The 15-Minute Warm-Up That Can Save Your Daughter's Season

Before we talk about the problem, let's talk about what actually works.

A neuromuscular warm-up done for 15 to 20 minutes a few times a week has been shown in repeated studies to cut ACL injuries by 50 to 70 percent in adolescent players. No surgery. No rehab. No lost season. Just a deliberate, consistent warm-up that replaces the jog-around-the-field routine most teams are already doing.

Here's what it looks like in practice.

Dynamic hip and ankle openers. Leg swings, hip circles, and ankle rolls that prepare the joints most involved in cutting and landing. These take three minutes, and most athletes skip them entirely.

Single-leg balance work. Standing on one leg, eyes open, then closed, on flat ground, then on unstable surfaces. This trains the neuromuscular system, the connection between the brain and the muscles around the knee, to react faster when the body is off-balance.

Controlled squats and lunges. The emphasis is on form: knees tracking over toes, hips dropping low, chest up. Done slowly and deliberately before practice, these reinforce the movement patterns that protect the knee under game speed.

Brakes and cuts drills. This is where it gets sport-specific. Athletes practice landing softly from jumps with bent knees and hips dropped, not stiff-legged. They practice decelerating before direction changes rather than planting and pivoting at full speed. These are the exact moments when ACL tears happen, and rehearsing them correctly builds the habit.

The FIFA 11+ warm-up program bundles all of these into a single progressive sequence of jogging patterns, strength work, and balance and agility drills. It requires no equipment, takes about 20 minutes, and has been validated across thousands of athletes. Coaches can find it free online and implement it at the next practice.

Why This Matters Right Now

The New York Times has called ACL tears in teen girls the next big crisis in youth sports, and the numbers back that up. Girls are three to six times more likely than boys to suffer ACL injuries. The reconstruction surgery that follows is serious, the rehab takes the better part of a year, and the long-term consequences, chronic knee pain and early osteoarthritis, can follow an athlete for life.

U.S. Soccer recently launched the Kang Women's Institute specifically to address this gap, applying sports science and better training environments to drive down injury rates for girls and women at every level. The institute is building what elite programs have known for years into something scalable, and the core of it looks exactly like the warm-up described above.

For parents and coaches on the sideline, the message is straightforward. These drills are not extra. They are not optional conditioning for athletes who want to go the extra mile. They are the basic protection every female athlete deserves before she takes the field. Think of them as seatbelts for the knee.

A handful of well-coached lunges, single-leg balances, and controlled jumps before every practice can be the difference between another ACL surgery and four healthy years of high school sports.

The science is clear.
The exercises exist.
The only question is whether we build them into the routine. [RS]