The news media have been paying great attention lately to the high rates of concussions and other injuries among professional as well as young athletes in the United States. Fortunately, 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.
However, health officials and medical professionals remain exasperated by existing gaps between truly safe behavior and the status quo. What is true on the elite playing fields of collegiate teams resonates as well for our day-school athletes. Granted that we don’t (yet) compete in football, rugby or other full-contact sports, yet we do compete in basketball, hockey, wrestling, swimming and volleyball. How many of our teams have an EMT or other trained person available or in attendance with the specific mission of preventing and/or treating injuries?
There are and can be debilitating injuries and trauma other than concussions. Parents need to vet their child’s coach and the refs officiating the game as much as they do their child’s first nursery school. Parents will often challenge a teacher, but somehow there’s a blind spot concerning a team’s coach or the league in which their child plays.
Recently, the movie “Concussion” opened, starring Will Smith as a scientist who sounded the alarm about the long-term impact of repetitive head injuries in professional football. It’s a reflection of the attention called to the serious, sometimes fatal damage done to the brains of football players of all ages—and of soccer players, too. We now know, for example, that soccer carries a greater risk of concussion for girls than it does for boys.
Granted that sports are important, but often the games are placed on a sacred pedestal. This adulation places kids needlessly at risk of all sorts of preventable injuries in all kinds of improvable sports. We need to improve safety in all the sports that children play.
A recent article in The American Journal of Sports Medicine established that among college athletes, concussions were most likely in wrestling, followed by men’s ice hockey and then women’s ice hockey. Women’s soccer and women’s basketball, in that order, were right behind football in terms of the danger of concussion. The safest sport is tennis.
An article in the Harvard Crimson offered documentation that 70 percent of high school athletes with concussions continued to play and only 1 out of every 27 hits to the head are reported. Are there clearly defined post-injury guidelines in the yeshiva leagues? Who determines the extent of the imprint on cortical function? Are clinical decisions made based on neuroscience or guesswork, or the need to score?
Some high school parents are consumed about a high school’s success or failure in getting their child into an Ivy League college but know nothing of the school’s athletic teams’ safety protocols. Some question the amount of homework more readily than the number of laps or pushups athletes run on a hot day. Others may shop for lenient physicians who will declare their child healed and let him or her back out on the field.
Long ago, in a galaxy far away, I was the administrator of a high school in Queens with a very aggressive hockey team coached by a frenzied rebbi who sent the boys out to win at all costs. This was at a time when floor hockey was coming into its own after starting out as a dormitory hallway game with rolled-up socks. Safety helmets didn’t exist nor were all the hockey rinks “regulation,” and many were not padded. As a result there were many injuries, none life threatening that we know of, but injuries nonetheless and many could have been much worse by a fraction of an inch. High sticking, slamming into the boards, blocking, etc., all without padding. If ice could be found, that was the remedy for most injuries not requiring bandages or sutures.
As a member of the BJE Principals Council I wanted to outlaw hockey until there were regulation rinks with padding, safety helmets, trained referees, etc. You’d think I wanted to outlaw recess or lunch. Usually attendance at these meetings was sparse and attended by principals or assistant principals. When this came up for a vote, every principal and dean from every high school showed up. The esteemed deans and roshei yeshiva of JEC and RaMaZ even showed up. How could I even conceive of banning hockey, after all the boys davened before each game!
Varsity basketball sees its share of bruises, sprains, pulled muscles and foul-induced injuries. Who determines how serious an injury is? Is “walking it off” always medically appropriate? Sports has achieved an almost mythologized place in our society. It’s not concussions per se but an unquestioning worship of sports that puts young people in jeopardy. We need to hold our schools accountable for the safety of our children on the playing fields and rinks of our schools (and camps).
Dr. Wallace Greene is a veteran educator and administrator. He was the principal of the Joseph Kushner Hebrew Academy, director of Jewish Educational Services for the UJA, and founder of the Sinai Schools. He is currently the executive director of the Shulamith School for Girls in Brooklyn.
By Wallace Greene
