The University of South Carolina’s top scorer, who powered the team to the 2025 NCAA women’s basketball finals, got knocked out of this year’s competition because of an injury that disproportionately sidelines female athletes.
Amid March Madness, Chloe Kitts, the Gamecocks’ 6'2" forward who grew up in Oviedo, Florida, offers a cautionary tale for other upcoming female scholastic athletes and weekend warriors.
Kitts, who graduated from DME Academy in Daytona Beach after attending The Master’s Academy in Oviedo, was averaging 10.2 points and 7.7 rebounds per game last season. But she tore her ACL, a ligament also known as the anterior cruciate ligament, in a team practice in October and now she’s on the sidelines urging her teammates on.
“While this isn’t how I hoped my senior season would go, I’m trusting God’s timing and purpose,” Kitts wrote in a post on Instagram right after the injury to the ligament at the center of the knee bone.
March Madness women’s tournament ACL injuries
This year’s NCAA women’s basketball powerhouse teams have a host of star players felled by the knee injury, including the 2025 collegiate women’s Excellence in Sport Performance Yearly (ESPY) award winner JuJu Watkins who was not on the court when her team, the University of Southern California Trojans, fell to the South Carolina Gamecocks in the second round of the NCAA March Madness basketball championship on March 23.
Watkins was injured during the second round of last year’s NCAA women’s basketball tournament.
The University of Iowa’s Taylor McCabe, who was averaging 8.1 points per game and making 37% of her shots from three-point territory, tore her ACL in January, leaving her second-seed team to lose in double overtime to the 10th-seeded Virginia Cavaliers in the second round of the championships on March 23. Additionally, the University of Connecticut star Azzi Fudd, playing the guard position, has torn her ACL twice.
It turns out that the ACL tear that has sidelined former Miami Heat star Jimmy Butler, now a Golden State Warriors forward, for the rest of the basketball season starting in January, is also the scourge of female sports, especially soccer and basketball.
What is an ACL tear?
It’s partly an outgrowth of how female sports are getting more airtime as federal law requires that schools invest in programs for women and girls.
The ACL is a joint that connects the thigh bone to the shin bone. It’s crucial for stability because it prevents the shin bone from sliding too far forward and controlling rotation, according to Dr. Nirav Pandya, an orthopedic surgery professor at the University of California, San Francisco.
The ligament forms an “X” shape inside each knee and acts as a strap that connects your bones and prevents your knee from bending or rotating too much.
A tear in the ligament that registers as a “pop” followed by swelling, pain and knee instability, often doesn’t heal on its own without surgery. The injury doesn’t immobilize the injured, but the possibility of arthritis increases without an ACL in good working order, Pandya said.
“Without any ACL … the long-term issue is that you’ll put more stress on your meniscus (the knee’s shock absorber) and cartilage as well,” Pandya said.
What’s happening with female athletes' ACL injuries?
The rate of ACL tears among athletes younger than 18 has increased by 2.5% to 5% every year, but it’s three to six times more likely that the ACL tear will be happening to a female athlete on the field, said Pandya, who is also director of Pediatric Sports Medicine at UCSF. He says the rate of ACL injuries among female athletes has jumped 32% over the last 15 years.
“A lot of this has to do with more participation in sports and they’re playing year-round and there’s a higher intensity competition as compared to 10 years ago,” he said.
Individually, he sees a host of specific factors at play, some of them having to do with the pitfalls of stressing joints still in the throes of development.