Posted: December 3, 2015 | Author: admin | Filed under: Football, Player Safety, Youth Sports | Tags: player safety, Safety Tag, Youth Sports, youth sports death |
By DIANE HERBST
This story is part two of a three-part PEOPLE series on high school football deaths. The mother of late football player Tyrell Cameron also spoke to PEOPLE about losing her son – and forgiving the player involved in the fatal collision on the field.
For freshman Tyrell Cameron, it was a fractured neck after being hit during a punt return. Ben Hamm took a hit to the head. The same was true for Kenny Bui and Andre Smith.
Cam’Ron Matthews felt woozy before he collapsed on the sidelines. Evan Murray also felt woozy, this following a hit to his stomach, while Luke Schemmcollapsed on the sidelines soon after he got hit a final time.
Within hours or days of their respective collisions or tackles, all seven of these high school football players were dead.
In all, 13 high school and one youth football players have died since July 1, to according to Doug Casa, Ph.D., the chief executive officer of the Korey Stringer Institute at the University of Connecticut, which researches sudden death in sport.
Seven of the deaths have been linked indirectly to the sport, with causes including cardiac conditions, heat stroke and exertional sickling (a medical emergency occurring in athletes carrying the sickle cell trait), says Casa, director of athletic training education, department of kinesiology at the University of Connecticut.
“Nearly all non-traumatic deaths in sport,” says Casa, “are preventable.”
On July 7, for example, 14-year-old Collin Kelly, a sophomore at Pike High School in Indiana died one day after passing out at a conditioning practice. The Marion County Coroner’s Office determined that Kelly died of heatstroke suffered at the practice.
“You can’t think of a bigger tragedy than a heatstroke death because all you need is ice water and a tub,” Casa says. “Imagine parents finding out their child dies and it was a $150 tub and ice and water that the school had, it’s the difference between their child living and dying.”
The deaths related to on-field injuries make Robert Cantu, M.D., medical director for the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill “very concerned personally,” he says.
How a Second Concussion Can Prove Fatal
Cantu, a professor of neurosurgery at the Boston University School of Medicine, thinks that several of the direct deaths – those related to on-field play – sound like they may be second impact syndrome: acute, sometimes fatal brain swelling that occurs when a second concussion is sustained before complete recovery from a previous concussion.
It is “a preventable condition and it would be a real tragedy if that were really the situation,” Cantu says.
An astounding 70% of high school athletes with concussions played despite their symptoms, and 40% reported that their coaches didn’t know of the injury, according to a 2014 study in the American Journal of Sports Medicine. Many players don’t reveal injuries, says Cantu, since they know it may keep them from playing or disappoint their teammates.
However, “it’s only as important as life and death,” Cantu says of a football player participating with the symptoms of concussion. (A concussion is an injury to the brain that produces a temporary loss of brain function with symptoms including dizziness, lightheadedness, confusion, headache and vision changes. Usually, nothing will be seen from an imaging test.)
“You are setting yourself up for the second impact syndrome, which has a 50 percent mortality rate if it happens,” Cantu says. “And, unfortunately, it has an almost 100 percent morbidity rate meaning even if you survive, you survive with neurologic deficits.”
Senior wide receiver Kenney Bui of Evergreen High School in Burien, Washington, had suffered a concussion one month before a game on October 2, for which a doctor cleared him to play. In the fourth quarter, when Bui seemed dazed, an ambulance took him to the hospital, where he died three days later. An autopsy found that he died of blunt force trauma to his head.
With great concern about concussions and the safety of football, one school board in Missiouri disbanded its football program earlier this year.
As shocking as these deaths are, however, the rate is far lower than its peak in 1968, when 26 high school players died from on-field play, according to a recent NCCSIR report.
The past ten years have had between zero and 8 deaths per year directly attributable to playing the game, per the NCCSIR report. In 2013, for example, eight players died from injuries sustained on the field, a rate of .73 deaths per 100,000, while last year five high school and one college player died, a rate of 0.45 per 100,000.
Why Is This Happening to High School Players?
Some 1.1 million high school students are playing football as compared to 100,000 playing at the college and pro levels, according to the NCCSIR. Yet even with those huge numbers of players in high school, a 2007 study in The American Journal of Sports Medicine found that the incidence of catastrophic head injuries in football is dramatically higher at the high school level than at the college level. The researchers concluded that, “an unacceptably high percentage of high school players were playing with residual symptoms from a prior head injury.”
Cantu, an author of the 2007 study and who published 2012’s Concussion and Our Kids, says the still-developing brains of high school athletes makes them more vulnerable to catastrophic head injuries as compared to players in the NFL.
Yet he notes that it’s the younger players who hit the most, “which is crazy,” he says.
“The coaches of those younger players say ‘you have to teach them,’ but you don’t have to teach them by bashing heads. They way practice is conducted and how frequently you hit needs to change.”
