Macalester’s fall athletes plagued by A.C.L. tears

In the early overtime minutes of her team's first conference match of the year, Macalester women's soccer midfielder Emily Humphreys '13 went down and knew she wasn't getting back up.

"I was running to go get the ball and on the way I stepped in a divot and just went down," Emily told me, months later, in an email. "It was like the feeling of walking down the stairs when you think you're at the bottom but there is still one more step to go, so you hit the ground with your leg fully extended."

In the third game of Macalester's football season, inside linebacker Levi Brown '14 left the field after his knee gave out during a tackle.

"I got off of the field without any help and as soon as I sat down it began feeling much better," Levi said. "The trainers put a brace on my knee and I was running around on the sideline so I was cleared to go back in, but before I could make a play my knee gave out again on the field. The pain was ten times worse."

Early in the Macalester volleyball season, outside hitter Mattie Hill '13 hit the ground after landing on the other team's right-side hitter.

"When I went to turn, I couldn't pivot and my knee rotated without my leg rotating with it," Mattie wrote me. "I knew right away."

What Mattie knew was that this moment wasn't one she'd soon forget—because like Emily, Levi and at least five other Macalester athletes, she'd just torn a ligament crucial to her knee, the anterior cruciate ligament (A.C.L.). She knew that her season was over before it had really begun, because she'd soon be navigating on crutches and making daily visits to the training room. She knew that as soon as her swelling went down, she'd be scheduling reconstructive knee surgery. And she knew that after surgery, she'd be back in the Leonard Center every day, slowly rebuilding her strength on a four-to-six-month road to recovery.

Mattie had torn her ACL before, during her freshman preseason, so she knew all of these things. That didn't make it easy.

"The night I tore it, I was really, really upset," Mattie said. "I took a long shower and tried to pull myself together and kind of stumbled home. When I got to my house some of the girls were there waiting for me been just as supportive through it all."

Emily, Levi and Mattie's stories are unfortunately common among Macalester's fall 2011 athletic teams. At least eight athletes among Mac volleyball, football and men's and women's soccer tore their A.C.L.s during scrimmages or games, an uncommonly high number by the standard of past years. This semester, women's soccer saw three of its starters go down with A.C.L. tears over the course of the season, including two-time All-Conference defender Kat Lenhart '13.

A season-ending injury

For all of these athletes, the injury was a season-ender.

The A.C.L. is a small, elastic fiber attached to the femur in the upper leg and the tibia in the lower leg whose function is to stabilize the knee. An A.C.L. "tear" is really more of an explosion; the ligament pulls away from the femur and then dissolves into a viscous liquid. About 80 percent of A.C.L. tears come during a routine non-contact movement, like a misplanted change of direction. Sometimes it's a matter of an unfortunate collision.

"I went in for a tackle and a girl ran through my leg," Kat said, describing the moment she tore her A.C.L. in a game at St. Kate's, halfway through the women's soccer season. "It felt like the bottom part of my leg detached from my knee and wiggled around a bit, which I guess actually is kind of what happened."

With no way of determining what the injury was, the St. Kate's athletic trainer suggested it might be a bone bruise. But an MRI confirmed what Kat had suspected from the moment she went down—that her A.C.L. was torn. Like many athletes, Kat has seen and heard about her fair share of A.C.L. tears, which are particularly common among female soccer players. And she heard the infamous "pop" when she went down, a loud noise accompanied by a shifting feeling that is perhaps the most notorious marker of the A.C.L. tear.

Left alone, most knees with torn A.C.L.s will eventually regain some stability. For people who don't have much pain or trouble walking after a tear and who don't participate in a sport that involves jumping, cutting or pivoting, going without surgery is an option. But sports like soccer and football are impossible to perform without an A.C.L., so for the eight Mac athletes I talked to the A.C.L. tear meant surgery. It also meant spending the rest of the season on the sidelines.