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Message: [QUOTE="Bone Dog, post: 4867582, member: 12088"] Interesting thought. The moment of injury may not be a result of contact, at least not contact in a game. If the “wear and tear of practice” is part of the problem, some of these seeming non-contact injuries may be connected to contact in practice. But maybe direct contact in practice is not a factor at all. If I focus on “lower leg injuries” I’m reminded of the sequence of injuries Paige endured. She’d been plagued by ankle problems in high school but managed to play through them. Finally, after her freshman year at UConn, she had surgery to correct the lingering ankle problem. She returned stronger than ever and seemed ready to have an even more dominant season… and promptly blew out her knee in the ND game. She endured plenty of hard contact in that game, including a heavy blow to the head, but none of it on her knee. Seen as an isolated event, her knee gave out in a way apparently unconnected to what she was doing at that moment. Many ACL injuries appear this way, though Paige’s tibial-plateau fracture may have been a bit different. Cue another surgery and a perhaps too-early return to play that March and a stunning march to the NC game led by a rickety star. Cue a second even more devastating knee injury the following summer, also presumably non-contact and suffered outside of game competition. In an interview during her last rehab stint, Paige talked about how much more thoroughly she approached every aspect of her athletic life including changes to nutrition and gait analysis. She mentioned that her therapists told her that injuries like hers often occur in a familiar pattern — ankle, knee, knee. I was reminded of something my dad said after he had knee replacement surgery: “Now my hip hurts.” He was a doctor and said this is a recognized pattern: when you change any one thing it affects the architecture of the other joints. I’ve been watching the way Paige positions her feet in preparation for a shot to see if I can notice anything different. The TV coverage isn’t really good enough for an amateur like me to see anything definitive. But I still wonder. We often hear about kids like Paige and Azzi and even Ash that they position their feet early to get off a shot quickly. It’s practically a signature move. Are they putting more torque on their joints by doing this? And are there other ways in which they might be stressing their knees in order to gain some other tiny advantage? I’m thinking too hard about this and it’s giving me a headache. [/QUOTE]

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