Another factor contributing to these deaths is the lack athletic trainers (highly-trained medical personnel) at all practices and games, says Casa.
The Importance of First Responders
Despite high school football accounting for the vast majority of catastrophic injuries, just 37 percent of high school have a fulltime athletic trainer, and only 50 percent have a trainer at all practices and games, according to a recent study in the Journal of Athletic Training.
“What you do in the first 5 or 10 minutes will dictate if the athlete lives or dies,” says Casa, of the study’s authors. “We can’t just call an ambulance and put our hopes on EMS or an EMT, we can’t put our hopes on the ER doc. The initial care needs to be resolved on the field.”
The most common causes of death in high school athletes, according to the Korey Stringer Institute, include heat stroke, cardiac arrest and head, neck and spinal injuries.
“If you look at indirect deaths, the deaths are almost always preventable,” Casa says. “If an AED [automated external defibrillator] is placed within a minute, 90 percent of cardiac cases survive. With heat stroke, if you cool a person down properly, 100 percent survive.”
Casa, an author of the NCCSIR study, notes that while direct deaths have seen a decrease since the 1960s, “we are in the middle of a four decade rise in indirect deaths.
“When it comes to cardiac, heat stroke and sickling death, it is without question getting more dangerous to play football,” he says.
“But those are preventable, it’s not necessarily the sport of football, it’s not because two people run into someone on a field, it’s what we’re doing in terms of conditioning and not having proper education for coaches, they’re not doing smart things in their training.”
Pre-Existing Conditions
“Any death of a young athlete is a tragedy, it is emotionally heart rending and absolutely horrible,” says Dr. Doug Zipes, a cardiologist and distinguished professor, Indiana University School of Medicine, who helped write the American Heart Association’s recently updated guidelines for athletes with heart problems.
There has been a debate among experts on the extent of screening athletes for cardiac problems, on top of their required physical examinations, he says.
“Some places add an electrocardiogram or other things but adding those things has not been cost-efficient and they lead to false negative and false positive diagnosis,” he says.
“The electrocardiogram can look normal and someone can still have heart problems, or the electrocardiogram can look abnormal and someone doesn’t have heart problems. The issues are complex.”
Zipes calls for AEDs at all practices and athletic events. “Knowing we have difficulty identifying the athlete at risk, let us be prepared to respond to that athlete who does have sudden cardiac death and the best response is a defibrillator,” he says. “And if that is applied to an athlete within minutes, we can save that life.”
Cantu bemoans the current system of finding the cause of death with football players who die after on-field play, as it is up to a medical examiner, not a neuropathologist, who is highly trained in determining causes of death on the field.
In light of the high school football deaths this year, two congressmen last week introduced legislation that would require the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to take some action.
“We desperately need a mechanism that would allow experts to examine each of these fatalities so we could be absolutely about what caused them,” Cantu says, adding that even one death, “is too many.”
Source: Herbst, Diane. “13 High School Football Deaths This Season – PEOPLE Talks to the Experts About Why, And What Can Be Done to Help.” PEOPLE.com. N.p., 03 Dec. 2015. Web. 03 Dec. 2015.
Posted: December 3, 2015 | Author: admin | Filed under: Concussions, Football, Player Safety, Youth Sports | Tags: Concussions, player safety, Safety Tag, youth football, Youth Sports |
By UZMA SAMADANI
I read with great interest the recent report on the call for elimination of football from high school argued by Drs. Stephen Miles and Shailendra Prasad (“U doctors call for no football in schools,” Nov. 22). They take issue with the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) position statement that tackle football should not be eliminated from youth sports. The AAP position statement instead proposes a series of measures to make football safer — including limiting contact practices, rule changes, improved protective equipment and neck strengthening, among others.
There are several reasons that the AAP statement is reasonable in arguing for continued contact sports, with efforts to render them as safe as possible.
The first reason is that it is impossible to legislate all risk-taking behaviors out of childhood and adolescence. The adolescent brain is not fully developed, and thus not as rigid in its signaling as the adult brain. It is still developing and is wildly creative compared with the more inhibited adult brain. Despite any legislation, children are biologically more impulsive, less restrained and more inclined to take risks.
Football is on the riskier end of the spectrum of sports, but still is less risky than skiing, snowboarding, skateboarding, equestrian sports or bicycling. If we are going to legislate all risk-taking behaviors in children, we should probably begin with those that are statistically most dangerous, rather than those in the middle.
Ultimately, if we do not let our children play football, they may choose to skateboard off the roof. This type of activity is what they are biologically programmed to do.
The second reason not to eliminate tackle football is that it is not entirely clear that elimination of risk-taking behaviors from childhood is in the interest of our society. With football, children learn to assess risk based not only on their own capabilities, but also on the capabilities of their teammates, who protect them and work for their mutual interests. This capacity for rapid risk assessment and plan execution, relying on teamwork and assessment of evolving challenges, may serve our children well in their later professional lives.
