By Michelle Stevenson
Step inside many college athletic facilities or professional sports complexes and you’ll find the kind of environment that rivals the most futuristic Silicon Valley campuses – until you enter the wing designated for women’s teams.
Even at some major universities and in top women’s sports leagues, facilities for female athletes are smaller, outdated or awkwardly adapted from those originally designed for men. Women’s facilities are often copy-and-paste designs scaled down in square footage and ambition that fail to reflect the specific physiological, psychological and personal needs of female athletes.
Perhaps the most enduring symbol of this disparity is the NCAA’s 2021 March Madness debacle, when photos of the women’s tournament “weight room” – a small rack of dumbbells and some yoga mats—went viral after being compared to the fully equipped facilities being provided to male athletes. Though that incident spurred public outrage and prompted some improvements, the underlying issue persists: women’s needs are often an afterthought in sports facility planning.
As women’s sports surge in popularity, from sold-out college basketball and volleyball games to record-breaking crowds in women’s professional soccer, it’s past time we stop asking female athletes to thrive in spaces that were never built for them. Instead, athletic departments, women’s pro teams and the architects they work with must commit to a more progressive framework, one that’s grounded not just in equity, but in excellence. That means designing facilities around the whole athlete and using five key principles to do so: Integrated, Holistic, Optimized, Personalized and Adaptable.
Integrated: uniting specialists, technology and space
In high-performance sports, the best outcomes happen when athletic trainers, physicians, nutritionists, psychologists and coaches work collaboratively in connected environments. For female athletes, this integration is particularly vital, as their training, injury prevention and recovery plans often differ substantially from men’s. For example, women are more prone to ACL tears, injuries that require tailored preventative training and close coordination between biomechanists, strength coaches and physical therapists. An integrated facility would house all these experts alongside gynecological health practitioners, maternal health experts and mental wellness specialists trained in female-specific stress patterns. Rather than being “add-ons,” these specialists should be part of the team’s core support structure – functionally and physically.
Technology can also help foster an integrated approach. The archaic method of tracking a player’s health and wellbeing via a hand-written questionnaire can be burdensome and wildly inaccurate. Biometric sensor technology – both wearable and built into a facility’s infrastructure – can be thoughtfully deployed to yield better data in a less invasive manner. For women, this can be especially important since studies show that menstrual cycles can affect physical balance. Integrated biometric sensors can help identify changes in a woman’s body and recommend day-to-day modifications to her training regimen based on the data that’s collected.
Health technology has at long last advanced to the point where biometric data can be collected and interpreted almost instantaneously to inform patient care and, for athletes, highly customized and individualized training and nutrition programs. Sports facility planners should seize the opportunity to embrace this technology and integrate it into the built environment.
Holistic: supporting body, mind and spirit
Elite athletes don’t just need a place to lift weights, they need an environment that supports recovery, mental health and overall wellbeing. A holistic facility considers the athlete’s entire experience, not just what happens in training or during competition.
For female athletes, this includes wellness spaces that account for gender-specific stress factors and mental health challenges, such as body image pressures and higher reported rates of anxiety and depression. Recovery lounges, meditation rooms and easy access to mental health counseling are not frills, they are necessities. According to the National Institute of Mental Health, women are about one-and-a-half to two times more likely than men to use mental health services. These services should be front-and-center, not an afterthought.
And a truly holistic space for professional athletes who are mothers would also include childcare facilities and rooms that provide comfort and privacy for breastfeeding.
All these details can help female athletes perform at their highest level. What’s more, this level of attention communicates something powerful to the women these environments serve: you are not just an athlete, you are a whole person and this space was designed and built to honor every part of who you are.
Optimized: right staff, right care, right time
Optimization is about efficiency and readiness: ensuring that every athlete has timely access to the right resources to perform at their peak. Unfortunately, many women’s teams still train in facilities with shared or limited access to recovery equipment, treatment professionals and performance technologies. When care is delayed or generalized, performance and safety both suffer.
