APEX PWR  |  Female Fitness

The Female Athlete ACL Epidemic Is Still Climbing in 2026

If you are a parent of a girl who plays soccer or basketball, you have probably seen it up close or heard about it from another family: the plant, the awkward landing, the pop, and a season, sometimes more, gone. The ACL injury epidemic in women's sport has been building for years, and the data coming out of 2026 shows it is still very much here.

Trackers that follow the professional women's game have already documented a long and growing list of ACL injuries across the top leagues this year, and we are only halfway through it. Every name on those lists is a real athlete facing a long road back. The professional cases make the news, but the same pattern runs all the way down to the high school and club level, where most of our local families are living it.

ACL Injury Rates in Girls' Soccer, Basketball, and Volleyball

This is not a perception problem. The research has been consistent for two decades, and it is stark.

A 2024 systematic review and meta-analysis of adolescent athletes found that soccer carried the highest per-season ACL risk for females, that club-sport participation raised risk further, and that female athletes overall tore their ACLs at about 1.56 times the rate of males. Earlier and repeated analyses across soccer and basketball put the female-to-male difference at roughly three to one. The American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine, writing on what it calls the female athlete ACL crisis, describes the gap as ranging anywhere from two to eight times depending on sport and setting.

Soccer and basketball draw the most attention because their rates are highest, but the pattern extends to volleyball as well. Volleyball is built on repeated jumping, landing, and quick directional change, the exact movements where non-contact ACL injuries happen. Any sport that asks a young female athlete to decelerate, plant, and land at speed carries this risk, which is why the answer is less about the specific sport and more about how prepared her body is for those demands.

The single most important detail for parents is this: most of these injuries are non-contact. They do not come from a hard tackle. They come from the athlete's own movement, the way she decelerates, plants, cuts, and lands. Rather than a reason for fatalism, that is the most encouraging fact in the whole conversation.

Building the Foundation to Reduce ACL Risk as She Grows

Female and male athletes differ anatomically, and girls and boys move through puberty and their growth spurts on different timelines. That is about as far into the causes as we need to go, because the useful conversation centers on what you can change rather than what you cannot. The most important factor is training that fits the athlete's age and stage of development.

The goal for a young female athlete is to build her body and her athletic foundation at a pace that mirrors her own rate of growth and development, while preparing her for the rising demands of youth sport. That means age and development appropriate speed and strength training, built around where she actually is, not a generic program borrowed from an older athlete or a boys' team.

Done right, this foundation gives a growing athlete the strength, coordination, and body control to handle the cutting, landing, and deceleration her sport is going to ask of her, long before the season demands it under fatigue and pressure. It is the difference between a body that is ready for the load and one that is catching up to it.

What Actually Decreases ACL Injury Risk in Female Athletes

Here is the honest framing, because overpromising on this topic does a disservice to families. No program prevents every ACL injury. A hard collision can tear a ligament regardless of preparation, and the research is clear that not all ACL injuries are avoidable. What the evidence does support is that building genuine strength and athletic control reduces ACL injury risk, with the strongest effect shown in soccer.

The work that decreases risk is not mysterious at all. It comes down to age and development appropriate strength and speed training: building real strength through the hips, hamstrings, and full lower body, and developing the coordination to move, land, and change direction under control. As the athlete matures, the work progresses with her, adding load, speed, and complexity in step with her development. This is the same ground-up foundation that also makes an athlete faster and more explosive.

At APEX PWR, that work happens through two paths depending on where an athlete is. For an athlete returning from injury or dealing with pain, our 1-on-1 sports physical therapy rebuilds the foundation first. For healthy athletes building toward their sport, our semi-private, athlete-specific sports performance training delivers individualized programming in a coached group environment. Both begin the same way, with a Sports Science Assessment, so the plan is built on what your athlete actually needs.

ACL Risk Screening and Female Athlete Testing in Portland, Oregon

You cannot address what you have not measured. The problem with the standard approach to female athlete development is that it guesses. It assumes an athlete is moving well because she is scoring goals, right up until the moment her knee tells a different story.

Objective testing removes the guessing. At APEX PWR, female athlete performance testing and training uses force plates and VALD technology to measure how an athlete actually produces and absorbs force, where her asymmetries are, and how her numbers compare against sport and age standards. Instead of a vague sense that she seems athletic, you get data: is her left leg meaningfully weaker than her right, how well does she absorb force when she lands, and where does she stand against the benchmarks for her sport and age.

That data is what turns a general "girls should strength train" message into a specific, individualized plan for your specific athlete. It also gives you a baseline to retest against, so progress is measured rather than assumed.

Female Athlete ACL Support in Tigard and the Portland Metro

ACL injuries are not an abstraction at APEX. We work with female athletes through every stage of this, from the ones building strength to stay on the field, to the ones grinding through rehab after a tear and fighting their way back to sport. The through-line in all of it is the same: give the athlete an honest, objective picture of where her body is, then build the strength and control that serve her, on the field and long after she is done competing.

If you have a daughter in soccer, basketball, or any cutting-and-landing sport, the most useful thing you can do is stop guessing about her movement and start measuring it. That is what the assessment is for.

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