The ACL epidemic
Marissa Siebka lay on the Slippery Rock High basketball court, clutching her left knee.
She knew what had happened as she writhed in pain on that January night in 2015. The junior guard for the Slippery Rock High girls basketball team felt and heard the telltale pop of her anterior cruciate ligament snapping.
Rockets’ coaches John Tabisz and Amber Osborn knew it, too.
“She’s done,” Tabisz said. “She’s done.”
Osborn, then an assistant under Tabisz and currently the head girls basketball coach at the school, had a difficult time focusing on the rest of the game.
“I was sick to my stomach,” she said. “Whether it’s the best player or the worst player, you hurt for them.”
Unfortunately for female high school athletes, that scene has been a familiar one, especially on the basketball court.
ACL injuries are alarmingly prevalent among girls prep basketball players. They are eight times more likely to suffer the injury than their male counterparts.
There have been a litany of studies conducted that have produced just as many conclusions as to why females are at such a greater risk to suffer the devastating injury, such as the angle of the hips, smaller ACLs and greater quadriceps/hamstring ratios and even differences in hormone levels.
What it comes down to for many athletes who have suffered the injury is one indelible fact.
“If it’s going to happen,” said Slippery Rock High junior Emma McDermott, who suffered her torn ACL last winter. “It’s going to happen.”
Butler's Alyssa Eyth still wears a bulky brace to protect her left knee.
“It’s definitely difficult sitting on the bench,” Eyth said during the early days of her return from two separate knee injuries. “You want to contribute, but all you can do is cheer.”
Eyth lost her freshman season to a torn ACL and part of her sophomore year to a torn meniscus.
A full story appears in the Sunday Butler Eagle.
