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Recently, those characters have been replaced by ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) and MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) as ones instilling dread among scholastic athletes, and a study released Wednesday indicates the injury has potential long-lasting effects.
Young women who do damage to their knees playing soccer appear to have a very high chance of developing disabling arthritis years later, the October issue of Arthritis & Rheumatism states.
It’s a well-known fact that girls who play soccer, basketball and similar sports are at risk for ACL impairment. The ligament is a tough band of tissue that basically holds the knee joint together.
"Blowing out" an ACL can easily end a female’s sports career, but doctors and trainers have long suspected that the injury sets the stage for osteoarthritis, a degenerative joint disease that typically strikes the elderly.
The newly-released study now adds hard data to that worry: more than half of the 103 soccer players, who were aged 14 to 28 at the time of their ACL damage, suffered osteoarthritis at the time of the study, about 12 years later.
Many of the women, who were roughly 31 by that time, also said that they had severe pain or some other disability that made it extremely difficult to conduct daily activities.
Area coaches, players and trainers have recently been expressing an increased amount of concern regarding the manner in which both boys and girls soccer is being played.
Two such ACL injuries have taken place in the greater Middletown area in the past two weeks. In a recent SCC matchup between rivals Mercy and Cheshire, Rams sophomore sensation Rachel Schuyler, who scored 32 goals last season, went down three times in the first half before finally being carted off the field with what was later diagnosed as a "blown-out ACL". She will be lost for the year.
Cheshire coach Doug Haas, whose team lost in overtime to the Tigers, was critical of Mercy’s physical play both during and after the game. Several times the Rams skipper accused the Tigers players and coaches of playing like "thugs" and "going after" Schuyler in particular. Mercy coaches Jeff Vagell and Lou LaPenna vehemently denied such allegations.
"Soccer is a rough sport," Vagell said. "But no one has ever accused me of coaching dirty. It’s a contact sport and kids are going to get hurt. Mygirls don’t play like that. They don’t need to."
A week and a half later, another of Mercy’s SCC rivals, Hamden, had no less than five girls exit the team bus on crutches prior to the contest.
Last week at Portland High School, Highlanders’ senior co-captain Kristen Zapatka was most likely lost for the season with the same knee malady.
"I’ve noticed a big difference in the way girls soccer is being played now versus when I was a freshman," Portland three-sport star Mandy Finklestein said. "There’s a lot more contact and a lot more girls getting hurt. I really don’t think too much about getting hurt, but I do know players who will back off if a there’s going to be a collision with a bigger girl."
No one knows for sure exactly why girls are at higher risk of injuring the ACL than boys.
Timothy Hewitt, director of Sports Medicine at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital, suggests girls often injure this ligament when they’ve been through a growth spurt but don’t have enough muscular power to control the added height or extra weight.
Stacey Divis, an area physical therapist and athletic trainer at Mercy High School, among others, believes the study may be somewhat misleading.
"They’re studying girls who had these ACL injuries ten or so years ago," she said. "Since then, the rehab and surgeries involving the knee have come a long way. Did these girls have their knees reconstructed? Did they have surgery? Anytime you get an ACL injury, you’re going to end up with degenerative changes a lot sooner.
"Then there’s the hormone factor. At certain times of the women’s cycle, the estrogen goes up and there is an increase in the laxity of the female body. It stretches more and sometimes the knee won’t be able to handle it."
The amount of females playing high school soccer and basketball has increased 22 percent in the past ten years, according to Hewett. The new findings add urgency to the need to find better ways to prevent an ACL blowout and, he says, reduce the ever increasing amount of violence associated with soccer in particular.
