Mon 12 May 2008
Aidan points out this New York Times article on girls and sports and injuries. There is no direct Eph connection, but Aidan was reminded of this EphBlog entry on Eph soccer player Ana Sani’s ‘08 rehabilitation from a similar injury. Friend-of-various-Ephs Laura thought that the article was “crappy” because it made it seem as if sports were too dangerous for girls to play. Comments:
1) Laura is silly to worry about any baleful effect that such articles might have on the future girls sports in America. Just look at the trajectory over the last 20 years and extend that into the future. More girls will be playing more sports for more hours with better coaching and more expensive facilities for years to come. Note how the Eph women’s soccer team webpage lists, not only the their hometowns but their club teams.
2) The Marxist reading focuses on the economic incentives. Most of the substantive points come for people who make a living selling their injury-prevention services to families and teams. Of course they want to hype injuries as a major issue for girls sports. If there were no problem, they would be out of a job.
3) The girls-sports-industrial-complex is the primary cause of the huge increase in the skill level of Eph womens sports in the last two decade. Although the mens teams of today also play better (?), the womens teams are just shockingly good in comparison to those of the 1980’s.
May 12th, 2008 at 10:56 am
I think the real lesson in the article, which wasn’t gender specific, was the relentless proliferation of high school sport obligations. It seems that even moderately talented strivers are engaging in Andre Agassi level obsession (multi-day, multi-game tournaments), and during key time, developmentally.
Sports monomania has been ported from individualistic sports (eg. tennis, skating, gymnastics) to bread and butter team efforts.
That being said, it is incumbent on coaches not to overtrain, and to keep long term development in mind. (Cf. Buzz Bizzinger’s recent NY Mag interview with Kerry Wood.)
May 12th, 2008 at 11:02 am
Those of us who work with teenage girls do see a marked and rather frightening increase in these sorts of injuries, and at younger and younger ages They are not something to pooh-pooh: not only do they cause pain and end sports involvement prematurely, but it also looks as though they will result in a rash of lifelong health problems for some of these athletes.
As the article points out, training to prevent injury is really important, and I believe the adults (parents, doctors, coaches, schools, league officials, and recreational directors) should insist upon it and work to raise the level of awareness. I’ve also found that teenagers often need more time to recover than even the doctors had thought. They need to be given that time. There are other things that can be done as well. For example, a wise parent I know worked to create and support “team manager” and “assistant to the coach” positions that allowed injured girls to recuperate fully while also playing important roles on their teams and not losing the social involvement; those who were able to resume play were stronger players and team members for it.
May 12th, 2008 at 11:35 am
Aidan,
ironic you use bissinger in a blog!
anyway, as a personal beef, bissinger uses very little good evidence. for an example of the critiques floating on the web:
http://miscellaneousmedia.blogspot.com/2007/06/buzzing-bissinger.html
http://thejuice.baseballtoaster.com/archives/972113.html
http://www.twinkietown.com/2007/6/5/223150/0312
the bizarre thing here, for me, is two fold:
1. it’d be really easy to do a statistical analysis of innings worked and arm injuries, yet i can’t find it (why wouldn’t a team or MLB try to do that?)
2. I agree with him–don’t rush players, just not because of injury concerns.
May 12th, 2008 at 11:48 am
The article suggests that males and females develop different types of strengths and weaknesses because of hormones. Testosterone builds muscle strength, and estrogen encourages flexibility (”lax ligaments”), which results in an injury risk (for women) in sports more dependent on muscle strength.
It makes me wonder about a few things;
By the same token, are men’s injuries more often a result of ‘less flexibility’?
And, do men and women train in totally different ways to compensate for these strengths and weaknesses?
Also, it would be really interesting to compare injury rates in different sports. Perhaps men suffer more injuries (than women) in sports that are more dependent on flexibility.
May 12th, 2008 at 12:02 pm
They ran a 10-page feature on one girl’s sports injury? Jesus. No wonder the NYT is losing thousands of subscribers a week.
May 12th, 2008 at 12:23 pm
The Times is struggling to fill the void left by Judith Miller’s “reporting” during the Iraq build-up.
May 12th, 2008 at 12:40 pm
it was in the sunday magazine. i’ll bet it was really popular compared to a lot of the other stuff they put in the magazine.
May 12th, 2008 at 1:19 pm
well, I’d argue that major league baseball pitching is so close to the limits of human ability that it is difficult to tell, a priori, who will be able to withstand operating near those physical limits over a career.
in regards to this article, I think part of the dillema is the intensity of womens’ sports being equal to male sports, ceteris paribus, but the sophistication and training not necessarily being there. People have mentioned weight training, and that’s certainly more widespread (and critical) in high school male athletics.