Without childhood risk, there might not be adult risk-taking behaviors — no astronauts, explorers, entrepreneurs, fire rescue personnel or surgeons, for example. Helicopter parenting and elimination of all risk may breed a generation of cowards unfit to face the challenges of the next century.
A third reason for the AAP position, clearly indicated in its statement, is that there is not substantive scientific evidence indicating that subconcussive or even concussive impacts in youth have deleterious long-term health effects. The vast majority of children will recover from a concussion without any adverse condition. The greatest risk factor for dementia in American society is vascular insufficiency due to hypertension, obesity and diabetes — all far more prevalent in children who do not exercise. Dementia is also more common in women, who are less likely to have played contact sports.
Within the spectrum of brain-injury-inducing activities contemplated by the developing and unpredictable minds of American youth, football represents an extremely tiny fraction of where risk actually resides. Focused efforts on elimination of football detract from the true preventable causes of brain injury — specifically, gun violence, motor vehicle collisions, and drug or alcohol abuse. Such efforts are also contrary to elimination of the greatest scourge to the health of our modern society — obesity due to inactivity.
The question we should be asking is not whether we should ban football, but how we can encourage more children to be active in the sport of their choice, played as safely as possible.
The AAP has it right — make football safer and get the kids out there playing. Children who want to play football should be encouraged, and those who do not should be counseled to seek alternative exercises that are hopefully at least as beneficial.
Uzma Samadani is Rockswold Kaplan Endowed Chair for Traumatic Brain Injury Research at Hennepin County Medical Center and an associate professor of neurosurgery at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of “The Football Decision — An exploration into every parent’s dilemma on whether or not to let a child play contact sports,” which will be published in January 2016.
Source: Samadani, Uzma. “Counterpoint: Call to Ban Football Collides with the Facts.” Star Tribune. N.p., 03 Dec. 2015. Web. 03 Dec. 2015.
Posted: November 30, 2015 | Author: admin | Filed under: Concussions, Football, Player Safety, Youth Sports | Tags: player safety, Safety Tag, Youth Sports, youth sports death |
By JASON SCOTT
Two youth football players — one a high school student from Kansas and the other in Ohio who was just 9 years old — died this week during football activities.
Luke Schemm, a 17-year old player at Wallace County High in Sharon Springs, Kan. Collapsed on the sideline after scoring on a two-point conversion play. He was airlifted to a Denver hospital, where he was declared brain dead. He was taken off life support late yesterday.
Referees reportedly didn’t see Schemm take contact to his head or neck. But David Schemm, Luke’s father, said that Luke had suffered brain trauma, which caused swelling and shut off blood flow.
Schemm was a standout athlete at Wallace County High. He started for four years on the school’s football team, played on a state championship basketball team, and a state ranked high jumper. He had plans to attend Kansas State University in the fall.
Wyatt Barber, the 9-year-old player, collapsed during a routine practice session. A preliminary autopsy revealed that he died of a heart issue.
Barber’s team was having a non-contact practice session when he fell to the ground.
“During the process of stopping and taking a break, the young man collapsed,” Meigs County Sheriff Keith Wood told WSAZ. “They started doing CPR on him immediately and contacted 911. When we got there, they were working on Wyatt and trying to get him revived, diligently trying.”
Barber was rushed to the emergency room, but was pronounced dead a short time later.
“To have a death like that is just a terrible thing to see happen,” Wood said. “We are a family here and we’re very closely connected in our community.”
Source: Scott, Jason. “Two More Deaths in Youth Football - Athletic Business.” Athletic Business. N.p., 15 Nov. 2015. Web. 15 Nov. 2015.
Posted: November 25, 2015 | Author: admin | Filed under: Football, Player Safety, Youth Sports | Tags: player safety, Safety Tag, Youth Sports |
By KELLY MCEVERS
We know more than ever about concussions, the permanent brain damage of chronic traumatic encephalopathy and the other physical risks of football.
Yet so far this year, at least 19 students have died playing football, according to the University of North Carolina’s National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research.
Cam’ron Matthews played safety on the Alto, Texas, varsity football team. The 16-year-old died after a game in October.
Laurie Gould Photography
Though participation is slowly declining, football is still the country’s most popular high school sport. Over a million high schoolers played last season.
Researchers at UNC have been tracking football-related deaths since the 1960s. Director Kristen Kucera describes two main tallies: deaths caused directly by football, like a broken spine or brain trauma, and those that are indirect like heat stroke or sudden cardiac arrest that occurred during a game or practice.
The good news is that there are fewer fatalities than there used to be. Back in the 1960s, around 30 or 40 players died each year. Then came a steep decline thanks to new safety measures: a standardized helmet that must be certified for use in a game; a rule banning headfirst tackling; and improvements in athletic medical care.
