The Injuries That Only Happen to Growing Athletes

Adult athletes get sore muscles and strained ligaments. Growing athletes get something different: injuries to the growth plates themselves, the soft cartilage zones where bone is still lengthening. A pulled hamstring heals like any other soft tissue injury. A growth plate injury is a different category of problem, and it's worth parents knowing the names and warning signs before the pain becomes the reason for an ER visit.

The scale of the problem is bigger than most parents expect. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, sports injuries send more than 2.6 million children to emergency rooms every year. A meaningful share of those are growth plate conditions, and each one shows up in a specific sport, a specific age range, and a pattern that's worth learning to recognize early.

Sever's disease: the heel pain of running and jumping sports

Sever's disease, medically known as calcaneal apophysitis, is the most common cause of heel pain in the growing young athlete. It comes from repetitive micro trauma to the growth plate in the heel, generally in kids between 8 and 12, and it affects boys more often than girls. Sports built around running and jumping are the usual trigger, and poor running form combined with tight calf muscles makes it worse. A kid who's suddenly limping after practice, with heel pain rather than ankle or arch pain, is worth watching closely.

Osgood-Schlatter disease: the knee pain of a growth spurt

Osgood-Schlatter disease comes from irritation of the growth plate where the patellar tendon attaches at the top of the shin. It typically shows up in kids 9 to 14 who've just gone through a rapid growth spurt, more often in boys, and it's most common in sports involving running, cutting, and jumping. The telltale pattern is pain right at the front of the knee that gets worse with activity and eases with rest. Because it tracks so closely with growth spurts, a coach or parent who notices a kid suddenly a few inches taller and suddenly favoring one knee is looking at a classic case.

Little league shoulder and little league elbow

Both conditions share a cause worth naming directly: volume. A single overhand throw doesn't injure a growth plate. Hundreds of them, across a season with no real rest, do. Pitch counts and position rotation exist for exactly this reason, and a kid complaining of shoulder or elbow pain specifically during or after throwing, rather than at rest, deserves attention before the next start.

Spondylolysis: the stress fracture in the lower back

Spondylolysis is a stress fracture of the lumbar spine, the kind of injury that happens when a bone breaks down after repeated tensile or compressive stress rather than from one dramatic moment. It shows up in the lower back and is most common in athletes whose sport involves repetitive spinal loading, particularly extension. Gymnastics, dance, and volleyball load the spine this way as much as football does. Lower back pain in a young athlete that doesn't resolve with a few days of rest is not something to wait out.

What all five of these have in common

None of these are the kind of acute injury that happens in a single dramatic moment on the field. They're overuse injuries, built up over weeks of repetitive loading on tissue that's still growing and hasn't finished forming into adult bone. That's precisely why they get missed early. There's no single fall, no single bad landing to point to. The pain just gradually gets more present, more specific, and more consistent, until it's obvious something is wrong.