TORN DREAMS ACL Injuries in Women’s Soccer Cuts Careers Short

By Lindsay White

Whitney McCormick paced back and forth on the sideline, waiting to enter a game with her travel soccer team. It was early March 2021, and she was looking forward to finishing on a high note before heading to Washington and Lee University in the fall after a year wrecked by the COVID-19 pandemic. As the whistle blew and the game started, she fell into a rhythm and made plays up and down the field. Injury was the last thing on her mind. Then, McCormick stepped in a divot and heard a pop in her knee.

It’s a pop that no one, especially an athlete, wants to hear, because it usually means a torn anterior cruciate ligament.

“Tearing your ACL is one of those things that happens to everyone else, and you never imagine is going to happen to you,” McCormick said. “It’s definitely something that blindsides you and hits you out of nowhere. And that’s definitely what happened to me.”

Starting at age 16, female soccer players face a 5% chance of tearing their ACLs each year they participate in the sport, said Dr. Mark Cullen, an orthopedic surgeon who practices in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Cullen said as many as 80,000 high school girls in the United States suffer ACL injuries, mostly while playing soccer and basketball.

Dr. Steven Martin, an orthopedic surgeon who treats athletes at Clemson University, said there are a combination of factors that make soccer players more prone to ACL injuries. Soccer is a “high intensity endurance sport where fatigue plays a role,” he said, and players engage in “fast speed running with cutting and pivoting.” Dribbling the ball while fending off defenders also can lead to a sudden “change of direction with off-center balance.”

All of those movements increase the danger of the “buckling” of the knee.

Cullen said women soccer players are four to six times more likely to tear their ACLs than men.

Mairin Wood, an athletic trainer at W&L, said the reason is physiological: Women have a wider pelvic structure than men, and that puts more stress on soft tissues that support women’s joints. As a result, they land differently on their feet than men.

Rehabilitation methods have gotten better, but less than half of female soccer players who tear their ACLs will ever return to their pre-injury skill level, experts say. The women who do manage to come back and play like they used to still face higher risk of re-injury. Martin said there’s a 10% chance that a previously injured athlete will retear the ACL in her knee that was injured, and there’s a 20% chance that she could tear the ACL in her other knee. Rehab strengthens the muscles around the injured knee like never before. But the other knee doesn’t get such a benefit, and it is more susceptible to injury.

“Before I tore my knee, I was on track to have a great season,” McCormick said.

“So, when my injury happened it was a major setback, physically and mentally.”

Athletes with torn ACLs feel the sting of the long recovery from surgery before they can get back on the field. It generally takes eight to 10 months to recover from surgery alone. And it can take more than a year for some people.