Of the nearly four million concussions estimated annually, 9.8% are due to sports.
WASHINGTON — When President Barack Obama said recently that football needs to address the issue of player safety more seriously, he also offered a simple solution: fix the game or stop playing.
“If I had a son, I’d have to think long and hard before I let him play football,” Obama said in an interview with the New Republic. “I think that those of us who love the sport are going to have to wrestle with the fact that it will probably change gradually to try to reduce some of the violence.”
But to those on the front lines of the battle to prevent sports injuries, the question is not whether to fix the game. The question is how to fix it.
It is here that the real struggle emerges. Proponents of youth sports safety have found that while they work toward the same goal, there is no consensus about how best to prevent injuries in bruising games. The one consensus that does emerge is the focus on concussions as the most dangerous and pressing issue in youth sports safety.
The National Athletic Trainers’ Association pushes for more athletic trainers in youth sports as a means to prevent concussions and other injuries. The association’s president, Jim Thornton, said he, too, would “have to think twice” before allowing a son to play football if there were not athletic trainers present.
“The reason (Obama’s) concerned is the injuries that could happen and the potential for those injuries to not be managed correctly,” Thornton said. “I love football, it’s a great game. But there’s no reason why if we can pay for football in a high school that we can’t afford proper protections against injuries.”
Chris Nowinski, co-founder of the Sports Legacy Institute, said at a Youth Sports Safety Alliance summit this month that the real problem, however, is that too much attention is paid to safety issues in professional leagues.
“We have this very vigorous national discussion about whether the NFL is too dangerous for participants,” Nowinski said. “When the reality is we know for a variety of reasons that the games are much more dangerous for the young brain and the young people.”
According to information from the Youth Sports Safety Alliance, about 8,000 minors of high school age or younger are treated for sports-related injuries each day. Among the most devastating of these injuries are concussions, which accounted for 400,000 sports injuries among high school students in the 2008-2009 school year, the most recent year for which data was available.
“Youth sports injuries are a public health issue,” Thornton said. “And the cost is enormous, in terms both of the literal monetary cost and the cost to our children.”
Doug Casa, a sports safety researcher at the University of Connecticut, cited another issue as the biggest problem facing youth sports: An inability to change the rules fast enough. Professional and collegiate athletic associations have implemented some rules to reduce concussions in their respective sports, but the process is more difficult with high school students.
Youth sports are largely made up of a patchwork of smaller organizations that must each make changes on their own.
Football and girl’s soccer are the two sports most likely to result in youth concussions.
“With FIFA and NCAA, everyone has to follow it (when they implement) one new rule,” Casa said at the Youth Sports Safety summit. “But at the high school level, while there are certain success stories at the state level, you have to do things one state at a time to get things changed.”
But even how to change the rules is debated. One of the big debates is how to set up different levels of competition to avoid unsafe mismatches in youth football.
Many leagues, including Pop Warner, use player size to determine at which level a young person plays. Using weight and height scales, children are placed in the division that is likeliest to pair them up against teams with similarly sized players.
Rick Taylor, president of the Greater Metropolitan Youth Football League in the Washington area, said this actually creates the opportunity for injury.
“When you just go by size, you end up with very different maturity levels,” Taylor said. “On one end they have cell phones and in some cases condoms. You have testosterone at play. The other kids have not matured yet.”
Taylor’s league instead decided in 2010 to divide players into levels by age, ensuring that no one plays against a competitor who is more than one year older or younger. He said more youth leagues around the country will begin moving to this model, noting the Boy’s and Girl’s Clubs in Baltimore and St. George’s County use age as the determinant as well.
“I’m happy to report there has been virtually no injuries since we made that format change,” Taylor said. “A lot of people are reluctant to do that because of the appearance of a bigger kid playing a smaller kid. But these kids learn… the techniques to protect themselves as they play, so age is the best way to keep them safe.”
Amid the debate about how to change football to make it safer, there is one area of agreement: Coaches must be more aware of the dangers the game can pose.
Thornton and the NATA acknowledge that in hyper-competitive high school football environments, that may be an uphill battle. But Taylor said his league has implemented mandatory concussion safety trainings for coaches.
“Parents have just been flocking to that idea, and we hear so much support,” Taylor said. “But it’s just one aspect of what we need to do.”
