Lacrosse is a game of cuts. Dodges, rolls, slides on defense and the first step after a ground ball all ask your foot to stop, grip and push off in a new direction. Most of those cuts now happen on artificial turf, and most players only think about their ankles once one rolls.
The NCAA has tracked injuries in college lacrosse for years. A pair of papers covering the 2014–15 through 2018–19 seasons, one for the men's game and one for the women's, shows how often ankles get hurt and when. Ankle sprains came out as a top-two injury in both. That makes the point where your cleat meets the turf worth understanding.
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What the NCAA tracked
The data comes from the NCAA Injury Surveillance Program. Athletic trainers at participating colleges log every injury they treat, along with how many practices and games each player took part in. That second number is what makes the data useful. One player at one practice or game is called an athlete exposure, so injuries can be counted as a rate per 1,000 exposures instead of a raw total.
On the women's side, 18 programs took part in the first season, rising to 69 in the last. Across the five seasons the researchers analyzed 1,435 women's injuries over 287,622 exposures. The men's paper used the same method, with 10 programs in the first season and 60 in the last, and counted 1,872 injuries over 381,811 exposures.
What they found
The overall rates were close. Men's players were injured at 4.90 per 1,000 exposures and women's players at 4.99. Games were much riskier than practice in both. The men's game rate was about 2.6 times the practice rate. For women, it was 8.87 per 1,000 in games against 4.07 in practice, about 2.2 times higher.
The injury lists are where the ankle stands out. In women's lacrosse, ankle sprains were the single most common injury, at 9.1% of everything reported, ahead of concussions at 7.2%. In men's lacrosse, concussions led at 8.0%, with ankle sprains right behind at 7.7% and hamstring tears at 6.9%. The papers count a sprain as a partial or complete tear of the lateral ligament complex, the ligaments on the outside of the ankle that stretch when the foot rolls inward.
Both papers also break injuries down by body part. For women, the knee was the largest group at 17.4%, followed by the ankle at 13.2%, the lower leg at 11.7% and the foot at 7.5%. Together, the knee and everything below it made up about half of all women's injuries. For men, the knee also led at 15.1%, with the thigh at 12.3% and the ankle at 11.6%. The most common mechanism in both games was noncontact, meaning the player got hurt without hitting another player, the ball or the ground. That covered 26.6% of women's injuries and 33.4% of men's. Women's overuse injuries were close behind at 25.2%, and player contact accounted for only 14.0%. Men's player contact came second at 26.1%.
Why cutting loads the ankle
The authors of the women's paper put the common injuries down to "quick or unanticipated changes of direction" and to acceleration and deceleration during play. The men's authors say much the same, writing that their findings "reflect the large amount of running, cutting, physicality, and fast-paced nature of the men's lacrosse game." Neither paper measured cuts directly, so this is the authors' reading of the pattern rather than a finding. It fits what a cut asks of the foot, though. Your full weight lands on one foot, the foot has to stop, and then it has to rotate and drive you somewhere else. If the foot slides inside the shoe or the shoe grabs the ground too hard, the ankle is the joint that absorbs the difference.
Where the cleat meets the turf
None of the NCAA papers recorded what surface or footwear each injury happened on. For that part of the story you have to look at football, which has studied the shoe and the surface much more closely.
In a 2009 study, Villwock and colleagues at Michigan State took a test rig out to real fields. The rig was a mechanical leg with a flexible ankle, loaded to the body weight of a large adult man. It planted a shoe and twisted it, measuring how hard the shoe resisted turning. They tested 10 football shoes on two indoor artificial turf fields and two natural grass fields. Averaged across the shoes, peak twisting force was 118 and 112 newton-meters on the two turf fields, against 96 and 83 on the grass. The turf-style shoe, with many short studs, averaged 70, the lowest of any shoe and lowest on every surface.
Stud pattern alone didn't decide the result. The researchers also noticed what happened with softer uppers: the shoe twisted around the mechanical foot, and the edge of the sole plowed into the surface instead of slipping.
Newer turf tells a more mixed story. In 2017, Penn State's Center for Sports Surface Research tested 11 football cleats on a modern sand-and-rubber turf and on two kinds of natural grass. For most shoes, rotational traction was similar on all three surfaces. The differences between shoes were bigger. On the turf alone, the cleats ranged from 57.3 to 85.6 newton-meters. The researchers note that nobody has established a "safe" level of traction. Lower traction is generally preferred for the legs, but too little and players slip.
