INTRODUCTION: Basketball is a physically demanding sport that requires high intensity movements in all directions. Therefore, understanding high intensity movement is integral to optimizing training, performance, and injury prevention (3). Investigating high intensity movements (e.g., accelerations, decelerations and changes of direction) in games has been done in other sports, namely football (1-3), however we are unaware of literature addressing these variables in women`s collegiate basketball. Our purposes were to identify the high intensity movement demands and movement patterns by position in women`s collegiate basketball. METHODS: Fourteen games from the 2023-2024 season were monitored. Data were collected from 9 players (age 21.8±1.6 years [range 18-24]; height 174.7±8.8cm) from the university womens team. Of the 9 players, 6 were guards (G) and 3 were forwards/centers (F/C). A threshold of 10 minutes played per game was used to include individual performance measures. Catapult S7 sensors in indoor mode and OpenField Console 3.10.1 were used to capture movement counts for the following variables: change of direction left high (CoD-LH), change of direction right high (CoD-RH), acceleration high (ACC-H) and deceleration high (DEC-H). The data were visualized using OpenField Cloud 4.7 and exported to excel to assess data quality. We obtained 46 observations for each variable from the G and 36 observations for each variable from the F/C for a total of 328 observations. Jamovi 2.3.28 was used to calculate descriptive statistics. In addition, the proportion of high intensity movements in each direction were expressed as a percent of the total. RESULTS: Average minutes played per game was 34±20.4 for G and 25.6±5.6 for F/C. The median CoD-LH was 5.5 (IQR=2.75) for G and 7.5 (IQR 5.25) for F/C. For CoD-RH the median was 8 (IQR=6) for G and 9.5 (IQR=6) for F/C. For ACC-H the median was 13 (IQR=11) for G and 14.5 (IQR=9.5) for F/C. For DEC-H the median was 6 (IQR=4.75) for G and 4 (IQR=9.5) for F/C. Relative to the total, CoD-LH accounted for 16.6% and 19.5% of high intensity movements for G and F/C, respectively. CoD-RH was 28.6% for G and 27.2% for F/C. ACC-H accounted for 37.1% for G and 41.2% of the total for F/C. DEC-H was 17.6% for G and 12% for F/C. CONCLUSION: Our results indicate that the high intensity demands and patterns of movement are similar for G and F/C. ACC-H was the largest portion of the total demand and had the greatest variability for both positions. Both groups had greater CoD-RH than CoD-LH, which may be explained by team and individual factors. Further investigation is needed to better profile the high intensity demands of women`s collegiate basketball. In practice, understanding these demands and patterns can be used to tailor training to better reflect game demands.
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