But instead of dropping to nil, the number of football-related fatalities leveled off in the 1990s. Since then, a persistent average of about four or five football players have died each year as a direct result of playing their sport, along with an average of 10 or so indirect fatalities.
When asked why the numbers have leveled off instead of reaching zero, Kucera hesitates. “That’s a great question,” she says. “That’s what we’re working really hard to figure out.”
One player who died this year was Cam’ron Matthews, a 16-year-old from Alto, Texas.
On a Friday night in November, one month after Matthews died, the Alto Yellowjackets bounded out of their black-and-yellow inflated tent through an artificial cloud of mist and onto the field. There was no trace of sadness. They were focused on winning.
Alto is a small town of about 1,200, and on Friday nights it feels like everyone comes to watch the boys play. Some parents like Misty Collins get there early to stake out a spot on the metal bleachers. Collins was there Oct. 16, when Matthews told the coach he felt dizzy, then collapsed on the sideline.
“We just all prayed,” she remembered. “We prayed that he was going to be OK, but the good Lord took an angel that was down here on Earth.”
That’s how people who knew Matthews talk about him. The 6-foot safety was one of the team’s captains. He was the only junior elected.
“He’s our number one, that was his jersey number,” Collins said. “He was an awesome student, and very polite, and anything that came out of his mouth was ‘Yes, ma’am’ and ‘No, ma’am.’ He was an awesome guy.”
After he collapsed, medics took Matthews to a hospital in East Texas, where he died the next day.
Doctors told the family he likely died from a burst brain aneurysm, though they’re still waiting for an autopsy to confirm that.
A fatal aneurysm could be related to football or other vigorous activity, according toRobert Cantu, a neurosurgeon in Concord, Mass., who specializes in football injuries. That activity could cause an aneurysm, which is a weak area in the wall of an artery, to burst, which in turn could cause dizziness, collapse and death. Aneurysms can run in families, but are “very uncommon” in 16-year-olds, Cantu says.
Matthews’ friend and teammate Keenan Johnson said it’s been hard to get back in the groove. But instead of falling apart, he says, the team has pulled together.
The Alto Yellowjackets take the field on Nov. 13, a month after Matthews died.
Lauren Silverman/NPR
“It hurts that he’s not here,” Johnson says. “He’s one of my closest friends, and we worked out all summer. But we dedicate it to him. We’re trying to win the state championship for him, be number one for him.”
In the playoff game in November, the Yellowjackets faced a longtime rival – the Groveton Indians. And Matthews was on the sidelines, in a way. His number 1 jersey was perched on a wooden hanger. His sister Paige sat in the bleachers at the 50-yard line. The team won 63 to 14.
Parents rushed onto the field to thank head coach Paul Gould. Gould says he’s proud of how the players are handling their teammate’s death.
“I think they’re doing probably about as good as possible, but this is something they’re going to deal with for the rest of their lives,” he says.
Gould knows parents are concerned about injuries associated with football, especially concussions. This year the governing body for high school sports in Texas says it will start counting concussions for the first time.
This month, the American Academy of Pediatrics made new recommendations about safety and urged players to consider “whether the benefits of playing outweigh the risks of possible injury.” The AAP is urging the expansion of non-tackle leagues like flag football and calling for athletic trainers to be present during practices and games. Only 37 percent of high school nationwide have a full time athletic trainer on staff.
Two University of Minnesota professors have gone even further, calling for theelimination of tackle football programs from public schools altogether.
“Everybody wants their kids to be safe. Everybody wants their kids to be OK, and I understand that,” Gould says. “We try to make sure we coach kids to hit the correct way. You try to make your kids as safe as possible, because that’s our job.”
After Matthews died, Gould says not a single parent pulled their kid from the team. He hopes what happened doesn’t fuel negative ideas about the game.
“I can say this: What football teaches kids for the rest of their life, in my opinion, is priceless,” Gould says. “I mean, it teaches you to deal with things. This situation is definitely teaching our kids to deal with things as they move forward.”
Mississippi defensive back Roy Lee “Chucky” Mullins tackled Vanderbilt fullback Brad Gaines on Oct. 28, 1989. The tackle paralyzed Mullins from the neck down. He died two years later.
Bruce Newman/AP
But players who have been involved in a fatal play say the experience will haunt them forever.
Back in 1989, Brad Gaines was a star running back at Vanderbilt University. Then came October 28, a date Gaines will never forget. It was a must-win game at Ole Miss in Oxford.
Vanderbilt received the opening kickoff and drove down the field. On third and goal at the 12-yard line, Gaines and the Commodores lined up for a play designed to pass the ball to Gaines.
The ball snapped and his quarterback threw the pass. An Ole Miss linebacker was close on Gaines’s tail.
“As soon as the ball reaches me, reaches my hands …bang!” Gaines remembers. “Just a fantastic hit from the back, and breaks up the pass, and [the linebacker] just makes a great play.”
