By OkayGoal 
Trinity Rodman has struggled with injuries in recent years, and unfortunately, that trend has continued. The star forward suffered a knee injury while playing with the Washington Spirit in their Concacaf W Champions League win over Monterrey. There was some real concern that the injury was severe when it first happened, but the best-case scenario happened, and she only suffered an MCL sprain. It’s a tough blow for Rodman, who was starting to really go on a tear of good form after coming back from missing quite a bit of the regular season while dealing with a back injury.
When it comes to knee injuries in women’s soccer, our minds go straight to ACL tears, and there was worry that Rodman had suffered a more severe injury, but after getting imaging done, it was revealed that it was a Grade 1 MCL sprain.
Here’s a little bit more information on MCL sprains.
What is an MCL sprain?
MCL stands for medial collateral ligament, and it runs on the inner part of the knee. A ligament is the term used for the bands of tissue that connect bones to each other. For the MCL, it’s the one that connects the thigh bone to the shin bone.
There are three other ligaments in the knee, and those are the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), which we’re most familiar with due to the amount of ACL tears in the sport. Then we have the lateral collateral ligament (LCL) and the posterior cruciate ligament (PCL). When it comes to Rodman’s injury, she was lucky to have only injured the MCL and not any of the other three.
In terms of injuries to your MCL, there are three grades of tears or sprains. A Grade 1 sprain is a very mild tear; the Cleveland Clinic describes it as less than 10% of the fibers in the ligament being torn, and it doesn’t cause instability in the joint. Grade 2 is described as a partial tear of the ligament, and then Grade 3 is a complete tear. Luckily, Rodman’s ligament is still intact, so the recovery time is much shorter.
MCL sprains/tears usually happen when the knee is hyperextended or suffers a direct blow, and they are fairly common injuries, especially when it comes to Grade 1 sprains.
Recovery time
When it comes to recovery time, it really varies by person, but Washington Spirit head coach Adrián González has said that Rodman will be reevaluated after three weeks. With that timeline, it means that we could see Rodman back for the start of the playoffs, but that might be a little bit optimistic, as they won’t want to rush the star forward to get back onto the field before she’s ready.
The treatment for this type of injury really revolves around the RICE method, which is rest, ice, compression, and elevation. We know from seeing Rodman that she is wearing a knee brace, which is probably a precautionary move to prevent too much movement in the knee and really give it the chance to heal.
The other treatment component is physical therapy, and we’re sure that Rodman is working with both the Spirit trainers as well as probably trainers with the USWNT on a treatment plan to make sure that they give it time to heal to limit the chances of reinjury.
It’s not crazy to think that we’ll see Rodman back out on the field for the Spirit before the end of the season, but I think that will likely depend on how deep the Spirit can make a run. It’s an unfortunate injury that came at a really lousy time, but in the grand scheme of things, Rodman got lucky that there wasn’t more damage.
Image via @trinity_rodman
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