Mount Sinai’s Choma at top of her game after returning from two ACL tears

Peyton Choma lay helpless on the turf. She didn’t need a trainer. She knew exactly what had happened because she had lived through it a year earlier.

Choma knew she had just torn her ACL — the second time in less than a year. 

On July 14, 2020, Choma, an incoming freshman at Mount Sinai High School, went down in a lacrosse game at the PAL complex in Holtsville, tearing the ACL and both the medial and lateral meniscus in her right knee. Her parents, Michael and Jennifer, saw it happen.

“Her right knee was lunch meat,” Michael said. “I went out there and I saw it right away.”

Then, on July 9, 2021 — the same nightmare! In a tournament in New Jersey she went down again. This time she tore the ACL in her left knee.

“I was on the field and I was screaming, ‘Oh no, not again,’ ” Choma said. “The only words coming out of my mouth were, ‘Oh no, not again.’ ”

The second ACL tear occurred in one of her first games that she felt confident enough with the right knee to play at full speed after returning to play for Mount Sinai in mid-April. That was most crushing for Choma. 

“The coaches ran to me and I was hysterically crying because what was running through my head wasn’t that I couldn’t do this again, but I didn’t know if I was going to be able to put myself through this again,” Choma said. “But there was also that part of me that was like there’s no way I can give up my love for this sport and I’m going to do everything possible.”

While it was somewhat obvious what had happened with the first injury, the second ACL tear wasn’t as clear. Trainers, initially, didn’t think anything was structurally wrong with Choma’s left knee. That was due in part to her intensive first rehabilitation. Her legs became so strong that her father nicknamed her “Quadzilla.” But Choma said she heard a pop when she was hurt, and two days later an MRI revealed a full tear.

“When you do it once, you kind of know what it…