Gaines headed back to the sideline, then noticed the linebacker hadn’t yet gotten back up. At first, Gaines thought this was another of football’s routine injuries. A sprained ankle, maybe. But five minutes went by. Ten minutes. The linebacker was still lying on the field, surrounded by trainers and medical staff. Maybe a broken arm, Gaines thought.
Finally Gaines realized it was something more serious when a helicopter ambulance arrived to take the linebacker to Memphis, about 70 miles away.
Later he learned the linebacker’s name — Chucky Mullins — and his injury: Mullins had broken his spine and could not move any of his limbs.
“I had the doctor tell me sometime later that when they got him stabilized, when they got him into surgery… his neck looked as if you dropped a grenade down his shirt.”
Gaines was horrified.
“The only thing I knew was you strapped up your cleats before practice, you went out and played and it was fun. I didn’t know that there was this other part to this game,” says Gaines, now 48 and living in Nashville, where he works in health care.
“In an instant, he goes from being a world-class athlete in the best conference in America, and now he’s laying on his back, and he’ll never move again. He will not be able to brush his teeth. He will not be able to wash his hair. He will never be able to feed himself. And I just felt like I was the cause of that.”
Against the advice of his coach and a psychologist, Gaines decided to visit Mullins in the hospital. He was scared to death, petrified, he says, and not prepared for what he saw when he walked in: a much skinnier Mullins, with “cords, tubes, things hanging out of him.”
Mullins’s guardian was there, and told Gaines that Mullins had something he wanted to tell him.
Gaines leaned over to hear Mullins whisper through his tracheal tube: “It’s not your fault.”
“And oh my goodness,” Gaines remembers. “It’s tough saying it now, but I tell you, it was a total selfless act on his part. I don’t know if I could have done that.”
Gaines and Mullins remained friends for the following year and half, until Mullins died of complications in 1991. Every year still, he drives to Mullins’s grave on October 28, the anniversary of the game, and on Christmas.
Today, Gaines regularly receives phone calls from players like him — players, often teenagers, who make a routine play or tackle that ends with an opponent’s death. Gaines is one of few people they can turn to who actually understands what they’re going through, and he’s happy to help.
“What I learned from Chucky Mullins was that selfless nature. It’s not about me. It’s not about Brad Gaines. I can help people. So if somebody calls me and asks me that’s going through something like this, or needs some advice, or counsel, then that’s my duty.”
Gaines thinks the game is safer today, thanks to things like better concussion protocol and the new kickoff positions that mean fewer kickoff returns. But he still calls himself a football purist. He says he couldn’t tell his 11-year-old son not to play football.
“I know that it’s not the game’s fault. I know that. And I know that there are going to be injuries,” Gaines says. “But when you love the game, you accept that. You accept that there could be consequences like this.”
Source: McEvers, Kelly. “Deaths Persist In Youth And Student Football Despite Safety Efforts.” NPR. NPR, 25 Nov. 2015. Web. 25 Nov. 2015.
Posted: November 25, 2015 | Author: admin | Filed under: Concussions, Dehydration, Football, Heat Stroke, Player Safety, Youth Sports | Tags: Concussions, player safety, Safety Tag, youth football, Youth Sports |
By DR DAVID GEIER
Tyrell Cameron. Ben Hamm. Evan Murray. Kenney Bui. Rod Williams. Cam’ron Matthews. Andre Smith. Luke Schemm.
These are all young athletes who have died this season playing high school football.
Deaths in a sport can be classified as either direct or indirect fatalities. Direct fatalities are those that result from football itself, such as a player suffering a broken neck tackling an opponent. Indirect deaths result from exertion while playing. Examples include heat stroke and cardiac deaths.
From available media reports, it appears that most of the young athletes listed above died from events directly caused by football. They died from brain injuries, cervical spine injuries or a lacerated spleen.
If these reports are accurate, then at least six of the deaths this fall are directly related to high school football. Add these to the eight deaths in 2013 and five in 2014, and this three-year period marks the highest total since 1986-1988, according to Jason Lisk of The Big Lead.
Whether or not this recent spike in fatalities is part of a trend or just an aberration remains to be seen.
Dr. Frederick Mueller, the former director of the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research, explained to me that in the 1960s and early 1970s, 25 to 30 athletes died each year as a result of head and neck injuries. In 1976, football banned spear tackling, which involved leading with the head or helmet. That change helped to dramatically cut fatalities in the sport.
According to data from the NCCSIR, 26 high school football players suffered deaths directly related to the sport between 2003 and 2012, or about three per year. Nineteen direct fatalities have occurred from 2013 through the end of the 2015 season, which appears to be a significant increase. It’s possible, however, that increased media coverage and the proliferation of social media has helped to publicize deaths we might never have heard about in the past.
While it’s hard to conclude that deaths in high school football are becoming more common, it is clear that we aren’t making much headway in preventing them either.
