“The upside of turf is that players feel more nimble, they feel faster,” said Dr. Brian Cole, orthopedic surgeon and team doctor for basketball’s Chicago Bulls. “The downside is they’re faster. It’s a collision sport. Velocity goes up and collisions go up.”
Dr. Joseph Donnelly has repaired numerous torn ACLs in female high school soccer players in the Bay Area where most high school athletes play on artificial turf. Female athletes are more likely than males to suffer ACL injuries in sports such as soccer that require sudden changes in direction, studies have shown.
“It’s an epidemic,” said Donnelly, an orthopedic surgeon at Stanford Health Care. “When these ladies tear their ACLs, we fix them, we send them back and then they’re actually more likely to tear their opposite ACL.”
He dug into the research. One study from 2016 used a hydraulic testing machine to simulate shoes with different style cleats pivoting on various playing surfaces. Shoes with blade-shaped cleats on artificial turf were a dangerous combination. The traction from the blade-shaped cleats increased the twisting force on the knee.
“You’re not going to be able to change the surface you play on,” Donnelly said. “So we do try to get them to use a cleat that has a favorable interaction with the turf.”
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