Adelaide will investigate recent spate of knee injuries after losing five players to torn ACLs in 2019
Chelsea Randall, a much-loved figure at West Lakes, becomes the fifth female Crow to suffer a torn ACL. The club has vowed to urgently address why the injuries are occuring so frequently.
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The clock had just ticked over to 5pm on Monday and from the reception area of the Crows headquarters at West Lakes you could already hear the excited claps and ‘whoops’ that were coming from a few floors above.
The long off-season was finally ending for the reigning AFLW premiers and each of the players was visibly delighted to be at day one of pre-season training.
This was the first time since their grand final win back in March that the squad had been together for a training session.
Coach Matthew “Doc” Clarke was telling his usual dad jokes as the players – including eight new faces drafted in October – were warming up on the Crows’ indoor shed floor, some lifting weights, others doing kicking and handball drills.
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When they gathered at the whiteboard to listen to Doc’s first address of the new season, they cheered while congratulating each other on being named SA’s Team of the Year at the Sport SA Awards a few days earlier.
Among them was the club’s co-captain – and three-time All-Australian defender and three-time AFLPA’s Most Courageous Player – Chelsea Randall.
In typical Randall style she was taking time to welcome the players as they arrived, giving them high-fives and putting her arms around them.
Clarke ran through the drills the squad would perform, and coaches and players headed outside.
Then the very worst happened: a mere 45 minutes after the team had headed out onto the Crows’ oval, Randall was running mid-drill when she changed direction and her knee buckled underneath her.
By this time, the club’s general manager of football administration Phil Harper – who had been on the boundary earlier – was back in his office checking emails when the team manager, Vicky Daldy, rushed in telling him Randall had hurt her knee.
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The sun will still come out tomorrow: Randall
“I went and saw her and I was asking her all these questions thinking ‘oh god, this doesn’t sound good’, but then there was some hope when the doctors saw her … as it turned out, no good,” he said.
The 28-year-old Randall had just become the fifth female Crows player this year to tear an anterior cruciate ligament, requiring a knee reconstruction and a difficult 12-month rehab, joining ruck Rhiannon Metcalfe, midfielders Erin Phillips and Hannah Button and forward Chloe Scheer.
“It’s a worry, it’s a worry,” Harper said.
The AFL is also worried and its research shows females are nine times more likely to tear an ACL than men, and hence the sporting body issues guidelines to its clubs with “pre-hab” preventive exercises aimed at reducing injury.
Harper said the Crows are stringent not only in following those guidelines, but going beyond them and each of their players is individually screened using KangaTech technology to determine weaknesses in knees and adjusts weights programs accordingly.
“We do much more preventative stuff for knees with the women than we do with the men,” he explains.
“(But) five ACLs in 10 months is too many and we’ll continue to work hard and continue to work with the AFL and their research team on what we can do better as a club and as an industry to try and prevent this.
“That doesn’t mean it will go down to zero, but nine times more likely to suffer an ACL injury than men is way too much and we as a club and an industry need to do something about it.”
Harper said if there is a silver living to Randall’s injury, it’s the way the much-loved figure has handled it.
“It’s a really difficult thing to accept and go through, but she’s been stoic and unbelievably she’s back at work here today because she didn’t want to sit around her home moping around; that’s the sort of person we’re dealing with,” Harper said.
He added Randall will likely undergo surgery within the fortnight and start the long road to recovery.
"She's got to be one of the all-time greats in AFLW" - @randall_chelsea inspiring our recruiting team 🙌â¤ï¸ #weflyasone pic.twitter.com/TFbGKVXplY
— Adelaide Crows (@Adelaide_FC) November 28, 2019
“It can happen to anyone, but if you’re nine times more likely than boys … we will work as a club and an industry to get that number down,” Harper said.
“But the girls want to train hard, they want to play hard and they want to play to the best of their ability, so there is really a fine balancing line in all of that … at the other end of the spectrum we’d say we’ll just stop playing all together.
“If I told the girls we were doing that, I’d have a riot on my hands.
“We’re not doing that, instead we’ll do our best to fix the problem rather than give up.”