Hurt Girls

sozobe · Posts: 43544

I keep reading things about this (general injury rate in kid's sports, specific injury rate for girls) and worrying.

Sozlet's in soccer and loves it. She's quite good -- not great, maybe 5th in skill level on a team of 14. She's definitely one of the kids who gets it (when she's in the mood, anyway, and she isn't always) -- she's strong and fast and is one of the few kids at her level who purposely passes to open teammates (who have subsequently scored goals, a few times).

I want her to continue as long as she'd like. But this is scary stuff.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/11/magazine/11Girls-t.html

Things I take away from the article:

1.) Allow sports, but limit sports. None of this regular league plus club league and traveling for tournaments stuff.

2.) Encourage diversification. A lot of what I see in this article and others is that the specific sports team becomes the kid's life. All of her friends are there, she has nothing to fall back on. That feeds into the need for getting over the injury and getting back into the group.

3.) Encourage toughness, with limits. A few years of glory in HS is not worth a lifetime of crippled knees.

4.) Encourage PLAY, not just sports. This is less from this article than from other things I've read. That increasing focus on organized sports creates repetitive motion injuries and less overall fitness than just plain playing, like a kid. I think this has something to do with the "like a boy" stuff in the article, too. I think boys are more likely to just go outside and run around and be goofy than girls are.

5.) Look into the PEP training. Sounds like it might be promising, and that now is about the time to start. Sozlet does have that "athletic stance" or whatever it's called -- knees bent, butt low.

Overall, scary stuff.

Your thoughts?

CalamityJane · Posts: 16652

Oy, I remember standing on the sidelines being so worried that Jane
will get her teeth knocked out or some other injuries while playing soccer.
With every year they played, they kicked more forceful and the possibilities of a bigger injury increased.

Jane was a strong and fearless player until she got the ball right smack
in the face one day. My heart stopped when I saw what happened. Jane
was screaming, more in shock than out of pain, luckily she wasn't
hurt that much. That did it for her though, she became a more careful
player and she shied away from the ball a lot. Based on that, she sat
at the sidelines quite often, which was fine with her - being with her
friends and supporting the team was more important to her .

Last year she wanted to stop playing soccer and took a liking to volleyball -
a less injury prone sport. Perfect!

ossobuco · Posts: 46183 Location: Enchanted Land

Just finished the article. Fascinating. I like it that people are working on core strength and support muscle prevention routines. The athletic posture part was interesting too.

Bohne · Posts: 2738 Location: Germany

I think you worry too much!!!

ebrown_p · Posts: 7786 Location: Boston

Is having a daughter that plays sports any scarier than having a son who plays sports?

My son was hospitalized for a head injury he got playing rugby. It was a pretty scary time (he is fine now)... but sports is a pretty important part of his identity and I couldn't imagine him not being passionately involved.

My only daughter is 3 (and hasn't started worrying about anything more dangerous than a swing set). I am interested to see if I feel any different when she starts competitive sports.

ossobuco · Posts: 46183 Location: Enchanted Land

Did you read the article? Long but interesting. As far as possible stupidity,
it probably crosses boards. Still a useful article

ossobuco · Posts: 46183 Location: Enchanted Land

Erm, Ebrown, I am loathe to tell you what to read, but please check this one out.

sozobe · Posts: 43544

Thanks for reading the whole article, Osso, and for encouraging others to do so.

It's one of those articles that are hard to excerpt -- if I do one section, I want to do another, and then I've copied and pasted virtually the whole thing and peoples' eyes glaze over.

But I'll try to get some of the most important parts (I still encourage people to read the original):

Quote:

Girls and boys diverge in their physical abilities as they enter puberty and move through adolescence. Higher levels of testosterone allow boys to add muscle and, even without much effort on their part, get stronger. In turn, they become less flexible. Girls, as their estrogen levels increase, tend to add fat rather than muscle. They must train rigorously to get significantly stronger. The influence of estrogen makes girls’ ligaments lax, and they outperform boys in tests of overall body flexibility — a performance advantage in many sports, but also an injury risk when not accompanied by sufficient muscle to keep joints in stable, safe positions. Girls tend to run differently than boys — in a less-flexed, more-upright posture — which may put them at greater risk when changing directions and landing from jumps. Because of their wider hips, they are more likely to be knock-kneed — yet another suspected risk factor.

This divergence between the sexes occurs just at the moment when we increasingly ask more of young athletes, especially if they show talent: play longer, play harder, play faster, play for higher stakes. And we ask this of boys and girls equally — unmindful of physical differences. The pressure to concentrate on a “best” sport before even entering middle school — and to play it year-round — is bad for all kids. They wear down the same muscle groups day after day. They have no time to rejuvenate, let alone get stronger. By playing constantly, they multiply their risks and simply give themselves too many opportunities to get hurt.

Quote:

David Cooper, Hannah’s father, observed: “I once heard that the injury rate in the N.F.L. is 100 percent. It looks to me, in girls’ soccer, it’s the same thing.”

Quote:

A study last year by researchers at Ohio State University and Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, reported that high-school girls who play basketball suffer concussions at three times the rate of boys, and that the rate for high-school girls who play soccer is about 1.5 times the rate for boys. According to the N.C.A.A. statistics, women who play soccer suffer concussions at nearly identical rates as male football players. (The research indicates that it takes less force to cause a concussion in girls and young women, perhaps because they have smaller heads and weaker necks.)

