This is a personal account from G-MIP's founder. It is not medical advice, and it is not a clinical review. Everything G-MIP publishes as guidance is drawn from peer-reviewed research and reviewed with people who work in the field. You can contact Alexis with press queries and other informational requests at alexis@preventsportsinjury.com.
Growing up in the training room
I am a student and competitive soccer and flag football player based in California — and I have spent a lot of my adolescence injured.
Before I turned fifteen, I sustained two concussions, three separate elbow fractures, a broken wrist, a dislocation, two quad strains, and an ACL tear. Written out in a list like that, it sounds almost absurd. Lived out, it was years of appointments, braces, rehab sessions, and the specific kind of boredom that comes from watching your team train from the sideline.
I got to know the healthcare system from the inside of it: physical therapy clinics, orthopedic offices, imaging appointments, pre-op rooms, operating rooms, and the long, unglamorous return-to-play process that nobody posts about.
When the question changed
For a long time, my only question was the obvious one: how do I get back?
Somewhere in the middle of all that rehab, the question changed. I started noticing patterns — in my own body, in my teammates, in the girls I met in waiting rooms. The same injuries, over and over, in the same sports, to the same kinds of athletes. It stopped feeling like bad luck.
The question I actually cared about became: why do these injuries keep happening, and how many of them didn't have to?
Finding the gap
The more I read, the more I found a research literature that was genuinely impressive — and genuinely disconnected from the fields I played on.
Researchers have studied ACL injury mechanics in female athletes in detail. There is real work on concussion differences, on bone health, on nutrition and energy availability, on the Female Athlete Triad and RED-S, on landing and cutting biomechanics. There are neuromuscular warm-up programs with evidence behind them that meaningfully reduce injury rates.
I also learned that a lot of sports medicine was historically built on research that did not adequately account for female athletes — that girls and women were often treated as a smaller version of the same body, even when the science said otherwise.
But the part that stuck with me most was simpler: almost none of this was reaching the people who could use it. Not my coaches. Not my teammates. Not most parents. The knowledge existed. The delivery didn't.
The question that became G-MIP
That left me with the question this whole initiative is built around:
How do we take what researchers already know and actually put it into practice for young female athletes?
That is what G-MIP is. Not new research — translation. Taking the evidence that already exists and turning it into things a coach can run on a Monday, a parent can recognize at a dinner table, and an athlete can use before she's the one in the waiting room.
What I am and what I'm not
I want to be direct about this, because it matters for how you should read everything on this site.
I am not a physician, a physical therapist, or a researcher, and I am not training as one yet. I am an athlete who got hurt a lot, got curious, and started reading, asking questions, and reaching out to people who do this work professionally.
The credibility of G-MIP's materials comes from the research behind them and the experts who review them — not from me. My job is to notice where the gap is, because I have spent most of my athletic career standing in it, and to keep pulling good information across it.
Where this goes
I would like the next generation of girls in youth sports to get the prevention conversation before the injury, not after. That is the whole goal.
If you coach, teach, treat, parent, or play — the resources on this site are free, and they are meant to be used.