Every year millions of high school athletes take the competitive playing field. Aspirations of glory and triumph run high, but athletes don’t realize the danger they are putting themselves in. The way athletes bodies contort themselves is extremely unnatural. Athletes often don’t know the danger until it is too late. One must go under the knife to fully understand both sides. Speculation is easy and it is convenient to say “It couldn’t happen to me”. But what happens when “that” person is you?

Although there are countless different sports injuries, I am going to focus on three major surgeries. The first (coincidentally the most common) is a knee ligament replacement. The tearing of the knee ligaments is most common in football and soccer. The two major ligaments, MCL and ACL are injured quite frequently in sports. After having the repairing surgery, the athlete needs at least 7 months to rehab the knee and the surgery success rate is about 88%. One look at a football highlight reel offers a glimpse of the terribly demanding positions we put our knees in. Most athletes who have the surgery say there is re-occurring pain sometime throughout their life.

Dead Elbow, Pitchers Elbow, call it whatever you want, but it’s commonly known as Tommy Johns surgery. When pitchers say that they “blew their elbow”, they are actually quite wrong, the surgery repairs or reconstructs ligaments that were worn down over a long period of time. The UCL ligament in the elbow is only used by two groups in society. Those tow groups are pitchers and catchers, and subsequently are the only ones to ever have this surgery. The most alarming fact about the procedure is that most athletes that have the surgery are in high school. Almost 60% of all surgeries are performed on high school baseball players. The rehab time for Tommy Johns surgery is about 1 ½ years.

The final surgery I’m going to talk about is a shoulder dislocation. A dislocation occurs when too much force is applied on a certain joint. The surgery to repair the shoulder takes about 3 hours and rehab time is 6-8 months. A dislocation is the most re-occurring injury in sports. The odds of a dislocation rise dramatically once you have already dislocated the joint. Most shoulder dislocations occur in football or rugby.