How We're Harming Young Athletes

Sunday, Sep. 10, 2006 By CHRISTINE GORMAN
Cody Walker of Columbus, Ga., and Japan's catcher Ryota Koike play in the Little League World Series Championship baseball game.
GENE J. PUSKAR / AP
Article Tools
Print
Reprints
Sphere
RSS

(2 of 3)
Some injuries seem to distribute themselves differently between the sexes. Boys suffer concussions more often than girls do, no doubt because boys play more contact sports. But researchers are only beginning to understand why girls are more likely to tear their anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), a piece of connective tissue that helps hold the knee together. The difference can be dramatic. A recent study by researchers at the Morgan Stanley Children's Hospital in Manhattan determined that adolescent female athletes were eight times as likely to injure their ACL as their male counterparts.

Related Articles

Part of the problem, investigators believe, may be that girls usually mature more quickly than boys do, girls' knees tend to be a little looser and girls' quadriceps muscles (at the front of the thigh) are often stronger than their hamstrings (at the back of the thigh), destabilizing the knee. Many soccer coaches have learned to address the problem by spending more time drilling girls on how to land properly and encouraging them to build up their hamstrings.

But in many ways, the underlying problem is not merely one of anatomy but of psychology as well. The pressures to compete earlier and earlier in life--because winning an athletic scholarship demands it, for example, or simply because everyone else is doing it--can be immense. And it's not always clear if it's the parents, coaches or kids themselves who are pushing the hardest. "We have a culture that is tremendously out of balance, in which you have nothing but competition," says Brooke de Lench, a onetime squash and lacrosse player who wrote Home Team Advantage, a newly published advice book for moms who want to avoid the pitfalls of overly intense sports for their family. "Children need to be playing and having fun."

But that's a tougher goal than it seems. Just look at the set of new pitching rules that Little League is putting into effect for the 2007 season. After decades of trying to prevent injuries by limiting pitchers to six innings a game--which could result in anywhere from 54 to more than 100 pitches per outing--Little League officials will focus instead on the total number of pitches per game, depending on the pitcher's age. Pitchers 10 and younger will stop after 75 pitches, and those 11 to 12 years of age are limited to 85 pitches a game. The move, designed to minimize the chances of seriously injuring a pitcher's elbow or shoulder, was based on research conducted by the American Sports Medicine Institute (ASMI) of Birmingham, Ala. Its studies actually indicated that an even lower number of pitches--75 for children 11 to 12 years old--was ideal.

But pilot testing by the Little League organization showed that a lower limit would mean changing pitchers more often during the game than coaches and players really wanted. So the investigators looked at their data again and decided that 85 pitches was still within the safety zone--and just as important, made it more likely that a pitcher could complete an entire game.