At the top level, an analysis of the 2021 and 2022 NFL seasons, built from public injury reports, counted 718 lower extremity injuries. That came to 1.42 per game on turf against 1.22 on grass, and injuries on turf had higher odds of needing season-ending surgery. The authors' explanation lines up with the traction testing above. They write that "the lesser ability of artificial turf to release a cleat puts more strain on a player's extremities," while grass "has been shown to often release the cleat before reaching an injurious load."
What to keep in mind
The NCAA data comes from a convenience sample of programs that chose to report, not every team in the country, and time lost was missing for a share of injuries. It tells you which injuries are common in college lacrosse. It can't tell you why a given ankle rolled, because it doesn't record the surface, the shoe or the movement. The traction studies used football shoes on mechanical legs. Villwock's turf fields were indoor surfaces five and seven years old, and the four fields were tested at temperatures from 11 to 32°C. The NFL study relied on public injury reports, which can miss injuries, and football players hit and cut differently from lacrosse players. None of this research tested a lacrosse cleat. Taken together, it points to the same place: the grip between the stud and the turf, and how well the foot stays over the sole when that grip is loaded.
What the researchers suggest
The men's paper closes by saying the overall burden of concussions and lower extremity injuries warrants further attention. The women's authors point at change of direction and deceleration as the likely drivers of their most common injuries. The traction researchers make the equipment point. Villwock's team says new shoe and surface designs need testing together under realistic loads. Penn State's report puts the goal as enough grip to play without slipping, but not so much that the foot gets stuck in the surface when you pivot.
How we think about it
Lacrosse players often ask us about ankle support. The research above doesn't test ankle height. What it points to is the plant itself: how firmly the studs hold the turf, and whether the foot stays centred over the sole when it does. That is where we build.
Every Prevolve lacrosse cleat is printed from a 3D scan of each foot, so the toe box, midfoot and heel are built around the way your foot actually sits. Your foot is locked in through the cut instead of sliding across the plate. The studs are mapped from your scan to your metatarsal heads and toes, so every plant loads through bone. Each foot is built on its own, which matters when one ankle has a history and the other doesn't.
You also pick the stud setup for your surface. Our AG plate uses a denser pattern of shorter studs for field turf, which is where most lacrosse is played. FG conical studs bite firm grass and release cleanly through dodges, and they're the safe default if you split time between grass and turf. FG bladed gives the most aggressive grip for hard re-directs on dry grass. The Penn State testing is a good reason to take this choice seriously, since the cleat changed traction more than the surface did. We cover how stud placement changes the way a cleat grips in more detail elsewhere.
The plate is a single piece of 3D-printed TPU with 0 mm heel-to-toe drop, so your heel sits level with the ball of your foot and close to the ground. Your weight and foot strength set the insole thickness, between 2 and 6 mm. The ankle itself still needs training, and our free foot strength level guide is the place to start. The full build is on our custom lacrosse cleat page, and the fit side is covered in wide toe box lacrosse cleats.
Your ankles take every cut you make, so build the cleat around the foot that's making them.
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Tell us how your cleats handle a cut
If you play lacrosse, we'd like to hear from you. What position do you play, and do you play mostly on turf or grass? Where do your cleats pinch, slide or grab on a hard cut? Have you rolled an ankle, and what were you wearing when it happened? Send us a message. We're using this to tune our AG and FG stud layouts for lacrosse. Lacrosse pairs are currently $250 off for players who'll test them and send us their field feedback.
Cheers,
Oliver
Founder
Prevolve Footwear
Source: D'Alonzo, B. A., Bretzin, A. C., Chandran, A., et al. (2021). Epidemiology of injuries in National Collegiate Athletic Association men's lacrosse: 2014–2015 through 2018–2019. Journal of Athletic Training, 56(7), 758–765. doi.org/10.4085/1062-6050-612-20
Source: Bretzin, A. C., D'Alonzo, B. A., Chandran, A., et al. (2021). Epidemiology of injuries in National Collegiate Athletic Association women's lacrosse: 2014–2015 through 2018–2019. Journal of Athletic Training, 56(7), 750–757. doi.org/10.4085/1062-6050-613-20
Source: Villwock, M. R., Meyer, E. G., Powell, J. W., Fouty, A. J., & Haut, R. C. (2009). Football playing surface and shoe design affect rotational traction. American Journal of Sports Medicine, 37(3), 518–525. doi.org/10.1177/0363546508328108
Source: Penn State Center for Sports Surface Research. (2017). 2017 football cleat models: traction comparison. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University.
Source: Venishetty, N., Xiao, A. X., Ghanta, R., Reddy, R., Pandya, N. K., & Feeley, B. T. (2024). Lower extremity injury rates on artificial turf versus natural grass surfaces in the National Football League during the 2021 and 2022 seasons. Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine, 12(8). doi.org/10.1177/23259671241265378