Nike Announces Project Shield with University Collaborators to Reduce Injury in Female Athletes

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Nike Announces Project Shield with University Collaborators to Reduce Injury in Female Athletes

• November 12, 2026
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What is Project Shield?
Project Shield brings together some of the country's leading sport science institutes, including those at Nike, Stanford Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, Emory University and the University of Oregon, to take action on athlete injury reduction, beginning with ACL injuries in female athletes.

What makes Project Shield different from other initiatives?
Project Shield is about turning research into reality. Each entity contributes its knowledge and resources based on its scientific expertise. Together, they'll work to turn their research on injury reduction into practical interventions for athletes at all levels.

What is NSRL Form for Field?
Adding to the Nike Sport Research Lab's body of research around movement analysis, NSRL Form for Field is a beta app that uses a proprietary algorithm to help global football athletes observe their own movement patterns through their smartphone camera.

Nike is announcing a new collaboration with Stanford Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance, Emory University and the University of Oregon called Project Shield: Protect to Perform, which brings together some of the country's leading sport science institutes with a goal of safeguarding player health and performance over their lifespan.

"For years, the scientific community has been studying the causes of ACL injury in female athletes, and yet athletes are getting injured just as often if not more frequently," says Matthew Nurse, Ph.D., Nike's Chief Science Officer. "By sharing knowledge and resources, we can accelerate our efforts to turn research into reality and make a meaningful difference in athletes' lives, now and for generations to come."

Each collaborator is contributing to Project Shield in a significant way, creating a virtuous loop around player performance and protection, assessing risk, readiness, prevention and recovery:

• Stanford will concentrate on prospective research, isolating variables that have the greatest impact on player health and safety based on prior injury mechanism research and future long-term injury surveillance. "The causes of ACL injury are complex and multifactorial, making it incredibly difficult for athletes, coaches and performance staff to know what to pay attention to," says Scott Delp, Ph.D., of the Wu Tsai Human Performance Alliance at Stanford. "Our research will focus on providing clarity in a trusted, science-based way."
• Emory will bring decades of experience in implementation science, translating sports biomechanics and injury-prevention research into practical, athlete-centered solutions. "Our collaboration with U.S. Soccer and the Arthur M. Blank U.S. Soccer National Training Center lets us bring what we learn in the lab directly to the field," says Gregory Myer, Ph.D., director of the Emory Human Performance Institute. "By pairing evidence-based neuromuscular training with AI-powered movement analysis, we can identify modifiable injury risk factors to help women athletes stay healthy and perform at their best."
• The University of Oregon will focus primarily on understanding the physiological characteristics of female athletes and building a strong connection between research and athletics to understand injury mechanisms. "Through our Peak Oregon initiative, we're uniting scientists, engineers, clinicians and performance experts in their efforts to prevent injury, speed recovery and improve health across our student athletes' careers," says Robert Guldberg, Ph.D., of the Knight Campus for Accelerating Scientific Impact.
• The Nike Sport Research Lab (NSRL) will contribute its expertise in biomechanics, data science and machine learning to develop computer-vision-based movement profiles that inform products and services for all global football athletes. Moreover, Nike will leverage its incomparable athlete relationships and reach via sponsored universities, teams and leagues around the world - as well as its partnership with the U.S. Soccer Federation - to drive impact at scale. "No single entity alone can solve a challenge this complex," says Elysia Davis, Ph.D., who leads Applied Footwear Research in the NSRL. "The greatest breakthroughs happen when different perspectives unite around a shared challenge. Only by working together can we change the future of athlete resilience."

ACL injuries are widespread across contact sports globally, and their impact is particularly long-lasting: They almost always require surgery and extensive rehabilitation, often leaving athletes sidelined for a year or more, with residual effects that can linger for life. Women and girls are disproportionately affected; studies show that women are three to five times likelier than their male counterparts to tear or sprain an ACL, the main stabilizer of the knee.

In the United States, according to a study that examined a dozen sports over a recent 15-year period, the rate of ACL injuries among high school girls increased 32%, more than double that of boys, placing their odds of experiencing a tear during their high school years at one in six, with female football players returning to the sport post-rehab having a one-in-three chance of a second tear.

With this in mind, Nike is independently piloting NSRL Form for Field, an app now in beta testing that will effectively put the NSRL's expertise into every football player's hands. NSRL Form for Field leverages learnings from NSRL Form, a two-minute test for runners that synthesizes 150 data points using a proprietary algorithm developed by the NSRL.

Similarly, NSRL Form for Field uses AI pose estimation to give players a personalized report based on their movement patterns. Requiring only a smartphone, NSRL Form for Field is specifically designed to work anywhere athletes already are. The output is instantaneous, helping athletes move and perform better by identifying suboptimal patterns during sport-relevant movements and providing targeted training solutions in response.

Additionally, in time, NSRL Form for Field will guide athletes to the best Nike football boots for them based on their playing style, so they can make informed, evidence-based choices.

"Women and girls are on the leading edge of sport, actively reshaping its future, and the Nike Sport Research Lab is right there with them," says Nurse. "In recent years, we have over-indexed on women's sport research in an effort to close a pervasive knowledge gap that's stood for far too long, and to enable her pursuits and dreams both on and off the field. I truly believe, if we solve for her, we solve for everyone, and I look forward to seeing the benefits of this work stretch across the sport landscape."

Project Shield and the forthcoming NSRL Form for Field app continue Nike's longstanding legacy of supporting women footballers: from its pioneering endorsement of Mia Hamm, sponsorship of the U.S. Women's National Team and introduction of the Air Zoom M9 F.G. (Nike's first women-specific football boot) in the 1990s to, in more recent years, the creation of the Nike Phantom Luna, the first football boot featuring Nike Cyclone 360 traction technology specifically developed to reduce the risk of knee injury caused by rotational traction.