Executive Director, NWSL Foundation

The National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) is one of the fastest-growing professional sports leagues in the U.S., powered by 16 clubs and a deep roster of the world’s best players, and built on record-shattering fan, media and commercial growth. Now in its 14th season, the league’s momentum continues to accelerate, with viewership and attendance numbers growing rapidly, social media fandom on the rise, team valuations massively increasing and new top sponsors investing in the NWSL brand.

This unprecedented growth in audience, media reach, and franchise value reflects the NWSL’s expanding fan base and increasing dominance in the sports-media landscape and popular culture.

The future of the NWSL is now — and we’re looking for world-class talent like you to help us continue the momentum.

The NWSL Foundation exists to advance the health and longevity of women athletes by supporting women’s health research and convening and coordinating the women’s athletic health research ecosystem. The Foundation helps guide the research agenda to ensure critical questions are identified, research efforts are aligned across institutions, and findings are translated into practical insights and resources for the benefit of the public and women and girls who participate in athletics.

The Foundation’s role is not to replicate academic research or function primarily as a grantmaker. Instead, it serves as a field-shaping platform—aligning researchers, practitioners, and funders; reducing redundancy; elevating rigor; ensuring practical application, and enabling research that meaningfully advances women athletes’ health, performance, and longevity.

Anchored by an initial endowment, the Foundation will operate with scientific independence, disciplined governance, and a clear focus on actionability.

The Executive Director is the founding leader and public face of the NWSL Foundation. This role is accountable for setting and stewarding the research agenda, convening the ecosystem, and ensuring the Foundation earns credibility as a trusted leader in women’s athletic health research.

The Executive Director is not expected to be a career researcher or a traditional frontline fundraiser. Instead, this role requires a leader who has worked closely with researchers, clinicians, funders, and institutional partners—and who understands what it takes to develop credible research agendas, synthesize complex information, and mobilize resources in service of impact.

The Executive Director must be equally comfortable engaging senior researchers and clinicians, league and club leadership, players, and donors. This role requires judgment, credibility, and the ability to direct complex, multi-stakeholder conversations—not simply administer programs.

The Executive Director reports to the NWSL Foundation Board and partners closely with League leadership, including Sporting and High Performance, while preserving scientific independence.

• Own and steward the Foundation’s multi-year research agenda, grounded in elite women athlete needs and informed by the global research landscape.
• Identify gaps, redundancies, and under-resourced areas across women’s athletic health research.
• Guide prioritization of research questions to ensure relevance, rigor, and actionability.
• Serve as an authoritative voice in shaping norms, priorities, and standards across the field—drawing credibility from prior leadership experience at the intersection of research, sport, and institutions.

• Design and lead flagship convenings, including an annual research symposium that brings together leading researchers, clinicians, practitioners, and funders.
• Facilitate alignment and collaboration across academic institutions that are currently operating in parallel.
• Create structured forums for debate, synthesis, and agenda validation.
• Position the Foundation as a coordinator and catalyst—not a competitor to academic institutions.
• Establish and oversee research governance structures, including Research Advisory Committees and peer review standards.
• En…