Participation in high school sports has physical, physiological, and social development benefits, but it also increases the risk of acute and overuse injuries. Risk of sport-related overuse injury differs between boys and girls. These authors sought to investigate differences in overuse injuries among high school athletes participating in the gender-comparable sports of boys’ and girls’ basketball and soccer and boys’ baseball and girls’ softball.
The nationally representative data from the 2006–2007 to 2018–2019 academic years comes from High School Reporting Information Online (RIO), the National High School Sports-Related Injury Surveillance Study. The authors extrapolated national estimates and rates of overuse injuries from weighted observed numbers with the following independent variables: sport, gender, academic year, class year, event type, body site, diagnosis, recurrence, activity, and position.
Key among their findings:
- Girls were more likely to sustain an overuse injury than boys (soccer, injury rate ratio [IRR]: 1.37, 95% CI = 1.20–1.57; basketball, IRR: 1.82, 95% CI = 1.56–2.14; baseball/softball, IRR: 1.21, 95% CI = 1.04–1.41).
- Findings from this study can help guide future strategies that are more specific to gender and sport to reduce overuse injuries among high school athletes.
Other findings include: Among an estimated 908,295 overuse injuries nationally, 43.9% (n = 398 419) occurred in boys’ soccer, basketball, and baseball, whereas 56.1% (n = 509,876) occurred in girls’ soccer, basketball, and softball. Most overuse injuries in soccer and basketball for both genders occurred to a lower extremity (soccer: 83.9% [175,369/209,071] for boys, 90.0% [243,879/271,092] for girls; basketball: 77.0% [59,239/76,884] for boys, 80.5% [81,826/101,709] for girls), whereas most overuse injuries in baseball and softball were to an upper extremity (72.5% [81,363/112,213] for boys, 53.7% [73,557/136,990] for girls). For boys’ baseball, pitching (43.5% [47,007/107,984]) was the most common activity associated with an overuse injury, which differed from the most common activity of throwing (31.7% [39,921/126,104]) for girls’ softball.
Source: Bunstine JL, Yang J, Kistamgari S, Collins CL, Smith GA. Differences in Overuse Injuries in Gender-Comparable Sports: A Nationally Representative Sample of High School Athletes.J Athl Train. 2024; 59 (9): 962–968. doi: https://doi.org/10.4085/1062-6050-0040.23
