Over the course of this past women’s basketball season, five players have been redshirted or simply benched due to severe injuries that heal over months of surgery and therapy.
Sophomore Betsy Bildner began her basketball career in grade school. She remembered that her fourth grade teacher used to come to her games. Quicky, Bildner grew out of the “kid stuff” and played in Amature Athletic Union or AAU during her high school years. Eventually she made it to the college level.
Over the course of her practices in the fall, Bildner gradually felt a pain in her knee grow worse during defense drills. Eventually she checked it out and found that she had been practicing on a torn meniscus in her right knee and a hole at the tip of her femur. Surgery quickly followed.
To heal the hole in her leg, Bildner’s surgeon pricked several holes with a needle around the larger hole in the femur. The blood from the needle pricks scabbed over her injury. Bildner spent six weeks in crutches before she could put any pressure on her foot so the scab could heal.
According to the Upper Valley Sports Education Facility, ACL injuries can be reduced up to 75 percent through prevention programs.
“There are prevention programs to help strengthen the muscles surrounding the knee joint and also ways to teach athletes proper techniques such as jumping and landing,” said women’s basketball trainer Amy Evans.” With that said, there are things such as our body’s make-up in which we cannot control.”
Although women athletes like sophomore Abbey Lovat try to be proactive, preexisting injuries endanger the likelihood of keeping the ACL in tact.
During a two-on-two game over the summer, Lovat tore her ACL as a result of a weak ankle from previous basketball injuries. She has sprained her ankle seven times and broken it three times.
After she healed from her ACL surgery in August she had her ankle surgery in January. Less than a week after surgery, Evans noticed that Lovat’s ankle was alarmingly red and inflamed.
“Amy told me, ‘Abbey, your ankle is infected,’” Lovat said. “If I wouldn’t have been out of it from the infection, I would have lost it. I would have been really upset.”
Sure enough, Evans was right. Lovat was taken to the hospital that weekend to treat her staff infection. Nurses inserted a pick line through her bicep to the tip of her heart so the medicine would have direct and immediate access. She was released that weekend to return to school with a homecare nurse and her mom so she could inject the medication through her IV for the remainder of the week.
Although Lovat is cleared to start running soon, she plans on taking the process slow to build strength and avoid more injuries.
More than 175,00 knee repair surgeries are conducted every year. The majority of these patients are under the age of 30. According to Dr. Constance Chu from the Institute of Regenerative Medicine, about 50 percent of those patients will develop arthritis within 5-10 years.
Even through the pain and annoyance of injuries, Bildner and Lovat both agreed that it is worth it to play basketball.
“I have had my ACL reconstructed, a limgament in my ankle reconstructed, and bone fragment in my ankle removed, and a screw taken out of knee,” Lovatt said. “The fact that I still want to play after all of this lets me know that it’s worth it.”