May 12th, 2008 at 1:36 pm
Speaking of pitching, this is a wonderful article, “Pitching With Purpose”, written by David Brooks. It’s more about the mental rather than the physical aspects of it, and it’s based on a book.
Not too long ago, there was an article (somewhere!!) about the pure physics behind a pitch… the incredible (and inhuman) strain a ‘pitch’ puts on a human body. Wish I could find it…
May 12th, 2008 at 2:27 pm
Speaking of sports … former Williams College professor Grant Farred just came out with a wonderful, deep book about being a fan: “Long Distance Love: A Passion for Football”
May 12th, 2008 at 3:28 pm
Another issue, which the article only touches on in favor of “flexible = too much play” is the knee-hip angle. Maybe I just favor the more physics-based explanation due to my academic background, but it’s perfectly logical, and just from back-of-the-envelope no-numbers figuring, puts much more side-to-side strain on the knee ligaments than does the male hip/knee/leg angle. Sure, the ligament play comes into play (if you’ll pardon the pun), but that only exacerbates the problems with the angle; it doesn’t cause it.
I also note that, even from age 10 at summer camp when going hiking with packs, we were told, as men, to put our heaviest items at the tops of our packs; girls were told to concentrate their heaviest items in the center of their packs, due to the hip/leg/knee angles.
May 12th, 2008 at 3:33 pm
Rory, I have no idea why you can’t find it — it is quite literally all over the place in the sabermetric literature for at least a decade.
Try a google search for “Pitcher Abuse Points, for starters. See also here: http://www.baseball-reference.com/otb/pitcher_usage_old.php
May 12th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
I would think that there is a higher chance of injury at the high school level because of the likelihood of ‘wrong body type’ within a sport. The lesser level of competition allows achievement without the genetics being as big of a factor. You see small football players, short basketball players, slight pitchers, knock knees, etc…
But by the time college comes around, ‘body type’ starts to become more important. Coaches look at achievement, but they also take size and shape more into consideration for a particular sport or position. And then of course, in Div 1, and pro level, ‘body’ is a crucial factor. There are exceptions, but not often.
May 12th, 2008 at 4:43 pm
lowell,
thanks. i’m not much into sabermetrics, so i should have figured with all of the stats out there, it’d have been done to death. i only know the critique of buzz bissinger from his rant against deadspin.
May 12th, 2008 at 5:12 pm
Jezebel supplies an appropriate response to the Times’ onanistic tripe:
http://jezebel.com/389623/girls-hurt-the-soccer-story-that-will-pain-your-pretty-little-head</a
I used to think that the WSJ’s Weekend Journal stood for all that was frivolous and smug about upper-middle-class American life, but they now have some serious competition.
May 12th, 2008 at 6:06 pm
You’re right, Ronit.
Jezebel.com is so much more worthy of one’s time than the NYT and the WSJ.
In fact, I am cancelling my subscriptions today. Then maybe I can spend more time on EB and Jezebel, where cynicism and bad manners (thank goodness) take precedence over smug and frivolous.
May 12th, 2008 at 6:41 pm
Regardless of the phrasing or statistics in the Times article, there are a few things that are pretty clear:
(1) Women have a gait that is different from that of men, due to the different hip structure and angles of the lower body. While there are bell curves in this difference in both sexes, there is remarkably little skeletal overlap, post-puberty. Most of the overlap is due to substantial hormonal and/or nutritional abnormalities.
(2) Though the exact numbers are not yet clear, women suffer catastrophic knee injuries (especially ACL) at a rate substantially higher than that of men, even in comparable sports. The sex differences in severe injuries to other areas (e.g., severe ankle sprains, lisfranc injuries) are less well-known; they are not as well-studied because they are substantially less common and when then occur, are not as “life-altering” as an ACL injury or other sever knee injury.
(3) Women *ALREADY* have substantially more lower body problems than men in old age; even when today’s elderly date from an era when women did not put nearly as much strain on their lower bodies as they do today. Look at the statistics for lower body injuries (especially hip fractures), which are only compounded by the much higher rate of osteoporosis in women.
All this article is saying, it seems, is that there’s no such thing as a free lunch — and is bringing attention to a systemic problem that is comparatively unknown, especially given the greater emphasis on and spectator interest in male sports (for better or worse), across virtually every sport and every age range.