Quote:

If girls and young women ruptured their A.C.L.’s at just twice the rate of boys and young men, it would be notable. Three times the rate would be astounding. But some researchers believe that in sports that both sexes play, and with similar rules — soccer, basketball, volleyball — female athletes rupture their A.C.L.’s at rates as high as five times that of males.

Quote:

But even football players, according to N.C.A.A. statistics, do not rupture their A.C.L.’s during their fall seasons at the rates of women in soccer, basketball and gymnastics. The N.C.A.A.’s Injury Surveillance System tracks injuries suffered by athletes at its member schools, calculating the frequency of certain injuries by the number of occurrences per 1,000 “athletic exposures” — practices and games. The rate for women’s soccer is 0.25 per 1,000, or 1 in 4,000, compared with 0.10 for male soccer players. The rate for women’s basketball is 0.24, more than three times the rate of 0.07 for the men. The A.C.L. injury rate for girls may be higher — perhaps much higher — than it is for college-age women because of a spike that seems to occur as girls hit puberty.

Quote:

So imagine a hypothetical high-school soccer team of 20 girls, a fairly typical roster size, and multiply it by the conservative estimate of 200 exposures a season. The result is 4,000 exposures. In a cohort of 20 soccer-playing girls, the statistics predict that 1 each year will experience an A.C.L. injury and go through reconstructive surgery, rehabilitation and the loss of a season — an eternity for a high schooler. Over the course of four years, 4 out of the 20 girls on that team will rupture an A.C.L.

Quote:

“Look at the girl on the left back with the ponytail,” she said as we stood on the sideline of a game at the Home Depot Center, a vast complex of fields in Carson, Calif., where the men’s and women’s national soccer teams train. “She really concerns me.” At first I couldn’t pick out whom she meant; there were lots of ponytails out there. “No. 8,” she clarified, and I fixed my attention on a tall, stiff-legged girl whose upper and lower bodies seemed not to be in communication with each other. She ran bolt upright, with very little bend in her trunk. Her knees seemed not to flex. When she came to a stop or slowed to change directions, she landed flat-footed. “She’s got really poor form,” Silvers said. “She won’t hold up running like that.”

...

Silvers directed my attention to one more player, a girl who seemed light on her feet, quick and springy. When she changed directions, she stayed in what generations of gym teachers have called “the athletic position” — knees bent, butt low to the ground. Even when walking casually during stoppages in play, she seemed more lithe than the other girls. “She moves more like a boy,” Silvers said. “Believe me, that’s a good thing.”

[explanation of PEP training, a way to teach girls to "move more like a boy" and get strength training that helps avoid injuries]

Quote:

In the 2000 soccer season, researchers calculated 37,476 athletic exposures for the PEP-trained players and 68,580 for the control group. Two girls in the trained group suffered A.C.L. ruptures that season, a rate of 0.05 per 1,000 exposures. Thirty-two girls in the control group suffered the injury — a rate of 0.47. (That was almost twice the rate for women playing N.C.A.A. soccer.) The foundation compiled numbers in the same league the following season and came up with similar results — a 74 percent reduction in A.C.L. tears among girls doing the PEP exercises.

Quote:

The club structure is the driving force behind the trend toward early specialization in one sport — and, by extension, a primary cause of injuries. To play multiple sports is, in the best sense, childlike. It’s fun. You move on from one good thing to the next. But to specialize conveys a seriousness of purpose. It seems to be leading somewhere — even if, in fact, the real destination is burnout or injury.

See? That's a lot, and still missing all kinds of context and good stuff -- but will give a flavor for people who don't want to read the article.

Chai · Posts: 15418 Location: Austin, Tx

Reading the article, at first I was thinking how it was a shame the girls were expected to play "by the same rules" as the boys, since a large part of the problem seemed to come from her anatomy being different.

But, I puzzled over the fact that if the rules were changed, would it be the same game?

When Silvers pointed out various girls and how their stance and movements were indicators of future injuries, that made perfect sense to me. The fact that the one girl who "moved like a boy" hit home.

While a girls anatomy won't behave exactly like a boys (and it shouldn't), girls can be trained to move in a more boy-like way, within anatomical restrictions.

I was thinking how rolfing opened me up, allowing not only a greater range of motion, but actually assuming postions I had never done in my life. When I day positions, I'm talking about sometimes subtle changes, that make all the difference, as those subtle changes in one place causes a chain reaction that ends up effecting the entire body.

I may not have caught this, but perhaps yoga, pilates and rolfing can be part of the training to try to prevent the inappropriate use of body parts in the first place?

boomerang · Posts: 12628 Location: CHS

I read the article yesterday but it really stirred up to many memories of the awful childhood insult of "you throw/hit/run/whatever like a girl". Hard to think there might have been some truth in that.

And then it made me think about that whole other converstion about what level of risk you are willing to accept for your child.

And then it made me think of my struggle to learn to tolerate youth sports culture.

And then that made me think of my convo with baseball nanny last week in which we discused kids finding joy in something and the best way to cultivate that.

And that made me think of the Newsweek article about the British Olympic Committee and "self-selection" for sports.

So I didn't respond because I'm all over the map and I'm waiting to see how the conversation gells.

Which is just a long winded way of saying "bookmark".