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.
Researchers have known since the early 2000s that targeted neuromuscular training reduces ACL injury rates in young female athletes — by as much as 61% in published studies. The science is settled. The barrier has never been the science. The barrier has been visibility.
Who needs the training? Which movements? At what dose? With what follow-up? Until the screen can run on a phone, in a school gym, in ten minutes, the answer to "who needs it" was "everyone, generically" — which in practice meant "no one, specifically."
The 100,000 Girls campaign is the first deployment of population-scale visibility paired with targeted prevention at the individual level. Every screen produces a clear next step for that athlete. Every aggregate informs the science — not the other way around.
This is the gap we are closing: between what the research has shown is possible and what families and clinicians can actually act on. It is a gap of infrastructure, not a gap of knowledge.
The 100,000 Girls campaign is itself a research engine. Every screen contributes de-identified data that — over the course of the campaign and the years that follow — will sharpen the protocol, strengthen the science, and inform the next generation of population-scale movement screening.
Tier distribution + adherence + flag-to-evaluation latency from the first 10,000+ screens. First peer-reviewed methodology paper drafted.
Side-by-side study at a participating research site comparing phone-based screening against laboratory motion capture. Independent IRB oversight.
Multi-year outcome tracking. Injury rate among screened cohorts vs matched comparators. Publication track in sports-medicine + youth-health journals.
Research outputs will be released as they pass peer review. Sign up for the methodology updates to be notified when each lands.
100,000 Girls during the World Cup window. Every screen is one more data point. Every prevention program is one more athlete protected.