Lorena Torres has reached the top of women’s basketball without ever taking a shot. The Golden State Valkyries, where the Ibiza-born sports scientist leads the medical and performance department, beat the Atlanta Dream 68-63 in San Francisco on Saturday to win the WNBA Finals 4-3. It was the first time the finals had gone to a seventh game, and it crowned a team that only joined the league last year.
Behind the scenes
Torres’s job is to keep the players fit: managing their workload, preventing injuries and getting them back on court when they happen. She has done it at the highest level for more than a decade, on both sides of the Atlantic.
From the pool to the NBA
Her story starts in Ibiza, at the sa Blancadona school and in the Can Misses pool, where she trained in synchronised swimming as a girl. The sport took her to Barcelona, to the Kallípolis club coached by Anna Tarrés, where she trained alongside Gemma Mengual and Andrea Fuentes. She then turned to sports science and went on to earn a doctorate on technology in strength training.
After spells at the CAR Sant Cugat high-performance centre and with FC Barcelona’s basketball team, she joined the San Antonio Spurs in 2015. There she worked with players such as Tim Duncan, Tony Parker and Pau Gasol, and she later moved to the Philadelphia 76ers. At home, she became the first woman on the coaching staff of Spain’s national basketball team. She prepared the side for the Tokyo Olympics and won EuroBasket gold in 2022.
Her work has earned her the bronze medal of Spain’s Royal Order of Sporting Merit, and in 2024 she published Supérate, a book with a foreword by Tony Parker.
“Winning is very hard”
“Winning is very hard, and that’s why I enjoy it so much,” she told Spanish public radio after the final. She has said she would love to work in Spain one day, but warned that clubs there would need to see staff as an investment rather than a cost. For now, home is still Ibiza, as she put it in a recent interview, even if her work keeps her on the other side of the world.
