The patterns are known. The interventions are validated. The public-health framework is in place. What was missing was the screening layer.
The injury burden is concentrated in cutting and pivoting sports — soccer, basketball, lacrosse, volleyball. The financial cost runs into the billions annually. The career and developmental cost on youth athletes is harder to measure and impossible to overstate.
Biomechanical research has identified specific movement patterns — knee valgus on landing, asymmetric force production, deceleration mechanics — that correlate with elevated ACL injury risk. These patterns are observable. They are modifiable. They precede the injury by months.
Until recently, biomechanical screening required laboratory equipment — force plates, motion capture, specialist operators. Population-level use was impossible. Markerless movement analysis from smartphone video is changing the access question.
Smartphone-based motion analysis has been studied against laboratory motion capture in peer-reviewed work, and is used in research across universities and professional sport. The historic limitation has been distribution rather than measurement quality. The 100,000 Girls campaign is built to solve the distribution problem alongside ongoing validation.
The campaign is operated by Better Athlete. The screening layer is what Better Athlete contributes. The institutions and initiatives listed below have each, independently, made female-athlete injury prevention a public priority — and the campaign is built to be useful to that work. Partnerships are in conversation; named partners will be announced as agreements are formalized.
A clinical screening protocol that is 95% accurate but unavailable to 99% of youth athletes is not the same as a triage protocol that is 80% accurate and accessible to anyone with a phone. The 100,000 Girls campaign optimizes for the second.
100,000 Girls during the World Cup window. Every screen is one more data point. Every prevention program is one more athlete protected.