Part of the problem could be the evolution of the sport at the high school level and the athletes who play it. Kids start playing competitively at a much younger age, so the high school game is played at a higher level than ever. Plus the athletes are bigger, faster and stronger and deliver hits with more force than they did decades ago.
More worrisome, though, are the deaths indirectly related to football. There were 62 indirect fatalities between 2008 and 2014, according to NCCSIR data. Most deaths from heat stroke, sickling in athletes with sickle cell trait and heart issues can be prevented with rapid and appropriate medical response in the first few minutes. Yet these deaths seem to be rising.
I don’t present these statistics to scare anyone. The simple fact is that kids die playing football.
You might look at that number — six deaths directly caused by football this year — and think that it isn’t many when 1.1 million kids play high school football. Or you might be a parent who decides it is far too high.
We need more research on high school football deaths and new strategies to prevent them. Would creating more protective helmets make a difference? Would teaching proper tackling techniques help? Yes, we need those efforts and much, much more. But the last 40 years have shown us that we aren’t making much progress.
Football is more popular than ever, and kids want to play. Parents will have to decide if six deaths a year is an acceptable risk for their children.
Dr. David Geier is an orthopaedic surgeon in Charleston. For more information about football injuries and other sports medicine topics, go to drdavidgeier.com.
Source: Geier, David. “Are Deaths Increasing in High School Football?” Post and Courier. N.p., 25 Nov. 2015. Web. 25 Nov. 2015.
Posted: November 23, 2015 | Author: admin | Filed under: Concussions, Football, Player Safety | Tags: Concussions, football, player safety, Safety Tag, Youth Sports |
By: MATT WALL
Luke Falk lay staring onto the field, unable to move or stand up after his head slammed onto the field. Paramedics rushed on and carted the quarterback off on a stretcher.
The Washington State quarterback suffered a serious looking head injury, but gave the crowd a thumbs up before exiting the field.
Saturday was not a good day in the sport of college football for head injuries, especially to quarterbacks. In fact, it’s been happening a lot this season.
Oklahoma starter Baker Mayfield suffered an apparent head injury against TCU in the second quarter Saturday. TCU linebacker Ty Summers was flagged for targeting and later ejected for the hit. Mayfield did not return.
Syracuse quarterback Eric Dungey was out this weekend with a head injury that he suffered three weeks ago.
For Arizona fans, they know this story all too well. Starting quarterback Anu Solomon has sat out three games over the season because of concussion symptoms. Solomon’s two head injuries occurred from the sophomore attempting to slide face first to avoid opposing defenders.
Arizona receiver Samajie Grant sustained a head injury during the opening play in the Territorial Cup on Saturday and sat out for the remainder of the game.
We haven’t even discussed all the professional football players in the NFL who have travelled the same path. To name a couple: Minnesota Vikings quarterback Teddy Bridgewater and Arizona Cardinals guard Mike Iupati.
Concussions are nothing new in the NFL or in college football. However, this football season has been one of significant injuries to top players.
Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, also known as CTE, has gained national attention over the years due to the numerous former football players who have suffered from the disease.
While increased rules have been implemented to protect player safety, it doesn’t appear to be working.
The current protocol in the NFL of immediate sideline assessment involves a neurologic exam, a graduated exercise challenge and the team physician clearing the player. In the NCAA, however, an initial suspected concussion evaluation involves a symptom assessment, physical and neurological exam, cognitive assessment, balance exam and a clinical assessment.
Maryland quarterback Caleb Rowe sustained a concussion according to SB Nation, removed himself from the came and returned a few minutes later.
According to a 2013 survey by the Chronicle of Higher Education, 42 percent of major college football trainers have been pressured by coaches to return an athlete to the field after suffering concussions.
That’s a startling number, one that has no business in the sport of college football.
Arizona head coach Rich Rodriguez knows concussions all too well with his quarterback.
“As coaches, we don’t get in the middle of it,” Rodriguez said in his weekly press conference last week. “There are a lot of people who give opinions, which is kind of comical. All of these other people give their opinion on what a player should do about their injury. One: They are not here to give the medical diagnosis and two: 99 percent of them are not qualified to give a medical diagnosis anyways, as I am not. We aren’t the experts.”
Rodriguez is sending the right message: Head coaches are in no way, shape or form experts on any sort of medical diagnosis.
“[Experts] make the determination whether a guy can go in and play,” Rodriguez said. “That is the way it should be. It should not be in the hands of someone’s opinion or anybody else’s, it’s up to the medical experts. They will always have the student-athlete’s welfare on the top of their list.”
If only every coach could have the same opinion.
Source: Wall, Matt. “Column: Head Injuries Continue to Plague Football.” Arizona Daily Wildcat ::. N.p., 23 Nov. 2015. Web. 23 Nov. 2015.
