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Message: [QUOTE="BBallF, post: 4491165, member: 10435"] Thank you Nan. This compilation helps us to view our injuries with some perspective. I would like to weigh in on a few points that are being raised, some directly and some tangentially. First of all, some injuries, such as to Paige and Ice this year are what I will classify as insidious because they did not arise from contact. Was the repetitive stress to the same muscles and ligaments caused by 365 day basketball a substantial factor? The answer is probably but how do you prove it medically without actual analysis of the muscles and ligaments. Girls and women have been getting ACLs without contact for decades. While I agree that parents have pushed their children into AAU and other leagues and into basketball training ( I was guilty of this myself with my daughter ), it's not just the parents. It's the AAU coaches who have created a niche industry and have made these "get ahead" programs available for a price, it's the college coaches who rely upon them to produce players, and it's the unwillingness of high schools to adopt internal rules which regulate how many leagues, hours, or teams a player can play for in the off season or even in season and still be able to play for the high school team. This may seem revolutionary but so did the pitch count for Little Leaguers and even Big Leaguers not that many years ago. I think it's a systemic problem. I coached high school girls in AAU so I saw it first hand. It's a very flawed system. Girls and women players have also been getting ACLs with contact and that brings me to my main point. Girls' and womens' basketball is much more physical than it ever has been. Let's look at our injuries. Aaliyah's nose was by contact, Caroline's concussion was by contact, Dorka's thumb this year was by contact ( rewatch it and you will see a deliberate hacking foul with force designed not to allow the shot to go up which is not illegal but poor sportsmanship), Azzi's injury was by contact. Aaliyah was deliberately pushed with two hands by the ND defender into Azzi. Again, not apparently flagrant within the rules that concentrate on the head, but the kind of foul nevertheless that in the playground where I learned to play basketball would have led to an altercation and maybe even exile. Finally, both Nika's concussion and Ines' stitches were contact injuries. I think we need new rules in the sport. The players are not being protected. There is still far too little freedom of movement, still too many deliberate fouls not upgraded, and still too few whistles for fouls. Watch any of our games closely in rewind mode for a quarter and you will see countless fouls, even when shooting, not called. It is directly responsible in my mind for the contact injuries which are now close to epidemic level. They have allowed so much physicality in the womens' game that injuries are almost inevitable. I will go one step further. I believe that there is an internal unconscious prejudice in the referees, even the female ones, that the players are only girls or women, so they aren't going to hurt each other. I know this to be the case from my own experiences speaking to referees. It's embedded sexism and has to be rooted out at the referee level and administrative level. Players adjust to the refereeing even during a game. While the TV product may suffer at first by slowing up the game with more whistles due to enforcement, the end result over time will be an adjustment by the players and coaches and the safety of the players. Which is more important? [/QUOTE]

Verification: First name of men's bb coach