Being an athlete means dealing with whatever comes at you, putting your physical and mental self on the line for your team and your school. But dedication can come with a price: the injuries that affect athletes across all levels of every sport.
After LASA sophomore Tanvi Thandri tore her ACL learning taekwondo last year, she didn’t just lose the chance to continue playing her favorite sport. She had to face over a year of recovery and a shift in her identity as an athlete.
“Mentally, it took a really big toll,” Thandri said. “I had to stop doing a sport that I had been in for a big part of my life.”
Throughout the 2023-2024 school year, many high schools and club sports observed increased student participation, primarily due to a ‘rebound’ back to physical activity after the COVID-19 pandemic. With this increase in involvement, the National Safety Council reported, the overall injury rate of high school athletes decreased, but the occurrence of serious injuries like concussions, sprains, and dislocations increased. These serious injuries typically require significant time without intense physical activity, ceasing participation in sports, and, in some cases, surgery.
“I tore my meniscus around two years ago and went to physical therapy for it,” Thandri said. “I also had to get an MRI, and right after that, I tore my ACL. After I tore both of those, I also had to quit taekwondo.”
BioMed Central studies show that individuals who have to stop playing their sport for just three months feel grief and sadness that typically affects their identity as an athlete. Sloane Townsend, a freshman on LASA’s soccer team, has hurt her ankle multiple times and been concussed, leading her to breaks from being on the field after every injury. As a result, Townsend expressed that the shift back into playing soccer was a struggle because she perceived her identity as an athlete differently.
“While I was adjusting, it took some time to get back to normal,” Townsend said. “During that time, it felt like I was really bad at soccer.”
As a sports trainer at LASA, Calvin Ta is responsible for helping athletes deal with injuries by monitoring, treating, and advising them. He believes that these problems are largely preventable, making sports less risky when one exercises caution.
“Injuries are typically from having bad form, from not having stretched or warmed up enough consistently before and after activity, and traumatic incidents,” Ta said. “The more common injuries that I’ve seen thus far are ankle sprains and concussions.”
Ta usually diagnoses concussions in high-contact sports like football, soccer, and wrestling, but has also found that they occur in cheer and basketball. These injuries, Ta says, come from fast movements that cause the brain to move inside the head.
“The earliest an athlete can come back from a concussion is one week,” Ta said. “Our protocol is that if we suspect a student to have a concussion based off of their symptoms and ways that we check for concussion, we put them on a protocol that has them be seen by a physician … and that physician will then determine the severity of a concussion and if they need any academic and athletic accommodations while healing.”
Sprains and tears also affect athletes like Thandri. When he encounters sprains, however, Ta takes a different approach from the long breaks he suggests for concussions, instead encouraging athletes to return to activity as soon as possible.
“If you go to a doctor to have your ankle checked out after a sprain, they’re probably going to have you rest for two weeks, whilst for me, I can get you back in two weeks,” Ta said. “If you rest for two weeks, you’re not doing anything, you’re not optimally loading that ankle to bring healing factors to it, like blood flow and nutrients.”
Although injuries can be overwhelming, athletes continue to work through them, reaching new heights even as they feel new lows. Ta emphasized the importance of moderation for student athletes who get injuries.
“I would have them talk to their teachers about what’s going on, and let them know that they are having trouble balancing their current schoolwork and needing to rehabilitate their injury,” Ta said. “There will be times where it’s the middle or end of a season when you have tests and projects, and they’re required to put more time and effort into that, and then because of that, they struggle with rehabilitation and getting better.”
