- Ladies European Tour Performance Institute convenes first expert board of its kind in the professional game at the PIF London Championship.
- World’s leading specialists in female athlete health meet at Centurion Club to begin building a model of healthcare for the women who play professional golf on the Ladies European Tour and beyond.
The LET Performance Institute has convened the inaugural meeting of the Women’s Health in Golf Advisory Board, bringing together some of the world’s leading experts across performance, sports and exercise medicine, female health, psychology, physiology, nutrition and research for the first time at the PIF London Championship at Centurion Club, St Albans.
It is the first board of its kind in professional golf. The meeting took place ahead of the PIF London Championship, alongside the players the work is designed to serve, with financial support for player services and female health from Golf Saudi, delivered through the PIF Global Series.
The Board has been convened to turn Women’s Health in Golf: A Comprehensive Athlete Healthcare Proposal — a blueprint for world-class female athlete healthcare in the professional game — from a document into a delivery programme, across three connected strands: research, clinical care, and public health.
Why golf, and why now
Professional golf occupies an unusual position in elite sport. Players compete across continents, week to week, in careers that routinely extend into their forties — which means they pass through much of the female health lifecycle while performing at the highest level. Menstrual function and performance. Breast health and biomechanics. Bone health. Fertility, pregnancy and postpartum return-to-play. Long-term athlete health.
Almost none of that has been studied in golf. Much of what the sport has relied on has been borrowed from research conducted on men, or on athletes in very different sports.
That makes golf one of the best natural laboratories in sport for questions that matter to every woman who plays — and the field is wide open.
Three strands of work
The Advisory Board will shape and review:
- Research — a targeted programme spanning menstrual function and performance, breast biomechanics in golf, and fertility and postpartum return-to-play, delivered with academic partners and supported by PhD fellowships.
- Clinical delivery — the on-site and remote care pathways that serve players wherever in the world they are competing, across a global tour calendar.
- Public health — translating the work outward: breast cancer screening awareness, menstrual health education, fertility literacy, stigma reduction, and golf as physical activity for health.
What is learned on tour is intended to apply to women and girls in golf at every level, and to female athletes across sport.
LET Director of Operations, Di Barnard, commented:
“Our players compete in more countries, across more of their lives, than almost any other group of professional athletes. Building healthcare designed around them is not a nice addition to what the Tour does — it is central to it. Convening this Board is one of the most significant things the LET Performance Institute has done, and I’m proud that women’s golf is the sport doing it first.”
The Institute behind the Board
The Women’s Health in Golf Advisory Board is convened by the LET Performance Institute, which launched at the AIG Women’s Open in 2023 and has grown quickly into one of the most comprehensive athlete support services in women’s professional sport. Supported by The R&A Foundation, through proceeds generated by The Open and philanthropic donations, it delivers physiotherapy, strength and conditioning, nutrition, sports medicine and women’s health services to players across the tour calendar.
Its ambition on equity runs in two directions at once — for the athletes, and for the people who look after them. Health and performance roles in elite sport remain heavily dominated by male practitioners, and the barriers to training and employment have not gone away. The Institute was built to change that from the inside: it brings together leading female experts from across elite sport, and it invests in the next generation through its physiotherapy fellowship.
This work complements the ambitions of The R&A Women in Golf Charter and sits alongside The Royal and Ancient Golf Club Scholarship. Established in 2023 through a collaboration between The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews and The R&A Foundation, the scholarship supports young people from around the world with the passion and potential to shape the future of golf. Through financial support, professional development and mentorship from Members of The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews, it helps scholars pursue careers across a range of disciplines, including sports medicine and nutrition.
Together, these initiatives reflect The R&A Foundation’s commitment to helping people realise their potential for — and through — golf.
The approach is already producing results. Royal and Ancient Golf Club Scholars, Amy O’Donnell and Ellen O’Gorman, now hold integral roles within the LET Performance Institute, continuing their development towards becoming world-leading practitioners.
Dr Danny Glover, Chief Medical Officer and Director, LET Performance Institute, commented:
“Equity in this sport can’t stop at the players. Health and performance roles in elite sport are still overwhelmingly held by men, and you don’t fix that by waiting for it to fix itself — you build a route in.
“Our physiotherapy fellowship is that route, and it sits alongside the work The R&A Foundation is doing through The Royal and Ancient Golf Club Scholarship. Two of our fellows are now core members of the Institute. They came in to learn and they stayed because they’re excellent. That’s the whole point: we’re not just developing world-leading practitioners, we’re developing world-leading women in their own right.”
What happens next
The founding session set the Board’s scope and priorities. Terms of reference, meeting cadence and the first programme of work will follow, with further announcements expected in the coming months.
Members of the Advisory Board pictured in the above photograph, in the back row, from left to right, are Paul Dunstan, Peter Indoe, William Wynter Bee, Ed Coats, Chris Bishop, Denise Hill, Dan Coughlan and Jem Sell and, in the front row, from left to right, are Danny Glover, Philippa Stewart, Jo Henderson, Margo Mountjoy, Jo Wakefield Scurr, Fiona Scott, Charlotte Smith, Kirsty Elliott-Sale and Sarah Jacques.
