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Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women's Sports
Simon & Schuster
June 2008
On Sale: June 3, 2008
320 pages ISBN: 0743297555 EAN: 9780743297554 Hardcover
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Non-Fiction Sports
Amy Steadman was destined to become one of the great
women's soccer players of her generation. "The best of the
best," Parade magazine called her as she left high school
and headed off to the University of North Carolina.
Instead, by age twenty, Amy had undergone five surgeries on
her right knee. She had to give up the sport she loved. She
walked with a stiff gait, like an elderly woman, and found
it painful to get out of bed in the morning.
Warrior Girls exposes the downside of the women's sports
revolution that has evolved since Title IX: an injury
epidemic that is easily ignored because we worry that it
will threaten our daughters' hard-won opportunities on the
field. From teenage girls playing local soccer, basketball,
lacrosse, volleyball, and other sports to women competing
at the elite level, female athletes are suffering serious
injuries at alarming rates. The numbers are frightening and irrefutable. Young female
athletes tear their ACLs, the stabilizing ligament in the
knee, at rates as high as eight times greater than their
male counterparts. Women's collegiate soccer players suffer
concussions at the same rate as college football players.
From head to toe, female athletes suffer higher rates of
injury, and many of them play through constant pain. Michael Sokolove gives us the most up-to-date research on
girls and sports injuries. He takes us into the homes and
hearts of female athletes, into operating theaters where
orthopedic surgeons reconstruct shredded knees, and onto
the practice field of famed University of North Carolina
soccer coach Anson Dorrance. Exhaustively researched and strongly argued, Warrior Girls
is an urgent wake-up call for parents and coaches. Sokolove
connects the culture of youth sports -- the demands for
girls to specialize in a single sport by age ten or
younger, and to play it year-round -- directly to the
injury epidemic. Devoted to the ideal of team, and deeply
bonded with teammates, these tough girls don't want to
leave the field even when confronted with serious injury
and chronic pain. Warrior Girls shows how girls can train better and smarter
to decrease their risks. It makes clear that parents must
come together and demand changes to a sports culture that
manufactures injuries. Well-documented, opinionated, and
controversial, Warrior Girls shows that all girls can
safeguard themselves on the field without sacrificing their
hard-won right to be there.
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