the rise of acls

has anyone noticed this trend?

acl injuries to newly promoted or newly recruited players.

in 2011, i moved to the US on a collegiate scholarship to play the sport i love. within 6 weeks, i tore my acl. fast forward two months, and three other of my freshmen teammates had also torn theirs. four acls, out of a squad of 20. all of us freshmen. coincidence?

as i’ve been following the women’s super league, one thing i’ve noticed is the occurrence of acls to players who have either just moved (countries or teams), or have recently been promoted.

what do all of these situations have in common?

a change in environment.

before moving to America, a mentor of mine spoke about all the support systems i had at home. family. friends. teammates. cats. a sense of self and purpose. but moving to America? i had none of that, initially. i was working in isolation from my environment.

i think this relates to what is known in psychology as the opponent process theory. our body wants to maintain homeostasis. so when we experience an extreme high, call it an ‘a process’, our body then learns to release an opposing force which is slower released, called the b process. this helps explain ‘chasing the rainbow’, or the ‘come down’, or why people who overdose don’t do so because they took more of the drug, but because they took it in an environment that was novel. unfamiliar. it’s also why you can have five beers at home, and feel completely fine. but have those same five beers on a picnic? you’ll feel wasted.

our environment works with us in ways we aren’t even consciously aware of. so when we experience an adversity in a familiar environment, our environment is acting as a buffer to prevent us from experiencing the low of that event. move to a new environment? you don’t have those buffers. small stressors are felt in their entirety, in isolation from the environment.

one thing i’ve learned over the years, from my own experiences and from an abundance of research, is that stress increases the likelihood of injuries. is it a coincidence then that players are susceptible to tearing their acls when first moving to these different environments? i think not.*

*these are my observations, not a definitive theory. i know there are a lot of factors that contribute to acl injuries, but i’m curious if novel environments are a risk factor we have yet to really consider.