There’s an old saying in sports that it’s not always the best team that wins the championship, just the healthiest one.
That kind of wisdom doesn’t bode too well for too many people wearing blue and gold right now.
Sure, injuries happen. They’re a part of competitive sports. But here in Westwood we’ve seen more than our fair share this year ““ and it’s only November.
The UCLA football team has seen its top two quarterbacks go down, along with its top receiver, a couple of linebackers, multiple linemen, and pretty much everyone on the roster who has ever seriously contemplated having the ball handed to them so they can run with it.
However you feel about the job Karl Dorrell has done recruiting and preparing his team’s backups, it’s difficult to imagine so many people calling for him to turn in his whistle if he’d spent more of the year watching a healthy Ben Olson hand off to a healthy Kahlil Bell behind a healthy offensive line. If the Dorrell era does come to an end after this season, you could make a case that it died not on the field against Utah or Notre Dame or Washington State, but in the trainer’s room.
And now the injury bug is catching. Literally. Josh Shipp was held out of Monday’s exhibition game with a sprained thumb that made it painful for him to catch a basketball. Worse, Darren Collison missed the same game with a minor knee sprain and worse still, Michael Roll will be shelved for three to five weeks with a ruptured plantar fascia. In case you’re not involved with the study of sports science, that’s the connective tissue that supports the arch of the foot. And, yeah, I didn’t ever want to have to learn that either.
But speaking of tissues, freshman Kevin Love joked last week that he could “have a tissue fall on (him) and still have to get a MRI.” But with the pounding Love’s been taking in practice and in the first two exhibition games, you really can’t blame Ben Howland’s staff for being protective of their new player. Plus, there’s a school full of disgruntled fans out here who have been mumbling “just wait until basketball season” for a few Saturdays now, whose hearts just might break the second any part of Love’s anatomy does.
Even the women’s soccer team, currently rampaging its way through the Pac-10, has had its share of injuries. Defender Erin Hardy missed a month with a sprained knee early in the year, and midfielder Caitlyn Mac Kechnie tore an ACL and is done for the season. Fortunately, those Bruins didn’t seem to get that memo about the best team not always winning, and they’ve overshadowed their injury report by doling out serious contusions to the egos of pretty much every team they’ve played.
Still, you can’t help but wonder why it seems like so many of our athletes are getting hurt. The easiest answer is bad luck, and that certainly plays a part of it. That’s probably the best explanation for why so many injuries are happening to UCLA in particular.
But major injuries have become more and more common throughout the sports world, which suggests a larger problem. As athletes become bigger, faster and stronger, it’s putting more and more stress on those little tendons and joints that hold their bodies together, most of which aren’t designed for being crushed by 350-pound defensive linemen or slide-tackled by a sprinting defender.
And as collegiate sports become more and more competitive, off-seasons are shrinking, and there’s more pressure on hurt athletes to get back on the field as soon as they can. It’s one of the central ironies of American sports that the people who are the most successful at winning games are more often than not the people who most refuse to view their sport as “just a game” (you hear that, Bill Belichick?). Combine all that with the culture of toughness inherent in all high-level athletics, and sooner or later someone’s going to push themselves too far and get hurt.
Is there anything that can be done about this? Or even anything fundamentally wrong with it? Probably not. It’s a frustrating trend, but I have faith that the UCLA training staff is doing its job about as well as possible, and at the end of the day I think you still have to chalk most injuries up as just unfortunate accidents. Hey, I can even sympathize. I once dislocated my knee jumping off of a one-foot high planter.
But I’m still going to do my best to make sure something like that doesn’t happen again. I hear there’s a pretty long line for the MRI machine this year.
Contact Lampros at nlampros@media.ucla.edu if you’re willing to risk being sidelined for two weeks with carpal tunnel syndrome.