The ACL stat is the thing I’m most proud of in my coaching career.
Not the state championships. Not the kid who started in goal for the United States in a World Cup. Not the full-ride scholarships. Four straight years, more than 200 athletes a year, zero ACL tears in our program. Most of those athletes are high-school girls’ soccer players, statistically the most ACL-vulnerable population in youth sport. The national rate is brutal.
People ask me what we do. The honest answer is: nothing fancy. We do the same boring fundamentals, every week, for years.
The work is the work
Most knee injuries in young female athletes are non-contact. The athlete plants, decelerates, changes direction. And the knee gives. The reason isn’t bad luck. The reason is that the kid has never been taught how to absorb force, how to position the trunk over the knee, how to brake from sprint without collapsing into knee valgus.
You can prevent it. The literature is unambiguous on this. But you can only prevent it by doing the work, consistently, across seasons. Not by running an injury-prevention warm-up the week before tryouts.
What we actually do
The four pillars:
- Eccentric strength. Every athlete in our program does heavy posterior-chain work: Nordic hamstring curls, hip thrusts, single-leg RDLs. Eccentric strength of the hamstring is the single best protector of the ACL we’ve identified.
- Landing mechanics. From day one. Box drops, depth jumps, broad jumps with stuck landings. The athlete learns to absorb force in the hip, not collapse it into the knee.
- Single-leg work. A field sport is a single-leg sport. We program single-leg squats, lunges, step-ups, and balance work into every cycle. Both legs, all the time.
- Sprint mechanics under fatigue. Most tears happen late in games when form deteriorates. We train the athlete to brake correctly even when tired.
That’s it. It’s not a system you can buy. It’s a system you have to build, athlete by athlete, season by season.
“The most important sentence in any training program is: we’re not doing too much.”
What we don’t do
We don’t grind kids. We don’t program for ego. We don’t put 14-year-olds under heavy back squats they’re not ready to absorb. We don’t chase Instagrammable drills. We don’t substitute conditioning for technique.
We coach the boring stuff. Well. On repeat. That’s what works.
What this means for your daughter
If your daughter plays a field sport (soccer, lacrosse, basketball, field hockey) and you’re worried about ACL injury, the protective work is available. We do it every week here.
It doesn’t take much. Consistent work, year-round, will move the needle further than any single-session intervention. The kids who train with us long-term don’t tear ACLs.
The four-year streak isn’t luck. It’s a track record. The work is the work.