Laura Ramus knows just by watching a female athlete’s landing when she jumps that the player is on her way to a painful anterior cruciate ligament tear.

Ramus has seen plenty of them, but the head athletic trainer of the WNBA’s Detroit Shock wants to see that trend reversed.

Research has shown females to be five times more likely than their male counterparts to suffer and ACL tear. Some studies put it as high as eight times.

But with proper training, Ramus said, female athletes can prevent many of those injuries.

Ramus will explain the prevention of those injuries from 1 to 3:30 p.m. Saturday at Lafayette High School in a free public program for all area female athletes ages 9 and up.

The program is the fruit of a passion that developed for Ramus back in high school. As a junior, she saw a teammate succumb to an ACL tear. It sparked an interest in physical therapy that put her in the forefront of the rehabilitation battle against the prevalent injury.

“Back then they were just called knee sprains,” said Ramus.

Much of the problem simply comes down to anatomy. During puberty, boys experience a growth spurt that is accompanied by a spurt in neuromuscular development, apparently spawned by an increase in testosterone. Girls, however, don’t have the increase in testosterone, and the increase in estrogen seems to do nothing to aid in that neuromuscular development.

Thus, girls who have yet to reach puberty are often stronger than those who have yet to reach that stage of development, she said.

The result for post-pubescent girls, Ramus said, is that instead of the knee being held in place by the neuromuscular system, the joint is being held together by the ligaments when the athlete lands, twists or suddenly changes direction.

“The ligaments should work 10 percent of the time, at the very end,” Ramus said. “The other 90 percent of the time, it should be the neuromuscular system — the muscles and mind.”

The ligament system works slower than the neuromuscular system, and when Ramus sees an athlete’s knees cave inward upon landing, she knows the ligaments are getting overworked.

“If you’re a ligament-dominant athlete, you’re going to hurt your knee, she said. “If you’re relying on that system, it’s too slow.”

To combat the problem, Ramus suggests a three-pronged approach including balance training, strength training and some old-fashioned lessons on how to jump correctly. That means plenty of squats, single-leg squats and multiple directional squats.

Many athletes, she said, have never been taught the proper technique for jumping, and with the proper training an athlete can not only guard against injury but also boost performance.

After years of treating athletes, first as a physical therapist and later as a certified athletic trainer, Ramus developed a passion for educating others about the dangers.

“As soon as Title IX passed, we started seeing these injuries,” Ramus said. “I had a real good idea that this was a real problem, and nobody was doing anything about it.”

Fueling her passion was her personal experiences of treating inner-city youths whose only opportunity to get to college and thus out of their poor environments was through their chosen sports. But Ramus has seen that without proper training an ACL tear can put an end to their promising futures.

“I’ve seen so many girls and so much devastation,” Ramus said.

Even those who make it into college can be in danger, Ramus said. Not all athletic trainers have shifted to the trend of neuromuscular training.

“When I get athletes who were at high-level Division programs it’s amazing to me that there are some still trained in the same traditional big-power strength programs,” Ramus said. “Some of them have some pretty bad knees.”

Sports reporter Rick Dunaway can be reached at rickd@npgco.com