Lower Extremity Injury Prevention in Youth Female Lacrosse Players: A Narrative Review and Proposed Warm-Up Framework

Lacrosse is one of the fastest-growing youth team sports over the past 2 decades, with female players two times more likely to suffer a noncontact lower body injury than their male counterparts. The sport requires rapid cutting, deceleration, multidirectional sprinting, and coordinated upper- and lower-extremity mechanics, all of which place substantial load on the lower limbs. Despite high injury rates, no standardized, lacrosse-specific exercise program targeting lower body injury prevention has been widely adopted. This narrative review identifies the specific attributes that make youth female lacrosse players an ideal and distinct target population for prevention efforts. Drawing on these principles, we propose a framework for a lacrosse-specific, coach-led neuromuscular warm-up program. Future work should include controlled, prospective studies with standardized injury surveillance to determine whether such programs meaningfully reduce lower extremity injury incidence in this growing population.