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For years, ligament tears have been a crisis among young athletes — even though a few simple exercises can prevent them.
On a damp February night in 2021, I was parked in a gravel lot waiting for my daughter’s soccer practice to wrap up. Through the windshield, I could see another player, Ella Goldsmith, head bowed, back against a fence, as worried coaches hovered around her.
Ella lived near us in our Seattle neighborhood. She and my daughter had become fast friends years earlier when they met at tryouts for their soccer club. On the field, Ella was fierce and determined, so I knew something had to be seriously wrong. She would have practiced with both arms in slings.
It turned out that while chasing a ball, Ella had changed direction and “just stepped funny,” she would tell me later. She heard a pop, her knee buckled and she crumpled in a heap. Her joint felt “creepy” and “gross,” she says, as if the lower leg had detached from her body. Like the professional athletes Megan Rapinoe, Ronald Acuña Jr. and Lindsey Vonn, Ella had torn her anterior cruciate ligament. Ella, though, was only 12.
A.C.L. injuries are among the most devastating in sports. Unlike broken arms or pulled hamstrings, they almost always require surgery and grueling rehab; players are frequently sidelined for a year, sometimes longer. Significant side effects can appear years later and follow athletes for life. A.C.L. tears are associated with long-term pain, early-onset osteoarthritis, even heart attacks (perhaps because damaged knees increase chronic inflammation and make it harder to stay active). Ella approached recovery with the grim discipline of a major leaguer, and 13 months later her doctors cleared her to play again.
A few games after stepping back onto the field, however, she tore the A.C.L. in her other knee when a larger girl smashed into her from the side. After that, she quit soccer, unwilling to risk yet another tear and a third year of rehab, all before she could drive.
The most remarkable part of Ella’s story is how routine this type of injury has become. In July 2022, a few months after her second injury, I watched trainers hoist another of my daughter’s friends onto a cart — another torn A.C.L. The next summer, that girl, too, ripped the ligament in her other knee. In the fall of 2023, three girls on my daughter’s high school team also ruptured their A.C.L.s. Soon the tally of torn A.C.L.s among my daughter’s current and former teammates would reach an astonishing number: 19.
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