Boys play like this, girls get hurt like this

May 12th, 2008 | Posted by PostmanE

The great thing about Sundays is the opportunity to read. Between weekend FanHousing and various other pursuits — OK, video games — it’s hard to get a good read in, but I was able to yesterday, and I learned some valuable, albeit perplexing, information: Young female athletes are injuring themselves at an almost terrifying rate.

Here’s the gist: Thanks to Title IX, girls are now playing sports in a more widespread, and more competitive, way than ever before. What’s more, training tactics and expectations for girls and boys are largely the same, and increase similarly in high school as kids begin to enter puberty. However, because girls and boys gain physical maturity differently — who knew? — those similar training tactics are causing girls to struggle through the sorts of injuries boys are less vulnerable to, such as the mother of all athletic injuries, the torn ACL:

But among all the sports injuries that afflict girls and young women, A.C.L. tears, for understandable reasons, get the most attention. No other common orthopedic injury is as debilitating and disruptive in the short term — or as likely to involve serious long-term consequences. And no other injury strikes women at such markedly higher rates or terrifies them as much. Rachel Young, a former soccer player at Virginia Tech who had to stop playing after two A.C.L. ruptures and substantial cartilage damage in her right knee, told me that young women she knew feared the injury but rarely talked about it. “A.C.L. is like a curse word,” she said. “You just cringe when you hear it.”

To openly discuss this, as the Times Mag story bravely does, is oftentimes tantamount to saying girls are weak, which, as we all know, they are. Finally, science has proven it. Score one for unfounded sexism!

UPDATE: For any uninitiated readers, I should probably add here that I’m just joking — I don’t think women are “weak.” Just differently abled. Which sounds like I’m describing the female body as some sort of handicap, but I’m not: Women just have different physical abilities than men, and the resistance of trainers and coaches to that reality is obviously a problem. How can you remedy this problem? I’m not sure. But the “warrior-girl” mentality the story describes is something that needs to give way to reason, especially in high school athletics where the stakes are relatively low.