May 12th, 2008 at 10:17 pm
FM - if you can’t spot the utter insanity of this 10-page, 8,000-word article, which takes one anecdote and turns it into an epidemic without supplying any real statistical evidence, I’m afraid I can’t help you. That’s not journalism, that’s an extremely long promotional placement.
They’re now impossible to tell apart from the Onion:
http://www.theonion.com/content/magazine/the_silent_killer
http://www.theonion.com/content/magazine/pinkeye_the_silent_annoyer
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/53194
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/47459
(And I fail to see why you react with such incredulity at my suggestion that a blog might have something valuable to say about a Times article…)
May 12th, 2008 at 10:58 pm
Ronit!?
C’mon….The NYT and the WSJ are based on less solid ’statistical evidence’ than Jezebel.com?!?
Granted, it was an overly-long, slow-news, weekend filler, but there was some darn interesting data, if you could get through it all.
In fact, my favorite section (which ‘Dr. Loweeeeel’ missed in his rather in-depth analysis), was the part citing the U.S. Army studies.
Apparently, in military basic training, women are, indeed, more easily injured than men. However, “one large study” suggests that though the women are “more frequently injured”, they are “tougher”. “It takes a bigger injury to knock them out of the service. The men, by comparison, are wimps; they leave with more minor ailments.”
The article goes on to draw the comparison, that in sports, like the military, women are newcomers, and thus may be over-compensating by “toughing it out to prove they belong.”
Now, really, you gotta love that stuff. Makes for some interesting conversation if you aren’t so quick to nip it in the bud!
May 13th, 2008 at 10:16 am
Apparently, in military basic training, women are, indeed, more easily injured than men. However, “one large study” suggests that though the women are “more frequently injured”, they are “tougher”. “It takes a bigger injury to knock them out of the service. The men, by comparison, are wimps; they leave with more minor ailments.”
This doesn’t say nearly as much as it purports to — this is like comparing, e.g., the top 50% of apples to the top 15% of oranges, by ignoring the self-selection of who goes into military basic training. Moreover, it ignores the social aspects of the military, in which many women feel the need to “prove that they belong” to men in their units. Given that we sex-segregate most, if not all sports, I think that the desire to prove that one belongs is much less pressing in girls-only sports than mixed-sex military units.
May 13th, 2008 at 11:14 am
Loweeel:
The comparison was drawn to the boardroom as well.
What I found most interesting about the article, was not really it’s focus, the prevalence of ACL injuries in women (which is a verifiable statistic, BTW), but how it led me to other musings.
The truth is, that women are being challenged in all kinds of new ways that were formerly venues for men, from the boardroom, to the soccer field, to the military. And whether they are directly alongside of a man during the ‘activity’, doesn’t remove their desire to prove themselves, to not let any kind of female weakness, whether it be physical or other, take away from their performance. And some are loathe to allow focus on any ‘weakness’ for fear of losing what they have gained. (We insisted on Title IX, after all.)
It is new, and interesting territory, with differences being confronted and worked out …maybe more successfully in the boardroom at this point (maternity leave, etc.). And it may be, that sports will need to be ‘tackled’, : ) in the same way.
May 14th, 2008 at 12:09 am
On the theme of whether girls’ sports injuries could kill us all, Colbert provides a timely warning (about 1:30 into the video):
http://www.comedycentral.com/colbertreport/videos.jhtml?videoId=168291
May 15th, 2008 at 5:49 pm
Kind of a stretch of a segue…but apparently, the soccer field and the military aren’t the only places women are having a hard time…’making a go of it’.
According to this article, even the corporate boardroom has had more success making women feel welcomed.
The workplaces where a “pervasive macho culture” is so prevalent that women are leaving in disproportionate numbers?
“Science, Engineering, and Technology”!
At least read as far as the bit about the “strikingly different messages” received by a computer programmer when she used an email nickname mistaken for masculine.
Ronit: It’s in your very favorite newspaper…
and hwc: You will like the title. :-)
May 15th, 2008 at 6:42 pm
Thanks, FM, that seems to confirm everything I was saying in the much earlier thread about sexism
May 15th, 2008 at 9:20 pm
Yeah…I noticed that. In fact, I thought about posting there, but that particular thread got so long and oooogly.
Anyway, I guess we have a ways to go. The surprise to me was in the particular fields…especially technology.
May 15th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
Interesting as well, how they didn’t mention Lawrence Summers by name. After all, he was the …ahem…’inspiration’ behind this study.
IMO, it really deserves it’s own post. It deserves more commentary.