Uptick in sports-related injuries as high school athletes return, notes Northwestern Medicine experts

MAPLE PARK – High school sports are back in full swing and with it comes a risk of injury, something the Campbell family of Maple Park have learned to deal with over the past year.

Nathan Campbell, a sophomore at Kaneland High School, is working his way back to the baseball diamond after suffering a serious injury last year.

On Oct. 12 2021, Carrie Campbell and her husband Ryan Campbell received a phone call informing them their son, Nathan Campbell — a three sport athlete — had been injured during a football practice at the school.

“And at that point we just didn’t think too much of it, he’s been playing football since he was 5-years-old, and no injury has been that serious,” Carrie Campbell said, adding that when she and her husband arrived an ambulance already was on the scene.

During a tackle drill, Nathan – a freshman at the time – got his foot in caught in mud and while working to get his leg unstuck a helmet came in, breaking the distal femur on his right leg. He couldn’t get up or straighten his leg and was taken by ambulance to Northwestern Medicine Delnor Hospital.

“So we got to the school thinking, ‘OK, he’s probably sprained his knee, it’s probably not that big of a deal’ and then we found it was quite a big deal,” Carrie Campbell said.

It’s a trend area health officials are noting which coincides with the return of schools, and sports.

Dr. Brian Babka, who works in the sports medicine and exercise medicine department of Northwestern Medicine’s sports medicine division, said athletes need to take care when doubling up on the sports they play.

“This is a notorious time of year where high school sports will start overlapping with club sports,” Babka said, noting overuse injuries from playing multiple sports have become a bigger issue in recent years because kids will specialize in a sport and play all year long while also playing other sports in high school.

Babka said athletes who play multiple sports back-to-back are especially prone to increased risk of injury.

“For example, football players coming off of summer baseball, getting ready for fall baseball but now football has also started,” said Babka. “And so they’re doubling up on practices or games or matches, and that’s becoming an overuse.”

“I think what people forget when you’re a student athlete or athlete, the lowest hanging fruits are actually sleep, diet and recovery. The things that are actually free are the things that are actually the most important. You know, getting quality sleep, quality diet, quality hydration,” Babka said.

While at the hospital Carrie Campbell received a call from the mother of one of Nathan’s teammates, who works locally in the medical field. The mother referred the Campbells to an orthopedic surgeon who saw them at 7 a.m. the next morning. One day later Nathan had surgery to put his distal femur back in place with medical screws used to hold the broken bone in place.

“Oct. 12 was the accident, the 13th we saw the orthopedic surgeon at 7 a.m., on the 14th this kid had surgery. So that is how fast that Northwestern dealt with this,” said Carrie Campbell, who noted how thankful they were to have been helped so quickly.

Nathan came home in a full leg cast and went to school in a wheelchair for a week until he was ready to be on crutches. In January, he underwent surgery again to remove the pins from his leg and then began physical therapy. After progressing through his physical therapy, his doctor cleared him in time to play baseball in the spring.

While getting ready for the season, Nathan found his knee was still unstable. He had an MRI after talking with his surgeon, and an hour after the MRI he was told his ACL also had been torn during the Oct. 12 football accident. His mother said it was something he’d hoped wasn’t also injured. Nevertheless, there wasn’t anything that could be done for it before the bone healed.

“You cannot repair both at the same time because when you have a break you have to immobilize the leg, when you have an ACL reconstruction you have to move your knee right away,” Carrie Campbell said.

At that point the family was then referred to Dr. Akur Rishi Behl, an orthopedic surgeon with Northwestern Medicine who specializes in sports medicine.

Behl said that any sport played at a competitive level can cause injuries. He said patience is the key when recovering from injuries such as Nathan Campbell sustained.

“Even the surgical intervention is a small part of the whole recovery. The post recovery period is fairly intense and fairly involved,” Behl said. “You have to be very committed to the recovery component of it.”

“A big example before was [former NFL player] Adrian Peterson, who tore his ACL, I want to say six-seven years ago,” Behl said. “And I think when he tore his ACL and came back at such a high speed at nine months, it kind of set the wrong expectations.”

Behl said he always tells his patients their recovery will be specific to them, and they shouldn’t look to professional athletes or outliers as expectations for themselves.

“Everybody is different, some people recover sooner. Some people take longer to recover,” Behl said.

Northwestern Medicine does not keep track of the amount of sports injuries seen through out the year, or from year to year, but Behl said injuries are common as a sport starts to gear up for a season, particularly contact sports like football.

“But you can see injuries in any sport, even you know, soccer you get a lot of head injuries basketball, you know, even baseball you’ll get – every sport I think has their subset of common injuries that I think you see,” Behl said.

Behl said proper conditioning, along with utilizing the correct equipment – such as helmets, face masks, shoulder pads – are key to preventing injuries. There’s also other factors, like sleep that Behl said are easily skipped over.

“I mean that’s always a hard thing, I think, to do at this age is convincing kids that they need to sleep. And then making sure they have a healthy diet, that’s the other, you know big component, you know that I think is a difficulty,” Behl said.

Regardless of conditioning, diet, lifestyle choices, and equipment, injuries are bound to happen. And no matter how long the recovery takes, the time spent on the sidelines can be difficult for anyone used to spending time playing.

“Mentally in the beginning I was crushed,” Nathan said. “Missing everything and keep getting bad news after bad news, that crushed me a lot, but currently and after the ACL surgery I was really happy to have all the support from not just my family and friends but coaches as well.”

Nathan, now 16, said he expected it to feel weird when he attended Kaneland High School’s first football game of the season, but he ended up having a lot of fun cheering on his teammates.

Right now, around seven months after his ACL was reconstructed, Nathan is focusing on physical therapy and eyeing a full recovery by January 2023. Then he’ll go right into training for baseball so that he’ll be ready for baseball season come March.

“I had discussions with my dad, my teammates, my friends and everything about my future in sports,” he said. “So in the future, I’m just going to go up and pursue baseball as my dream sport rather than doing all three [football, basketball and baseball] in the future.”

Ryan Campbell said the renewed focus is the one silver lining that’s come from this.

“It really gave Nate an opportunity to reflect and think his different sports he was playing,” Ryan Campbell said. “And he excelled in all of those different sports, but what he realized was it’s baseball what he kept missing the most.”

“And now that we’re kind of into the high school seasons and high school career, it’s very difficult to be a multi-sport athlete,” Ryan Campbell said. “But this gave him an opportunity to kind of really focus in on what he really enjoys.

With students back in schools and participating in fall sports, Babka said he’s started to see injuries that are common this time of year.

“You know we had our first football game last week, we’re definitely getting out muscular-skeletal injuries, our bruises, our contusions, our fractures, our skin lacerations, our head injuries such as concussion,” Babka said. “So those are tend to be our typical back to school injuries, and our kind of back to school things I’m seeing in the office fairly predominantly.

Despite the injury the Campbells have not been steered away from participating in sports.

“Accidents happen, you know,” Carrie Campbell said. “It’s just, when you play a sport you are taking a chance to get injured and you hope it doesn’t happen, or if it does happen you hope for a sprain, but sometimes it’s more than that and that’s what we had to deal with.”

Nathan Campbell’s resilience and commitment to get back to what he enjoys is a good thing, Behl said.

“We don’t want the fear of injury to prohibit anybody from participating in sports,” Behl said. “Sports provide a wide variety of not only physical but mental benefits for the young people.”

Nathan Campbell said other young athletes dealing with injuries should keep moving forward.

“If you keep thinking about the past it’s just going to get worse,” he said. “Keep your head up and keep marching forward.”