Tragedy to Trend: Tyrese Haliburton’s Achilles tear is a tragic warning for young athletes
Anwar Stetson
After hitting multiple 3-pointers to start the game, Tyrese Haliburton’s tragic Achilles tear in game 7 of the NBA Finals sucked the life out of the building in Oklahoma City. Ultimately, it cost the Indiana Pacers a chance to win their first-ever NBA championship.
A routine forward lunge with 4:55 remaining in the first quarter was the “straw that broke the camel’s back” for the 25-year-old star, who took the risk to play after suffering a calf strain in Game 5.
Unfortunately, the image of Haliburton writhing in physical and mental anguish is one that NBA fans are far too familiar with. Just two playoff rounds ago, Celtics star Jayson Tatum tore his Achilles with a similar forward lunging motion. In the first round, Bucks point guard Damian Lillard also tore his Achilles against Haliburton’s Pacers in game 4.
It seems like a coincidence fitting of a Greek tragedy, but it’s actually becoming a disturbing trend. Eight NBA players have suffered Achilles tears this season, and only one, Lillard, is over 30-years-old. In comparison, from 1990-2023, the league averaged just 1.36 Achilles tears per season.
The fast-paced play, tremendous athletic requirements, and long season play a factor, but the wear-and-tear on athletes’ bodies begins at the youth level, long before the bright lights of the pros.
Overworked, overplayed
Boston Children’s Hospital defines an overuse injury as “sports-related microtraumas that result from repetitively using the same parts of the body, usually by overtraining.”
The amount of training and specialization in youth sports is growing, and as a result, doctors are seeing more overuse injuries.
A 2024 study by the American Academy of Pediatrics states “The professionalization of youth sports is widely considered responsible for the high volumes of training and the pressure to specialize in a single sport that may lead to overuse injury, overtraining, and burnout in youth athletes.”
Dr. Kristofer Jones, a surgeon at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center said in a 2021 report that “the chance of serious musculoskeletal injury from repetitive microtrauma is increased at a time when, due to normal adolescent growth, the body may be particularly vulnerable (due to sports specialization). The literature shows a clear correlation between training volume and intensity and injury risk.”
Kids ‘broken by the time they get to college’
In a lengthy two-part ESPN series from 2019, a number of NBA trainers, General Managers, and medical professionals emphasized the “grave” consequences of overuse. In the report, Dr. Neeru Jayanthi, the Director of Sports Medicine Research and Education at Emory Healthcare, stated frankly that “kids are broken by the time they get to college.”
His research concluded that students who specialized in one sport and played that sport year-round were at a 125% higher risk for overuse injuries, such as bone, cartilage, and ligament injuries.
This phenomenon has even reached NBA commissioner Adam Silver, who spoke at the NBA Global Games Series in Paris earlier this year. He compared the amount of injuries in American-born players to Europeans.
“It’s not that [American players] are not working as hard — in some cases, I think they’re often working too hard and need to be playing more sports at once,” Silver said. “We think some of the injuries that our young players are experiencing are overuse injuries, not because they’re being too physical, but it’s from the repetition of certain things. And that’s why I think [NBA players from the 1980s and 90s] also happened to be the best in every other sport in their schools [as children] because they play different sports depending on the season.”
According to Hopkins Medicine, Achilles injuries, like Haliburton’s, are often caused by repetitive stress on the tendon, the kind caused by overuse.
But overuse injuries aren’t just limited to basketball. In baseball, according to Yankees team physician Dr. Christopher Ahmad, teenagers are the fastest-growing group needing Tommy John Surgery. The athletes are bigger, faster, stronger, and more athletic than ever. But year-round pitching, and an emphasis on pitching with velocity, has left youth baseball players with weakened UCL ligaments, leading to blown-out elbows as soon as high school.
So what can be done to keep young athletes healthy?
Experts at Nationwide Children’s Hospital highlight 7 risk factors that predispose young athletes to overuse injuries:
- Sport specialization at a young age
- Imbalance of strength or joint range of motion
- Anatomic malalignment
- Improper footwear
- Pre-existing condition
- Growth cartilage is less resistant to repetitive microtrauma
- Intense, repetitive training during periods of growth
Though there’s no way to avoid injury completely, avoiding specialization and year-round training, allowing children to cross-train and play multiple sports, and engaging in flexibility and balance exercises like yoga can help.
Youth athletes require oversight from adults. It’s important for parents and coaches to ensure that student-athletes are put in a position to succeed not only on the field, but also to find success in their long-term health.