Grant: Project Grant - Priority Announcement: Female Athlete Health

Injuries remain a large component of sport participation. Each sport comes with its unique set of injuries due to exposure to particular movements that put athletes at risk. Soccer is the most popular sport in the world with injuries in the legs being most common. Many common injuries, such as ankle sprains, hamstring muscle strains, and knee Anterior Cruciate Ligament tears, are non-contact injuries that occur without any interaction with other athletes. Instead, these injuries are often associated with maneuvers such as cutting when moving around the field (ankle and knee injuries) or through over-exertion (hamstring injuries). Recently, we have developed a wearable movement sensor to both monitor soccer play and measure specific movements that are most associated with injury. Here, we propose to first train a machine learning classification algorithm to determine when athletes are performing 'risky' movements in soccer. Then, we will deploy the wearable sensor to female and male soccer athletes over the soccer season to track how often they perform 'risky' movements as a measure of exposure to these potentially dangerous movements. We expect female and male athletes will exhibit different exposure to different types of 'risky' movements associated with the injuries that are more common in the respective sex. We also expect athletes will perform 'risky' movements more often and with greater intensity (as measured by the sensors) over a season. This information can help link injury with mechanistic factors such as fatigue or training, which can in turn help develop preventative training to reduce injury risk. Through this study, we will have applied our wearable movement sensor to understand the evolution of 'risky' movement exposure over a season and how female and male athletes are differentially exposed to 'risky' movements. Ultimately, this will help us understand differences in female and male athlete play and its potential role in injury risk.