Posted: November 14, 2015 | Author: admin | Filed under: Concussions, Football, Player Safety, Youth Sports | Tags: Concussions, player safety, Safety Tag, Youth Sports, youth sports death |
By FRANK FEAR
American kids are dying for football. Literally. Nine players have died this season. And it’s not a new story either. Over a century ago—in 1905, to be exact—18 amateur football players died, most of them high schoolers.
Equipment improvements, “head down” coaching, concussion-prevention and treatment protocols certainly make the game safer. But none of those approaches, even when taken together, make football safe. The inconvenient truth is football l— a national passion — isn’t safe, particularly for youth.
There are two reasons why — the game and the age of players. As players get bigger, stronger, and faster, the hits have greater physical impact. And the hits are being taken by kids whose physiology is developing, not developed.
Those two factors override a solution we’ve used to solve many thorny issues in modern life — developing and applying advanced technology. But “safe” in football won’t come from advanced helmet design. And having medical staff available at the field won’t make football safe, either. That help comes after the fact and fewer than half of America’s high schools employ an athletic trainer.
The culprit in football isn’t always “the big hit.” Head trauma is often caused by repetitive hits, “sub-concussive hits,” which come from repeated contact—practice after practice, game after game, year after year. Those hits are especially problematic for kids.
So numerous medical experts recommend that kids not play contact football until they’re teenagers. But if a player wants to advance then the default option is to begin playing early. Over 225,000 American kids engage in Pop Warner football, where play starts as early as 5 years old.
What are parents to do? Some believe the game is safe. Others are saying no to football, largely for safety reasons. Participation in youth football is down about 10 percent over the past few years; and it’s also down about 3 percent at the high school level.
Who is stepping away? Non-participants are more likely to come in families with parents that have more formal education and earn higher incomes. Many families with sports-playing kids seek non-contact alternatives.
That finding reveals a second inconvenient truth about football: the predominant racial-ethnic composition of teams, especially in college. Getting a college scholarship —p erhaps a shot at the pros —i s an economic pathway for many limited-income and racially-diverse families. Safety may be a concern (and often is), but it can be outweighed by the prospect of future rewards. Many kids play early, hoping to “get noticed.”
The problem with inconvenient truths like these is that it’s easy to look the other way. The situation is even more challenging because football is an industry. It’s a career choice for coaches, a product line for equipment manufacturers, a brand for schools, and a way of life for people, schools, and communities.
I don’t believe the answer is eliminating the sport, even though President Teddy Roosevelt almost did that in 1905. Instead he assembled leaders and asked them to come up with solutions. What emerged were new rules that made the game safer.
We need that approach today, but the very first step is to admit this: Football isn’t safe for kids! Then we need to make player safety Priority #1—more important than wins or championships. Each school, community, conference, and our state governing association needs to take leadership—aggressive leadership—to address what is unbecoming America.
Kids are dying playing a game.
Source: Fear, Frank. “Youth Football Breeds Inconvenient Truths.” The News-Press. N.p., 14 Nov. 2015. Web. 14 Nov. 2015.
Posted: November 13, 2015 | Author: admin | Filed under: Concussions, Football, Player Safety, Soccer, Youth Hockey, Youth Sports | Tags: Concussions, player safety, Safety Tag, Youth Sports |
By NICK CALOWAY
SMYRNA, Tenn. (WKRN) – During football season, we hear about concussions all the time. At the high school level, all the way up to the NFL, players are being hit with the invisible injury.
Other youth sports are high risk, too, such as cheerleading.
Spirits were high at last year’s UCA National Cheerleading Championships in Orlando. The Stewarts Creek High School JV team won state last year, but one cheerleader was on the sideline.
She couldn’t cheer because of a serious injury she suffered during practice.“I was out for three months from cheer. I couldn’t do any physical activity,” Anna Smith told News 2.
“We had to do a front flip off the stunt and I ended up landing on my head,” Smith said. “I got a concussion and three compression fractures in my vertebrae.”
To many, that sounds like more like a football injury, but not to concussion experts.
Dr. Colleen Vanderkolk, a neurologist at Saint Thomas West, emphasizes in headaches and epilepsy.
“And the highest ones that we see, of course football is No. one, but then you also have hockey, we have cheerleading, soccer is actually very high in concussion, and gymnastics,” Vanderkolk said.She said sports other than football are also high risk for concussion.
Doctors say when it comes to concussions, early identification is key.
“The symptoms that you look out for is any headache, nausea, feeling of lightheadedness or dizziness, just feeling off. Those types of symptoms you have to look out for,” Dr. Vanderkolk told News 2.
Mot concussion patients recover in about 3 or 4 weeks.
Smith has since recovered from her injuries and is back to doing what she loves. Now she knows the risk better than anyone.
The Stewarts Creek JV co-ed team is competing for state again this weekend at the state championships in Murfreesboro.
Source:Caloway, Nick. “Football Not the Only Sport with High Risk of Concussions.” WKRNcom. N.p., 13 Nov. 2015. Web. 13 Nov. 2015.
