GREEN BAY (NBC 26) — When NBC 26 first kicked off Beyond the Score, we explored why youth female athletes are more prone to ACL tears.
The reasons were many, from overuse, to sports specialization, and more.
However, the knowledge of that injury continues to evolve and now - a new operation could make their recovery process a whole lot faster..
“To play on the court again this season has meant everything,” said Melia Lemorande, a junior at Bay Port. “This is what I've been looking forward to since I was a kid basically.”
For Melia and her freshman sister, Alayna, ball is life.
“I love the entire sport,” Melia said. “I love the emotional ups and downs. I love the intensity of the whole game.”
“Our whole family honestly, we all love it and we all just bond over it,” said Alayna, a freshman.
But both had the game they love taken away from them. Melia missed her entire sophomore year after tearing her ACL during a volleyball game.
“I landed on her feet and my knee just kind of locked and it was just kind of gone from there,” is how Melia described it happening.
Alayna has torn both of her ACL’s. Once heading into her eighth grade year and then heading into her freshman season.
“I just stole a ball, I was going up for a layup and my knee planted wrong and it hyper-extended backwards,” Alayna said describing her first ACL tear.
“It was awful,” Melia said of seeing her sister tear the other ACL. “I was sitting on her team’s bench while she was playing and she just went down and then the entire bench just went ‘oh no’. It was horrible.”
She says the recovery process has been draining.
“Before I tore it, I considered myself pretty good and now that I'm obviously out for two years it’s like I'm falling behind skill-wise,” Alayna said. “Lets hope I'm not.”
Both players had their ACL surgeries done at Bellin Health by Dr. Kevin Shepet.
“There are surgeons, researchers, scientists, all over the world constantly trying to perfect this and say how can we do better and we’re kind of in this cutting edge golden age of some of this stuff right now,” Sheep said.
Dr. Shepet says he recently began performing a surgery called BIOACL. A procedure that uses the quadriceps tendon, and turns it into the new ACL.
"The BIOACL involves harvesting bone marrow from the patient's own body that then gets processed during the surgery to create a mixture of a solution with the patient's own stem cells,” he said. “The goal is to make that a more rapid robust response decrease pain and decrease the rate of re-injury.”
Then says he uses what's known as an internal brace technique for additional support.
“The internal brace which is a strong collagen coded brace that is a suture that runs with the graft and provided the seat belt so when the graft ultimately does see the load when people are pivoting and cutting that it shields it from the high forces as kind of a fail safe,” said Shepet.
Shepet says the goal is to improve the healing process and decrease rate of re-tear. He says hopefully with a little more research that it shows that athletes can get back out playing faster.
“I think we’re still waiting for that data to feel confident about it. That's ultimately the hope, but we’re not quite there yet. that’s probably the most rewarding part is seeing someone go from their low of lows to highest of highs.”
