Trade Show Guru

Please take the time to read this post (I’ll try to keep it short) and see if you can help Will. You’ll get good karma if you do.

One of the blogs I follow is Will Taft’s Healthy Living. Will, like several other bloggers I am grateful to, is helping me learn about blogging. Anyway, in a reply to an email I sent Will this weekend, he wrote back:
“On another note, I am posting an article on ACL injuries to young women. This is an important issue for all parents and coaches of girls who play sports. My youngest daughter is a stand-out basketball player who also plays competitive soccer, so I am really concerned about this. If you don’t mind stumbling the post when it goes up tomorrow so as many people as possible can pass on the information, I would really appreciate it. Thanks!”

Unfortunately, I can’t do this (stumble his post). I’m just learning blogging, and have yet to tackle social networking. I’m a trade show guru, not a blogging or social marketing guru. I’ve heard of Twitter, Digg, Facebook, etc (who hasn’t), but I haven’t learned what they are exactly or set up any accounts. I’ve read mixed reviews as to the effectiveness of social marketing, and I’ve read that it can eat up a LOT of time (which I don’t have), so it’s low on the priority list at this point.

However, I did realize I can help will by writing a post about his post and creating a link, so here it is ~ Preventing ACL Injuries in Women.
It’s a great article. I need to read it again, but the main points I got are that teenage girls are more prone to ACL injuries (8 to 10 times than boys perhaps!), which can in some cases end their ability to play sports and also lead to life-long pain. With proper education though, we can reduce the number of ACL injuries. This sounds like a good cause if ever I heard of one. I won’t say any more about preventing ACL injuries in women because Will does a much better job.

What really strikes me about Will’s request is that this weekend (before I heard from Will) my family went to a 2-year-old’s birthday party (the 75th birthday party was the week before). At the party I saw a woman on crutches with a full leg brace. I asked her what had happened and she explained that she had fractured her tibia. I then asked if there was a cool story behind it, like she did it snowboarding in Australia, but she said she fell while she was running on a trail at a law conference. She then said she was lucky not to need a cast, and went on to talk about how she had torn her ACL playing flag football at law school. The funny thing was that she said when she called her mom about tearing her ACL, her mom wouldn’t believe it, saying “girls don’t play that hard!” (read Will’s article). When this woman mentioned her torn ACL, it was the first time I’d heard “torn ACL” in years (FYI – it’s never happened to me or anyone close to me).

Also this weekend my 6-year-old daughter finished her final game of the season of AYSO soccer. This was her first year playing soccer (as an aside, for those soccer moms and dads out there, a dad friend of mine warned me before we started the year that AYSO doesn’t stand for American Youth Soccer Organization, it really stands for All Your Saturdays Occupied).

So what are the odds that my daughter finishes her first year of soccer and that same day a woman at a party mentions tearing her ACL years ago playing flag football, and then the next day Will sends me an email asking if I can plug his article? If that’s not karma calling, I don’t know what it.

Now I’m asking you to help. Please read Will’s article, and if you belong to one of these social networks, then digg it, or stumble it, or twit it, or whatever you do. Better yet, on your next blog post, at the bottom stick in a little blurp and link to his article. I, the trade show guru, promise you good karma if you help me out.

In case you missed it, here is the link again: Preventing ACL Injuries in Women