Posted: November 11, 2015 | Author: admin | Filed under: Football, High School, Player Safety | Tags: high school football, player safety, Safety Tag |
Everyone knows football is a dangerous sport. No matter how much protective equipment kids strap on or how leagues alter or impose new rules to reinforce player safety, injuries are bound to occur.
While in the past those injuries tended to be reported as things like sprained ankles or the occasional broken arm, lately it seems like more and more young athletes are suffering serious, even life threatening traumas.
From back in the day when players first strapped leather padding to their heads, helmets have been associated as the go-to in football protective gear. More recently, as people began taking serious notice of concussions, tackling and “targeting” rules (specifically prohibiting helmet-to-helmet contact) have been imposed league-wide in an attempt to stave off unnecessary injury.
The problem is that with players now tackling lower on the body, from the knees to shoulders, it has unintentionally opened up a different problem: “liver” hits.
In September 2015 alone, three high school football players died from game related injuries and, according to CBS News, another 16 have died in the past two years. The Denver Post reported that that number jumps to 77 if you take it back to 1995.
In early October, 15-year-old Taylor Haugen died of a massive liver rupture after getting hit simultaneously from the front and the back during a football game in Florida. The week prior, a player in New Jersey died from a lacerated spleen after he was tackled around the midsection.
Both were legal hits.
While cases of head injury are now more documented, enabling players and coaches to take protective measures, body hits typically aren’t.
According to The Denver Post, although 1.1 million kids play high school football across the country every year, over the past five years, that number has dropped by more than 25,00o as schools are disbanding their programs due to injuries or low student interest.
The question remains: Is football too dangerous to be a high school sport? Opinion varies.
Proponents of the game will usually agree that while the sport can have its risks, players know what they’re signing up for and pretty much any sport carries some risk factor in play, which is true. A study commissioned by USA Baseball showed that between 1989 to 2010, 18 children younger than high school age died of injuries from baseball.
A report put forth by the University of North Carolina concluded that high school wrestling has been associated with 63 “direct catastrophic injuries” over the past 30 years.
So it’s not just football.
The problem isn’t that people don’t know that football is dangerous, it’s that the sport is so ingrained upon the culture that the slightest change in a regulation sparks mass outrage — even if the new rule is only meant to protect the players.
So, what’s next? Flag football? Honestly, especially in the Southern states, that will probably never fly. But the situation is well on its way to becoming a more discussed topic.
Football has become an issue of safety versus tradition, but which is more important? And keep in mind that we’re not talking about professional athletes here. These are kids.
Source: “Is High School Football worth the Injury Risk? - Pickens Sentinel - Pickenssentinel.com.” Pickens Sentinel. N.p., 11 Nov. 2015. Web. 11 Nov. 2015.
Posted: November 9, 2015 | Author: admin | Filed under: Concussions, Football, Player Safety, Youth Sports | Tags: Concussions, player safety, Safety Tag, Youth Sports |
By ASHLEY HANLEY
Vikings quarterback Teddy Bridgewater suffered a concussion after a big hit in Sunday’s game.
And while his status for next week’s game is still unknown, we wanted to take a look at concussion safety and the potential long–term impact for not only athletes, but people of all ages.
A lot of Vikings fans are still upset over this hit on QB Teddy Bridgewater.
Many calling it a dirty hit by defensive back Lamarcus Joyner.
The hit knocked Teddy out for the remainder of the game with a concussion.
Mayo Neurologist Andrew Reeves says, “A concussion is when the brain’s natural, normal function changes due to impact.”
But coaches, parents and athletes at all levels need to be aware of the warning signs and risks associated with a hit to the head.
Troy Hoehn says, “Obviously the most common one is headache, it it’s from a blow to the head in any way, even a fall, the headaches, dizziness, sensitivity, concentrating, they just don’t feel right.”
When it comes to player safety, athletes and parents in Minnesota need to know the athletic trainers and coaches are not just being overprotective; it’s the law.
OFC Head Athletic Trainer Troy Hoehn says, “Concussion law for the state states that if they have an incident that could cause a concussion or symptoms we need to pull them from play that day and they can only be returned if they are cleared by a medical professional.”
And for a sport that prides itself on toughness, coaches say it’s not worth the risk to the brain.
MSU Head Football Coach Todd Hoffner says, “Do not mask, do not hide, do not hold back. This is nothing to mess around with.”
And the best way to prevent a concussion?
Reeves says, “Protecting ourselves, including wearing a helmet.”
And while helmets can’t completely prevent concussions, they can help soften the blow.
Because when it comes to the brain, you can never be too safe.
Source: Hanley, Ashley. “Concussion Safety: Why Athletic Trainers Say You Can Never Be Too Safe With The Brain.” KEYC. N.p., 09 Nov. 2015. Web. 09 Nov. 2015.
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