'How Title IX Hurts Female Athletes'

Article here. Excerpt:

'The numbers bear it out. Since the advent of Title IX, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations, the number of girls playing high school sports has grown more than tenfold, from 294,000 in 1971 to nearly 3.2 million last year.

But this welcome transformation has come at a serious cost for many female athletes. Title IX has inflicted significant collateral damage, including increased health risks for the players, a drop in the number of women coaches, and increased exposure to sexual abuse.
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Of special concern for girls is damage to their anterior cruciate ligament, or A.C.L., the tiny ligament in the knee that connects the two halves of the leg. Female athletes are four or five times more likely than male athletes to have A.C.L tears, says Dr. William Levine, the director of sports medicine at Columbia University and the head physician for its varsity teams.

As Dr. Levine explains, once girls begin to menstruate, they become more "quadricep-dependent" than males, and that thick slug of muscle in the middle of the thigh then works against the A.C.L., sometimes causing tears. "Female athletes jump and land in a more erect posture, which puts increased stress on their A.C.L," he says.'