To optimize performance for female athletes, facilities must be built around sport-specific demands and schedule-aware access. That means flexible treatment rooms available after late-night travel, gender-specific medical technology such as ultrasound for reproductive care, and equipment calibrated for the female body – not retrofitted from male prototypes. It also means hiring staff who understand the specific mechanics and nutritional needs of female physiology and are not just applying male-based protocols to women’s bodies.
On a separate but related note, spaces shared by men and women don’t need to feel awkward. Hopefully, in the future, sports facilities that are purpose-built for women will be the norm and not the exception. But for now, even temporary or shared facilities can have a feeling of permanence and authenticity.
Architects and designers should recognize this fact and seek out creative solutions to convert facilities swiftly to provide unique environments for players and teams. These solutions may include utilizing semi-permanent screens for urinals, so they aren’t the focal point of a women’s locker room; increasing the security and light levels at all entrances to a facility; or providing key branding components and recognizable features that celebrate a women’s team’s history. This involves far more than slapping up logos and painting a wall.
Personalized: tailored to the athlete, injury and sport
No two athletes are the same. And no two recovery plans, training regimens or nutritional strategies should be either. Personalized design allows each woman to train, recover and grow based on her unique body, goals and sport.
For example, consider two female athletes: a sprinter recovering from hamstring strain and a volleyball player managing joint pain. Each requires different recovery modalities, therapy tools and biomechanical assessments. A facility designed with personalization in mind includes modular recovery zones, sport-specific strength rooms and nutrition stations that offer varied options tailored to hormonal cycles, dietary restrictions and energy demands. Technologies like individualized performance dashboards or wearable data integration should be standard, not premium.
In addition, we should also acknowledge that women can have increased anxiety over body image and exposure, both in public and privately among peers. We should seek to create environments that take this into account.
It’s time to deconstruct the notion of the locker room as a place of unity and team bonding tied to the exposure of being undressed. Considering the growing presence of athletes under the age of 18 in both college and professional sports, along with other relevant regulations, it is worth exploring the idea of providing equal facilities for men’s and women’s teams, rather than merely separate ones.
Adaptable: built for what’s next
Technology in sports evolves quickly and so do the needs of athletes. The best facilities don’t just meet today’s needs; they’re built to accommodate tomorrow’s innovations. Such flexibility requires infrastructure and spaces that can be easily reconfigured or expanded without disrupting the experience of athletes.
Adaptability is particularly important for women’s teams, who are often relocated as programs expand or given access to underused men’s spaces instead of facilities purpose-built for them. Adaptable design principles ensure that as training methods advance – whether in injury prevention, recovery science or wearable technology – changes can be implemented easily. Movable walls, modular treatment rooms and tech ports in every training bay make it simpler for spaces to grow and evolve. Female athletes, whose sports are seeing exponential growth, deserve environments that can grow with them.
We must also acknowledge that the unique needs of female athletes may require more physical space than their male counterparts require. For instance, women’s restroom and shower facilities have been shown to take up 30% more space than facilities that would serve the same number of men.
With square footage at a premium in construction, we must find a way to avoid sacrificing needed space to fit a women’s facility within a footprint equal to or smaller than a comparable program for a men’s facility. Smaller training spaces are not an acceptable compromise. One creative alternative might be to explore how an adjacent outdoor space can be used to increase interior space. Employing movable partitions and other tactics to create rooms that can be utilized for multiple purposes can also be considered.
From afterthought to intentional
The most powerful facilities are not the biggest or most expensive – they’re the ones that are most intentional. The five principles of Integrated, Holistic, Optimized, Personalized and Adaptable design must become the new blueprint for women’s sports.
Athletic departments and team owners now have a choice: continue to retrofit men’s facilities and call it equity or start designing for women as they are – powerful, diverse and deserving of their own space. Female athletes are no longer asking for permission to be taken seriously. It’s time their environments caught up.
Michelle Stevenson, AIA, a former student-athlete and current weekend warrior, is principal and regional director of the Sports & Entertainment practice for HKS, a global architecture, design and planning firm.
