Winners of the Youth Sports Safety Ambassador Award: USA Football represented by Steve Alic, Senior Director of Communications; Project ADAM, represented by Laura Friend, Project ADAM Texas Coordinator at Cook Children’s Hospital; U.S. Congressman Bill Pascrell Jr., and Scott Sailor, president of the National Athletic Trainers Association (Photo: Renee Fernandes)
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — Youth sports safety experts and advocates discussed insights on preventing catastrophic injuries for student athletes Tuesday at the 7th annual Youth Sports Safety Summit, hosted by the National Athletic Trainers’ Association and the Youth Sports Safety Alliance.
The alliance is made up of 260 organizations to prevent catastrophic, chronic and acute injury and illness in young athletes.
More than 7.8 million high school students play sports. More than 50 sport-related deaths of young athletes occurred in 2015.
U.S. Rep. Bill Pascrell Jr. (NJ-09), founder of the Congressional Brain Injury Task Force, addressed the national discussion on brain injuries, as well as student-athlete safety. He said the science is there, so “let’s talk about it in a real way with our student-athletes.”
“Traumatic brain injury is part of our national debate, about whether the benefits of organized sports outweigh the risk,” he said. “That’s what parents have to debate. That’s what you and I have to debate, that’s what the pros have to debate, whether they like it or not.
“We’re trying to bring things to the surface so we can address them. Look what we’ve hid. We’ve hid lead in our drinking water, schools falling apart, and we hid this issue because we don’t want to address it. We don’t want to face parents and tell them, ‘would you stop pushing your kid? He didn’t get ‘his bell rung,’ he got a concussion. ‘But he’s gotta play, he’s gotta get a scholarship.’”
He said “getting your bell rung” means getting your brain bashed against the skull.
Pascrell said statistics show 3.8 million concussions are related to sports and rec each year and commended the athletic trainers for “saving life and limb” in their jobs, and that they need resources, training and equipment to do their job effectively. He thanked them for pressing issues like neuropsychological testing, such as baseline readings for student athletes.
Pascrell was one of three winners of the Youth Sports Safety Ambassador Award, given to those who demonstrate commitment to health of secondary school athletes. USA Football and Project ADAM were the two other award winners.
Project ADAM — Automated Defibrillators in Adam’s Memory — was honored for its work with high schools to prevent sudden cardiac arrest and to assist schools in acquiring AEDs.
Adam was Adam Lemel, a 17-year old athlete from Wisconsin who collapsed and died after suffering sudden cardiac arrest during a basketball game in 1999. AED and practiced response could’ve saved him, said Laura Friend, the project coordinator at Cook Children’s Hospital in Fort Worth, who accepted the award. Through the Texas affiliate of the project alone, more than 23000 school employees have been trained in five years, and more than 100 lives have been saved because of these partnerships.
“If you have the equipment and tools that is the best chance of survival,” Friend said in an interview. “That’s equipment that should be at every school. I want to say it’s simple, but it’s not that simple. But it’s accessible and doable for youth organizations for elementary, junior high, high school, businesses. We’re trying to save our communities and our schools.”
She said every three days a student-athlete collapses and dies from cardiac arrest.
“Sudden cardiac arrest is often not given the attention it deserves,” agreed Steve Alic, Senior Director, Communications for USA Football, which also won the award. “The leading cause of all athlete fatalities during exercise, from age 19 on down, is sudden cardiac arrest.”
Alic said USA Football, the national governing body for the sport, works to establish standards “routed in best available science for the good of high school and youth football community.”
This ranges from practice guidelines for youth football to operating the Heads Up football program. USA Football received the award for its commitment to youth safety, addressing how coaches are trained, athletes are taught, parents are informed and safety is handled.
“Youth football has been played 80 years, and there had never been national standards for how to coach the game and how to teach fundamentals,” Alic said. That’s changed now; coaching education is now the norm. Nearly 70% of youth leagues have enrolled in Heads Up football and more than 1100 high schools have enrolled in the program, though schools and organizations are not obligated to take part, he said.
“We work with leaders across medicine, child advocacy and sport, to put forth programs and best practices that high school and youth leagues can adopt as their own,” he said.
Alic said though they were humbled by the award, there is more work to be done. “There’s always more research to learn.”
Research was a continual topic at the conference. On Tuesday, NATA released a study published online in the March Journal of Athletic Training. Lead author Lindsay Nelson, PhD, ATC, assistant professor of Neurosurgery, Medical College of Wisconsin, and her colleagues studied high school and college athletes. They found no age difference in recovery following sport-related concussions. They concluded separate injury management protocols for high school and collegiate athletes were not needed. She cautioned that more research needed to be done on youth sports and athletes, as most work that had been done is at collegiate level.
Other nationally acclaimed speakers addressed mental health, opiate abuse, pediatric overuse injuries, tackling in youth football and collaboration among youth sports governing body.
They also issued a formal call to action: for young athletes to have access to qualified health care professionals, to educate families about symptoms of muscoskeletal and neurologic, to ensure pre-participation exams before play, to check equipment & surfaces for safety and best conditions, to contact legislators to support national sports safety resolutions, to support further research into youth sports injuries, mental health and their effects.
“Today’s summit helped us set the course for the year ahead in an effort to reduce catastrophic injury in youth sports,” said NATA President Scott Sailor, who moderated the program.
15 high school get grants to fund trainers
Also at the summit, 15 high schools were awarded $50,000 each to fund athletic trainers. The NFL Foundation, NATA, Gatorade and the Professional Football Athletic Trainers Society (PFATS) announced the winners of the national grant contest to expand access to athletic trainers in underserved high schools and improve youth athlete safety. (sidebar)
“We’re excited to see the athletic training programs they develop in the year ahead,” said Amy Jorgensen, NFL senior manager of health and safety policy. “We had 600 entries competing for these 15 grants, so we know there is a need, there is desire across the country to have more emphasis and expertise our athletic trainers provide. We are anxious to see more kids get more access to athletic trainers.”
She said the NFL wanted to open up opportunities in areas where there wasn’t an NFL team to allow for schools to apply for funding to either expand a program at their school or establish one where they previously had no access.
Here are the winners:
Alden-Conger Public School (Alden, M)
Attica Central School (Attica, NY)
California Lutheran High School (Wildomar, CDA)
Canyon Ridge High School (Twin Falls, ID)
Carlisle High School (Henderson, TX)
John Muir High School (Pasadena CA)
Lutheran HS (Chula Vista, CA)
Marist High School (Bayonnne, NJ)
Mount St. Michael Academy (NY, NY)
Orrick R-XI High School (Orrick, MO)
Pleasaan Valley HS (Chico, CA)
St. Anthony Village HS (Minneapolis MN)
St. Thomas More High School (Rapid City SD)
Walpole HS (Walpole MA)
William V. Fisher Catholic Hs (Lancaster, OH)
Safe Sports School Award winners
NATA also presented the Safe Sports School Award to 11 high schools in the Washington DC school district, for providing safe environments for student athletes and reinforce the best level of care, prevention and treatment.
Here are the winners: Anacostia High School, Cardozo Educational Campus, Columbia Heights Educational Campus, Collidge Senior HS, Eastern Senior HS, Frank W. Ballou Senior HS, HD Woodson Senior High School, McKinley Tech HS, Paul Laurence Dunbar Senior HS, Theodore Roosevelt Senior High School and Woodrow Wilson HS
