Nyke Johnson tears his Achilles in winter drills

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Terrible break. Hopefully he has a rapid and complete recovery.

It came earlier than I anticipated.

We have a harder schedule this year and while we are starting to replenish the ranks, its going to take time for it to gel

To add to this while we've added a few sought after transfers we're still absolutely tissue paper thin in depth and haven't even made it to Spring practice yet where historically we're good for one debilitating achilles tear to a projected contributor player.

https://www.thekeyplay.com/comment/reply/23111/1181293

which begs the question what are we doing that we tear an achilles once a season???

(add if applicable) /s

which begs the question what are we doing that we tear an achilles once a season???

I do wonder which teams have the worst injury luck. Is VT is particularly unlucky, or we (those of us in tkp) just notice it more since we follow the sport/team year round?

https://meridian.allenpress.com/jat/article/56/7/643/467957/Epidemiology...

Across the study period, the competition-related injury rate was higher than the practice-related injury rate; the preseason injury rate was also higher than regular and postseason injury rates.

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This study, while interesting, does not segment injury frequency by program, just by activity.

Although, it does appear that across all schools, preseason has the greatest likelihood of injury. Wonder why.

Probably because theoretically, in preseason athletes may be out of conditioning and flexibility (more than in-season anyway; I know they do off season workouts but I'd guess they aren't as structured or intense as during the season)

From the 2018 VT-uva game-"This is when LEGENDS are made!"

I would think off-season is way more intense because you can be. Being exhausted in the spring isn't an issue like it is in the fall.

I wonder if it's a little bit of both. Take winter break off and then start to get back into it. Realize you are out of shape for football and start to practice a little harder and a little longer or more often.

I agree that is also a factor in spring.

I doubt it, but I have no hard numbers to support that. Just mathematics and probability. I mean for example, NC State packed 3 years worth of key injuries into 2021. Or remember when Maryland was reduced to playing their 5th or 6th string QB (who was really a backup LB or something) a few years back? Teams have encountered FAR worse.

Contradicting that, however, it's always been my sense that VT kind of found the injury rabbit's foot during the heyday years of Beamer ball.

I always assumed non-contact ligament and tendon injuries were just freak occurrences...are there actually ways to avoid or prevent them?

Any time I have had injuries in my adult, no longer the athlete I once was, life.... its not helped by the fact that other supporting muscles are not as strong as they should be. I.e. hurting my knee from cycling where I had been neglecting all lateral strength and my ligaments were more at risk.

Danny is always open

There's two ways those kind of tears occur 1) You have a freak accident where a leg gets pinned, or something gets rolled up on, and the force, just pops it. 2) You can have recurring micro-tears, which will cause the ligament to eventually give way. The second way is likely what happens for most of the non-contact tears you see, where it doesn't seem like there's something that happened to cause it, and also UCL tears.