Football and Brain Injuries

Posted on October 5, 2007 by Law Office of D. Hardison Wood

As  we know sports injuries are all  too common in  high schools across the nation.  The injuries are not exclusive to the sport, they happen in everything, football, soccer, baseball, basketball, hockey and more.  It is a promising idea to us that there are studies such as the  this one    where there are monitors placed inside the helmets of football players.  These monitors register to a laptop on the sidelines indicating what type of blow to the head the player just received.

The purpose of the high-tech headgear, which uses six strategically placed, spring-loaded accelerometers to wirelessly beam information to a Web-based system on a laptop computer on the sidelines, is to more effectively – and more immediately – detect when blows to players’ heads may result in concussions or more severe brain injuries.



This also opens the opportunity to better pad the helmets by learning where the hits are causing the most damage. 

“We will look at how hard and where they get hit,” he said, adding that one possible outcome of the work may be determining the need to develop a different type of helmet for high school athletes.

“We may find they’re getting hit in different places and need more padding in those areas of the helmet, for example.”

This is so important, as high school students' brains may not be fully developed and furthermore,  the damage that these injuries cause could evolve over years.

Unfortunately, Broglio said, “what other researchers are finding is that people with multiple concussions have incurred Alzheimer’s Disease at a higher rate. Getting their ‘bell rung’ as high school athletes may have permanent repercussions. There seems to be a link.”

It seems this study certainly is a step  in the  right  direction to protecting our children.
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Baseball & Helmets

Posted on July 10, 2007 by Law Office of D. Hardison Wood

Baseball is a great sport.  My son plays baseball, and I'll  admit that one of the reasons I don't worry so much about it is because at least he isn't playing football, or some other full contact sport.

Yet according to the blog Transducer Reviews, baseball  is the sport with the highest  fatality rate for kids from 5-14 years of age.  The post is here, and I'll go into more detail about how these statistics can play out in the legal world on the flip.

According to the article:

Baseball has the highest fatality rate among sports for children and adolescents ages 5 to 14, with three to four persons dying from baseball injuries each year. In 1998,baseball injuries sent more than 91,000 children and adolescents ages 5 to 14 to hospital emergency rooms for baseball injuries. Nearly 26,000 children and adolescents ages 5 to 14 were treated for softball-related injuries.

Those are pretty serious statistics which I bet most mothers and fathers with baseball playing young ones are surprised to learn.   Yet, when you look at the physics involved, baseball is the only sport our kids routinely play where projectiles traveling at speeds in excess of 60 mph zoom around our little tikes heads.

And this is where the law can, and  in my opinion, should come in.   It is entirely foreseeable that in a game like baseball, with physics at play like baseball, the skulls, chests, and other vital areas of a child's anatomy will come into contact with a dangerous amount of force and violence.  So why then is only the batter (and perhaps the catcher) required to wear helmet in order to shield him or her from these forces?

The article continues:

One of the test series showed that a player without a batting helmet who is hit in the head with a standard hard baseball has a 20 percent risk of serious baseball injury to the head.

In other words, any of those kids you see out there playing first base, pitcher, or center field and they get clocked in the head with a ball has about a 1 in 5 chance of having a serious head injury.  One in five.  Those aren't good odds.  We can do a lot of good by pushing little leagues around the country to require helmet usage.  At the very least, by showing we take seriously the protection of our little leaguers minds, maybe when they get older, and some of them become big leaguers, they'll thank us by making better decisions.
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