ACL injuries are common in sports like basketball, football, and soccer. The ACL ligament is among the four key ligaments that connect the shinbone and thighbone. It helps in changing direction and making quick stops. Therefore, the ligament is susceptible to injury during collisions.
Common ACL injury symptoms are quick swelling, instability in the knee, severe pain, and a popping sound. Vivianne Miedema and Beth Mead are some of the star players who missed the 2023 Women’s World Cup due to ACL injuries. But, Stephen Smith, Kitman Labs’ CEO, is determined to curb the ACL injury plight in women’s sports.
Kitman Forms Collaborations to Handle ACL Injury
Smith’s firm is partnering with several leagues and teams, including Gotham FC to help women avoid ACL injury. The CEO informed Reuters, “What we’re excited about is that we’re now working alongside a couple of female-based leagues and teams globally to start collecting that data and understand what it means.
[We want to] couple the game information, alongside the healthcare information and the information concerning things like the menstrual cycle, so that we can better understand the cause and effect. Then we can help these clubs and leagues to learn about how to better manage the female athlete.”
Smith Curbs the ACL Injury Crisis in Ireland
Smith served as Leinster Rugby’s senior conditioning and injury rehabilitation coach in the past. He discovered that the performance, medical, strength, and conditioning departments’ independent nature helped them gather a lot of information about players. But they didn’t share it well.
The CEO stated, “The idea was to be able to take all of this information, pull it into one place, and give teams the ability to create that 360-degree view of the reality of their athletes and to make way better decisions that were tailored to what the athletes needed.” This prompted him to form Kitman Labs in 2012 to automate and streamline workflows to get better player performance results.
The Complex Nature of Women’s ACL Injury
Smith relocated to California several years ago. He has collaborated with Irish and English football unions, the Washington Wizards, and the Premier League. He explained that female athletes have a “Q angle” due to their wide hips. This makes them more prone to ACL injury compared to male athletes.
He added, “Most ACL injuries happen when landing or trying to decelerate and change direction, and they happen generally when the knee gets flexed and it gets rotated. And then it has a shearing action that occurs, and that shearing action is more accentuated when somebody has a wider Q angle.
What we also know is that, during times of hormonal change, different hormones release different chemicals that change the structure and resilience of our ligaments, so at different points through the menstrual cycle for females, they are going to have changes that make their ligaments more relaxed.
It’s an area that’s been ignored previously because people don’t want to talk about the menstrual cycle, but the reality is that women have to deal with it, and I think we see it as such a huge opportunity to improve the standard of healthcare that is provided to female athletes.”
Smith isn’t focusing on creating a one-size-fits-all solution as each player will get treated alone. He stated, “We’ll need a lot of data to be able to go on and identify those patterns and trends as they emerge, and then we’re going to need to fine-tune those for every person because no two humans are the same.”
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