THE AFL is investigating the prevalence of certain injuries among elite young players.

The trend was highlighted this year by the fact that 19 of the 30 young footballers picked for the current intake of the Australian Institute of Sport's AFL Academy have come in affected by injury. "We had 19 who had had a history of lower back, hip or groin injuries," the academy's head coach, Alan McConnell, said yesterday.

He said such injuries were quite common among kids of that age, and the league was doing what it could to figure out why. "I know when I inherited the program (in 2005) there was a whole lot of anecdotal evidence about this," he said.

"What we're doing through the academy and through the AFL's research board is doing a whole lot of research around this to quantify exactly what the issues are."

McConnell had his own ideas about what could be behind the injuries. "Maybe it's just about the nature of the fact that young boys these days don't climb trees and ride bikes quite so much," he said.

He also suggested that the problem may stem from the fact that the young men he works with were often quite happy to put a lot of work into upper body strength — and appearance — but often tended to neglect their core strength development. Either way, the academy is now focused on educating young players about how to avoid such injuries in the future.

NICK SHERIDAN