Dear Commons Community,
Frank Bruni, in his New York Times column today, focuses on an issue that keeps gaining traction in our society, young people and sports injuries especially head trauma. Policies in local school districts are evolving that indicate progress is being made to protect young athletes but that much more needs to be done. Here is an excerpt from Bruni’s column:
“It’s now less common for a player whose head has collided violently with a ball, a wall, the ground or another player to return to competition right away. It’s now more common for him or her to get medical attention.
But Comstock, an epidemiologist at the Colorado School of Public Health, is frustrated by stubborn gaps between truly safe behavior and the status quo. She told me that more than half of the high schools with football teams don’t have a full-time athletic trainer, so there’s no immediately available person with the specific mission of preventing and treating injuries.
There are also sports other than football — and trauma other than concussions — that don’t attract nearly the vigilance they should, she added. Above all, there’s an enduringly strange, dangerous relationship between parents and sports, specifically between parents and coaches.
“What I would love to see is parents taking as much time to investigate their child’s coach, the league that they’re putting their child into and the officials officiating the game as they do a day care center when their child is young,” she told me. “They don’t have trouble challenging a teacher, even a pediatrician. But somehow they have trouble challenging a sports league.”
“I worry that we’ve been so focused on football that parents are pushing their kids out of that and into something else and not realizing that there are dangers there, too,” said Kevin Guskiewicz, one of the directors of the Matthew Gfeller Sport-Related Traumatic Brain Injury Research Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. “We need to improve safety in all the sports that children play.”
Did you know that while the incidence of injuries in cheerleading is much lower than in the majority of high school sports, nearly a third of those injuries are concussions? The reason, Comstock explained, is a shocking lack of common sense and caution in monitoring an activity that isn’t automatically associated with violence.
“We’ve seen cheerleaders who’ve sustained concussions because they were practicing on the asphalt in the parking lot or on the cement sidewalk — or in the school cafeteria on a tiled floor,” said Comstock, adding that grass or mats would be infinitely more appropriate. “Why on earth would parents let that happen?”
Guskiewicz drew my attention to a study published just a few months ago in The American Journal of Sports Medicine that determined that among college athletes, concussions were most likely in wrestling, followed by men’s ice hockey and then women’s ice hockey. And women’s soccer and women’s basketball, in that order, were right behind football in terms of the danger of concussion.
Comstock, who supervises an ongoing national inventory of athletic injuries among high school students, said: “I have 22 sports in my surveillance system, and concussions have been reported in all but one of them. That includes swimming.” A distracted kid will swim head-on into the wall or into someone coming from the other direction. The sport without concussions, she said, was tennis.”
Every parent with a child would do well to review this column and to heed its advice. The important message is to investigate carefully what a school does to protect its athletes in all it sports programs.
Tony
