Injury plaguing March Madness is hitting young girls too. Here’s why
Dodging and weaving are great moves on the basketball court and soccer field, but knee injuries are increasingly affecting female athletes.
The University of South Carolina’s top scorer, who powered the team to the 2025 NCAA women’s basketball finals , got knocked out of this year’s competition because of an injury that disproportionately sidelines female athletes . Amid March Madness, Chloe Kitts, the Gamecocks’ 6'2" forward who grew up in Oviedo, Florida, offers a cautionary tale for other upcoming female scholastic athletes and weekend warriors. Kitts, who graduated from DME Academy in Daytona Beach after attending The Master’s Academy in Oviedo, was averaging 10.
2 points and 7. 7 rebounds per game last season. But she tore her ACL, a ligament also known as the anterior cruciate ligament, in a team practice in October and now she’s on the sidelines urging her teammates on.
“While this isn’t how I hoped my senior season would go, I’m trusting God’s timing and purpose,” Kitts wrote in a post on Instagram right after the injury to the ligament at the center of the knee bone. March Madness women’s tournament ACL injuries This year’s NCAA women’s basketball powerhouse teams have a host of star players felled by the knee injury, including the 2025 collegiate women’s Excellence in Sport Performance Yearly (ESPY) award winner JuJu Watkins who was not on the court when her team, the University of Southern California Trojans, fell to the South Carolina Gamecocks in the second round of the NCAA March Madness basketball championship on March 23. Watkins was injured during the second round of last year’s NCAA women’s basketball tournament.
The University of Iowa’s Taylor McCabe, who was averaging 8. 1 points per game and making 37% of her shots from three-point territory, tore her ACL in January, leaving her second-seed team to lose in double overtime to the 10th-seeded Virginia Cavaliers in the second round of the championships on March 23. Additionally, the University of Connecticut star Azzi Fudd, playing the guard position, has torn her ACL twice.