigations within Division I women's college soccer. Junior et al [9] and Wells et al [21] each reported on the monitoring of a single season, while Sausaman et al [10] impressively covered 4 consecutive seasons from a collegiate women's team. Although each of these are critically important studies for the field, these three did not report heart rate and the athletes were from non-"Power 5" athletic programs.…”