The Depths Of An Anterior Cruciate Ligament - 2389 Words

Imagine an athlete at the top of their game coming to a sudden halt because of a life-altering injury, tearing their Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL). This happens to athletes everywhere because of lack of awareness and lack of prevention. To a non-athlete, this injury might not sound life-altering, but when an athlete hears that they have torn their ACL, they know that there will be a hard journey in front of them. Until an athlete endures the hardships of recovering from this injury, they do not understand the intricacies and the pains that an athlete endures when facing this game-changing injury. Not all athletes can avoid an ACL injury by preventative strengthening exercises, so they must endure a long process of recovery in order†¦show more content†¦There are also the Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) and the Posterior Cruciate Ligament (PCL). These two ligaments coexist in the center of the knee and balance out the weakness of the other; the ACL â€Å"prevents th e shin bone from sliding out in front of the thigh bone† while the PCL â€Å"prevents the shin bone from sliding backwards under the femur† (Vorvick). Despite how the ACL and the PCL work together, the ACL is one of the most well-known major injuries in sports. In her article, â€Å"High School ACL Injury Rates†, Dawn Comstock shows that in 2009, about sixty percent, of all sports surgeries involve the knee; within the sixty percent, about fifty percent of the knee surgeries are ACL reconstructions. Sports that could have a higher tendency for an athlete to tear the ACL are sports that require an athlete to decelerate quickly or need to cut and change direction instantly. For example, an article shows that a high-impact sport has a higher percentage of ACL tears when compared to a low-impact sport, such as football and women’s soccer; football has a forty-one percent ACL injury rate while women’s soccer only has nineteen percent. Not only does the level of impact effect the likelihood of ACL injury, but the gender of the athlete as well. When looking at women’s and men’s soccer, men have a merely thirteen percent ACL injury rate because their physical structure along with their techniques when doing ce rtain exercises. According to Comstock’s article, â€Å"girls are