This is part two of a two part series. For part one click here.
When Carol Irwin coached K-12 in sports in the 1980s and 90s, the harm concussions could cause were simply not well understood.
Now in 2015, the dangers of concussions are firmly established in the sporting world, but many questions remain. How to treat a concussion effectively? How many concussions are “one too many”?
“That’s the confusing part of concussions,” Irwin said, now an associate professor of health sports and sciences at the University of Memphis. “Because a lot of times we never get baseline data on these athletes. We never get a picture of what their brain looks like before they start doing sports. So when they get a concussion we have nothing to compare it to. That’s a huge problem, so baseline measures are needed but they don’t have them.”
As a result, there is no “all-clear” in terms of when an athlete can safely come back from a concussion. The unpredictability goes even further, because unlike most injuries there is “no one too many” with concussions — the knowledge is simply not there, according to Irwin.
“There’s no magic number, and when I see someone like Wes Welker (Denver Broncos wide receiver) continue to play after so many concussions, I just want to shake my head,” Irwin said. “But that’s his decision. If he wants to die on the football field, maybe that’s the way he wants to go out of this world. It’s his life, but as a parent, when you’re still kind of in control of your kid’s life you need to think how to protect your children as much as possible. Once they are 18 or 21 they can make their own decisions.”
Irwin said the issue of concussions was truly not brought into play until the NFL did recently.
“Now it’s become this huge problem with the NFL, and some of the other sports including the NCAA have to be careful, because there is so much liability around it,” she said. “When I was coaching, we were not trained about it. If someone got a blow to the head or got dizzy, you’d take them off, let them recover and sometimes you could even let them go back in and play. Over the years, it’s become more and more of a medical problem that we need to be aware of.”
Irwin said the NFL has made significant rules changes, such as moving kickoffs from the 30-yard line to the 35-yard line, because research showed returning kickoffs in the NFL was a high-percentage concussion play.
“I would say in the next 10 years there will be no more kickoffs and there may not be anymore punts,” she said. “Those kind of plays where there are significant high-percentage concussion plays may be gone.”
The NFL might have brought the issue of concussions to the forefront, but they are not the only athletic institution facing the threat of concussions.
In February 2014, the NCAA released a survey in which over 20,000 student-athletes from over 600 institutions were asked if they’ve been diagnosed with a concussion or experienced one in their collegiate career, on or off the field.
The survey found that 13.3 percent of male athletes reported they suffered at least one concussion, while 9.9 percent of female athletes reported experiencing one. In addition, men reported having a second concussion nearly twice as often as women (6.1 percent for males, 3.2 percent for females).
Surprisingly in the survey, the sport with the most self-reported concussions for males was not football. It was wrestling. 19.5 percent of male wrestlers reported having at least one concussion in their college careers. Ice Hockey was second on the list with a self-report concussion rate of 18.6, and football was third on the list at 17.9 percent.
For female student-athletes, ice hockey (20.9 percent) and field hockey (15.2 percent) were the two sports with the most self-reported concussions. Women’s soccer was third at 13.9 percent. This is greatly underestimated, according to concussionsafety.com, which claims soccer is the sport with the most concussion risk for females at 50 percent.
“I think in women’s soccer, especially with the heading of the soccer ball, it has caused a lot of problems,” Irwin said.
Now, the NCAA has upped their concussion protocol in all sports. For example, if helmet-to-helmet contact is made in an NCAA football game, a 15-yard targeting penalty is called and can lead to automatic ejection on further review. If the player is ejected from the game, he will also be suspended for the first half of the following game.
Each NCAA member school must have a concussion management plan in place. If a student-athlete shows signs of a concussion, he or she is not permitted to return to play the same day of the injury, according to the NCAA.
While Irwin said she believes science is improving in regard to concussions, it’s a slow process, but companies such as General Electric have partnered with the NFL in recent years in an attempt to get a better “image” of the brain in terms of mapping out concussions.
“To see the bleeding of the brain and to capture that is hard because an MRI is x-ray and radiation, and you don’t want to x-ray someone’s brain over and over again,” she said. “They’re trying to find other imaging possibilities.”
Irwin said from a parent’s point of view that it wouldn’t make sense for parents of athletes to not know everything they can about concussions.
“These are your precious treasures,” Irwin said. “Why would you not be educated in something that could end their lives or disable them for life. Education right now is the most important, and I would want to think parents would want to be educated to protect their child.”
However fear of concussions won’t stop Sam Watson — a former U of M football player who suffered at least two undiagnosed concussions — from allowing his children to play football.
“I would never stop my kid from playing,” Watson said. “I would inform them that technology is changing the way the game is played. I would proceed with caution. I know a lot of people are keeping their kids away from football until high school. But as long as it was a structured environment (they can play).”
He said he has no regrets in his football career, which lasted from his fifth grade year until his sophomore year of college with the Tigers in 2013.
“It was an amazing experience for me,” Watson said. “The realization of a lifelong dream. I absolutely loved it.”
William Park, a U of M junior accounting major, who had four concussions in a 12-year span, advised people to always wear helmets.
“Always practice safe,” Park said. “In football, you’re going to have a lot contact to the head — it’s inevitable, especially, biking, dirt biking and skating. It doesn't look cool to wear a helmet, but it can really help a lot. So it’s really just about trying to be safe and have fun.”
Sam Watson, pictured in the middle holding onto the ball, starred at Tipton-Rosemark Academy in Millington. He was named the team’s MVP in his senior season and played three different positions: center, offensive tackle and defensive tackle. Photo by Leighann Wilson
