Unfortunately, season-ending injuries are a major part of college gymnastics. The most common tend to be Achilles and ACL tears, but there are certainly other injuries that can cause an athlete to lose a significant amount of competition time. Odds are, you’ve seen at least one of your favorites sustain a scary injury on the competition floor and might be wondering, how might this effect the rest of their career? Will they have the same scoring potential once they return? Will they return to competition at all? Let’s see what the data says!
Firstly, I compiled a list of all the season-ending injuries since the start of the CGN Injury Updates page in 2017. I then determined the general career outcome for each athlete, such as medical retirement, return to competition, etc. Since this analysis is comparing pre-injury performance to post-injury performance, all athletes who entered college already injured or who were injured prior to competeing an event at least four times were not included.
Of the 251 athletes that were included in this analysis, 124 athletes (～49.4%) went on to recover and return to competition, while the remaining 127 athletes (～50.6%) either medically retired, graduated before returning to competition, or left their respective teams…
