Riverside athletic trainer Erin Samuels teaches her sports medicine students the parts of the spine. Photo by Saul Janiak Stein
As injury rates spike, student athletes rely on rehab and family support to get back on the field.
By Fiona Fehrman, Levi Brown & Aureli Dominguez
It is a Tuesday afternoon in November. Volleyball season ended weeks ago, but junior Daniyah Humphrey is hard at work in Riverside’s sports medicine room.
Humphrey takes a resistance band and presses her foot against it like she would a gas pedal. She goes to physical therapy every day after school and does a series of stretches and exercises that are routine now.
Humphrey tore her ACL three weeks into the 2024-2025 season when she jumped up to hit the ball and her knee dislocated. More than two months later, she had major surgery and constant physical therapy sessions. But the hardest part has been missing out on is the experience of playing with her teammates this season.
“It’s my junior year and it was my first year playing for this school in general so I was really upset, and this is a 9-12 month process,” said Humphrey. “Next year is my senior year, so I really do hope to play.
Working alongside Humphrey in the training is Erin Samuels. Samuels is Riverside’s athletic trainer. Her job is to help rehab injured athletes and manage their return to play plan.
Samuels works with athletes from all sports, but sees the most season-ending injuries in volleyball.
A 2012 Riverside grad herself, Samuels was a member of the Pirate cheerleading, swimming and diving, gymnastics and lacrosse teams. She also took sports medicine classes and worked with Riverside’s athletic trainer (AT).
“That’s what made me want to be an AT,” said Samuels.
Samuels treats the physical impact of an injury on an athlete, but she also sees students’ mental and emotional journey after suffering a season-ending injury.
“With serious injuries, they go through multiple stages, the first one being devastation,” said Samuels. “They have a grieving stage that their season or career may be over.”
Even after athletes recover from their injury, they have to fight to regain confidence in themselves and in their body post-injury.
“They struggle mentally in trusting the leg that they injured and getting past that mental block,” said Samuels. “They need to believe in their strength.”
Samuels also works with TJ Moore, a Physical Therapist (PT) and AT from Duke Sports Medicine. As a licensed PT, Moore can give supplemental help to athletes and provide a surgical protocol when needed.
During the fall season Moore is at Riverside five days a week after school to work with football players. During the rest of the year he’s in the training room three days a week.
Samuels and Moore evenly split the athletes that they work with. Usually, Samuels takes the shoulder injuries, while Moore does the knees.
Another issue that Samuels deals with is athletes not following their return-to-play plan and not showing up to rehab sessions.
“I struggle to keep kids coming in,” she said.
Once they stop rehabbing, Samuels says that athletes will also return to their sport before they’re ready,
“They keep pushing themselves and get injured,” she said.
RISING RATES
Humphey’s injury isn’t the first time Samuels has dealt with ACL tears. Rates have been gradually increasing since studies began in 2007. According to the National ACL Injury Coalition, 8.2 female athletes experienced an ACL tear per 100,000 in 2022, up from 6.2 in 2007.
The growth isn’t limited to just female athletes either, as male athletes have also seen their cases rise to 6.3 tears per 100,000, up from 5.5 in 2007.
Researchers studying ACL tears have a few theories as to why these rates have been on the rise. A common opinion is that athletes were sedentary during COVID, which hurt the development and health of their ACL’s and led to a spike in injuries during 2021. Another thought is that lots of kids have been spending less time outside and exercising themselves and spending more time indoors, which doesn’t properly develop these athletes’ bodies.
The National ACL Injury Coalition also concluded that around half of the injuries are non-contact, meaning neither a teammate nor opponent made contact with them when they went down. This is usually from pivoting or rotating around the knee, or landing from a jump. 57.5% of ACL tears are non-contact for female athletes, while just 39.7% are non-contact for male athletes. The rate was most extreme in women’s lacrosse, where over 80% of the ACL tears were non-contact.
Researchers have also determined one of the biggest factors contributing to the rise in injuries is poor lower body control. A study from the Hospital for Special Surgery saw that 80% of adolescents that play sports don’t have adequate control over their trunk or knee joints when performing activities like squats or jumps. This could also be related to athletes being held inside during COVID, which led to inadequate neuromuscular control.
Riverside has seen these rising rates in its athletes too, Jackie Wenzlik was a senior at Riverside last year. She was known around the school as one of the best women’s soccer players and was one of three co-captains in her junior year.
On December 16, 2023 that changed.
She tore her ACL and meniscus and sprained her LCL and MCL in her last home game for her club team, Triangle United.
The injury sidelined her for the rest of her club season and her entire senior high school soccer season.
“Soccer was always a huge part of my personality and who I was and that got taken away from me,” said Wenzlik.
Instead of attending practice, she had physical therapy twice a day. On Jan. 12, Wenzlik had surgery to repair the torn ligaments.
“I lost all the muscle in my right leg, and I lost a ton of weight from not playing soccer,” she said.
Wenzlik’s injury even caused tension in certain relationships.
“All of my closest friends were soccer players and when I got hurt none of my friends really knew how to act around me,” she said. “My injury ruined a lot of relationships in that way. I really found out who my true people were, because a lot of people left my life when I got hurt.”
The injury forced her to find a new network to rely on.
“My biggest support was definitely my parents,” said Wenzlik. “Those were the only two people who were really there for it, through the entire process.”
An injury leaves the team and coach scrambling to fill the void left by that player, too.
When Wenzlik got hurt the team lost a key player as well as a captain that they could rally behind.
“Our team really struggled,” said senior captain Subi Tallmadge. “She was such a key person on our team and without her our offense really struggled to get not only goal counts up, but make connections.”
“These types of injuries not only hurt a team by being down a player, but it also really drains the spirit of a team,” said head women’s soccer coach Sarah Holland (formerly Cade). “When Jackie got injured, it was devastating news for the team, but you have to stay encouraged while knowing when to take some time to mourn the player missing their season.”
“We did still have a good season,” said Tallmadge. “It was just hard.”
When Humphrey makes a full recovery, she feels she’ll be making safer decisions on the volleyball court.
“I think I’ll be a lot more safer on the court,” said Humphrey. “I’ll definitely be a lot more precautious about how I’m doing things. I’ll probably wear a kneebrace and change up the shoes I wear as well,”
Humphrey is looking forward to playing next season. And Wenzlik is on the Randolph Macon College soccer team in Virginia. A year after her injury, she is still not cleared to play but is getting closer.
“My knee is still really stiff and it swells up sometimes,” she said.
When she does get back on the field, Wenzlik says that she will value her playing time more.
“I’m definitely going to have more of an appreciation for the time on the field because it was taken away from me for 13 months,” she said.
