I encourage you to click through on the links that I provide to the articles about ACL tears & knee injury prevention.

My comment were written on a blog, not a peer reviewed journal - they represent the well informed perspectives of a woman who has, in fact, dedicated her life to feminist thought & criticism. Please see links on my blog if you want to know more about my work. From A Left Wing, though, is something I do for me and for the folks out there interested in a queer-positive feminist marxist slant on things.

There are intersting books written by coaches & training staff, as well as sociologists about women athletes etc.

Both ways? What do you mean? I don’t dispute that gender difference matters. What I dispute is how we frame stories about gender difference. My argument with that story, as I state above, is with the way it is framed - read my responses above if you want to guess what I think about your comments.

And, hey, when you take your team to nationals multiple times, and send your girls to Division I NCAA programs on full rides, well, then you can talk to me about my sister. I’m sorry, but she is actually a very excellent model for how one might think about gender difference and key aspects of coaching to them. Lots of luck to you, and to the young women you coach.

I came across your response while looking for information on how to coach girls in soccer. Just by chance, I had read the NY Times article but took a completely different view. To me it was an interesting medical issue and the frequency of female ACL injuries very concerning. I am glad I now know this information. I went away thinking about what can be done do to minimize these injuries for my daughters and her fellow athletes. There does not seem to be any clarity on how to currently do this which is very unfortunate.

While I appreciate your point of view. I found your response weak and primarily based on exceptions and unsubstantiated beliefs. This is inappropriate- please back up your points with real data. The reference to your sister coaching runners is inappropriate and bar talk. What did you really contribute?

For example:
YOUR PARAPHRASE: The author then goes on the explain how girls develop differently - e.g. boys gain more muscle, but become less flexible; girls get fatter but more flexible. The author’s language flirts dangerously close to naturalizing girls and women as weaker, more delicate etc (I’m not the only one to spot this slant). WHAT WAS STATED IS LIKELY TRUE AND PERHAPS AN IMPORTANT FACT IN THE ETIOLOGY OF THE INJURIES. AND WOMEN MIGHT BECOME INJURIES DUE TO THESE MALE, FEMALE DIFFERENCES-STRENGTH BEING ONE OF THEM.

YOUR LATER RESPONSE: One must recognize gender differences in order to coach/train/treat athletes well. Those differences may be physiological, metabolic, social and psychological. SO THERE ARE DIFFERENCES (do not forget anatomical, genetic and physical). THIS SEEMS LIKE A CONTRADICTION FROM WHAT YOU STATE ABOVE. YOU CANNOT HAVE IT BOTH WAYS.

I don’t think adults listen to boys much either. Look at how many high school football players have died of dehydration or how many little league pitchers throw their arms out before they even reach high school. So many coaches and parents (dads, mostly, I suppose) assume that anything that doesn’t kill the boy makes him stronger…until, you know, it actually does kill him.

Coaches and parents just need to be a lot more sophisticated in general about how kids’ bodies work. Certainly, reading up on the latest research on gender specific issues is an important part of that.

Fact is female athletes have been “getting past it” since, well, they started practicing their sport.

I’d be really interested to know if people have posted “not the forum” in response to the very interesting articles on pitch invasion about racism in football culture. Sexism & homophobia are just as big as issues in football culture. They are just as important to understand in our efforts to put an end to them.

Pitchinvasion is, in fact, a real oasis in terms of football websites - most sites rarely cover women’s football and never give space to stories written from the perspective of a woman athlete or fan. Print media is even worse.

The shame of that NYT article is that it’s written as though no women athletes read the NYT. Informed women athletes & fans are rarely, rarely imagined as readers of the sports pages. (Today’s Guardian has not one sentence about any woman in any sport in its pages). This is a real indication of how deeply ingrained sexism is in the media.

Deeply embedded in that NYT article is the name of one women who has worked in collaboration with a doctor in Santa Monica, California on knee injury prevention training, and you will find on my blog click-thoughs to information about their work - click throughs not offered by the NYT website.

Solutions basically come from us politicized & committed feminists (male & female) working in the corners of the culture. So, it ain’t US Soccer. It’s coaches & players, and physiotherapists who really listen to their patients.

I doubt the NYT would publish an article about the same issue written from a feminist perspective - which would recount horror stories about women athletes being offered career ending surgery as “treatment”, and highlight the ways that physiological differences get buried under a male standard, and also by a reluctance to admit that gender differences matter. In my view, that’s the real story.

JD

Who is leading that effort (US Soccer, some medical school?)?

While I appreciate the poorly worded title, get past it, there are some legitimate points & questions raised. Focus on the solution, not some sociological agenda. Not the forum.

Just reading the description of the piece on the cover of the magazine, you knew the conclusion and slant of the article before reading the thousands of words in it. The teaser was something like “Are we ready to accept our girls getting injured more?” Gee, I wonder what the writer thinks…