Create Safe Concussion Symptom Environment, de Lench Tells National Concussion Conference

An ambulance and paramedics should be present at all contact high velocity sports, and, if they are not, procedures need to be in place on how to contact 911. For a reason, we need look no further than the tragic story of Will Benson, a 17-year old football player from Austin, Texas, who paramedics were unable to reach for nearly 30 minutes because the person who called 911 didn’t tell the dispatcher exactly where he was, causing paramedics to waste valuable time trying to find the trainer’s room where Will lay unconscious after collapsing during a game in September 2002.

Laws should be enacted in every state modeled on “Will’s Bill,” the 2007 Texas law named after Will Benson, which requires that every high school coach and official to be trained in basic safety and emergency procedures. Every coach needs to be certified in CPR, the use of an AED (which should be available at all games and practices), and first aid, with special attention paid to hydration, cardiac and concussion awareness.

Sports officials should be given the right to send any athlete who they reasonably suspect has suffered a concussion during play to the sideline for further evaluation.

High school athletic programs should require that each athlete undergo a pre-participation physical examination that includes the taking of a structured concussion history, including specific questions about previous symptoms of concussion (not just the perceived number of concussions) and previous head, face or neck injuries, as well as questions about symptoms currently being experienced, if any. If a school can’t afford to foot the bill for such exams, parents need to get them on their own or, better yet, alternative ways should be explored to provide such exams to all athletes, either through parent fundraising or by asking local medical groups to donate the exams as a community service.While parents with kids in some sports can take some comfort in knowing that the national governing body for that sport is taking steps to address the concussion issue, too many have yet to follow its lead.

And, even though only a tiny fraction of athletes playing sports at the youth and high school level will go on to play college ball and then to the pros, this country’s professional leagues could and should be doing more when it comes to concussions, not just for their own athletes, but because children follow and take their cue from the examples set by their heroes in the pros.

From where I sit, as a parent and editor of a site for parents with children in sports, I believe that the NFL has thus far been a little too slow to get on the concussion bandwagon and to set the right example for the parents and children of this country. The NHL recently became the first professional league to offer baseline testing of players, and has made the glass and the boards more forgiving, but hasn’t done nearly enough to penalize players for illegal hits, like the one by the Flyers’ Randy Jones on the Boston Bruins’ Patrice Bergeron last fall that left him sitting on the sidelines with a Grade 3 concussion for the rest of the season.

Unless and until professional sports send a clear message that concussions are dangerous and need to be treated as the serious, potentially life-altering or -ending injuries they can often be, parents are going to be fighting an uphill battle in convincing their young warriors to likewise take concussions seriously.

I think it is time for the NFL, as the professional league in the sport which experiences the largest number of concussions by far, to demonstrate in a tangible way its commitment to concussion safety and education, both for its players, for the players at the youth level who emulate them, and the parents whose job it is to keep them safe. To that end, I would love for the NFL to join with MomsTeam in sponsoring a public service campaign about the dangers of concussions in sports. This need not be a campaign about the danger of football but the importance of concussion management.

There is no doubt that the key to keeping our young athletes safe when it comes to concussions is education. I know this from long personal experience. When I started MomsTeam in 2000, I included some information — not a great deal — about concussions based on my own experiences with my sons. After five families contacted us requesting more information we rolled up our sleeves and started looking for more answers. I knew that, working less than two miles away at Emerson Hospital in Concord, Massachusetts was Dr. Robert Cantu, who we are all fortunate to be in the company of today — is widely acknowledged as one of the world’s foremost experts on concussions in sports.

Dr. Cantu was concerned that many athletes and their parents did not understand the risk of playing while still symptomatic from an initial head injury. For their part, coaches, especially in sports with the highest risk of head and neck injury, may not fully understand the risk, he said, because most of them have not received training in managing sport concussions.

While Dr. Cantu was traveling the world speaking to his peers in the sports medicine community about concussion management, he felt that those presentations were simply “preaching to the choir.” In his view, the most effective way to reduce the number of cases of SIS and protect athletes from suffering long-term effects from concussions was for MomsTeam.com to reach all of the parents, aunts and uncles of youth sports athletes to educate and inform them about Second Impact Syndrome and concussions.

In 2001, working closely with Dr. Cantu, who joined MomsTeam as an expert, the MomsTeam health & safety editor spent two months researching and writing articles for the Head Injury Awareness channel to provide comprehensive information on concussions to coaches, parents, players and trainers.

In the seven-plus years since, we have been continually updating our concussion section to reflect the enormous advances that have occurred in the last seven years in concussion management, and have, I believe, become one of, if not the leading, sources of concussion information for parents on the Internet.

We are proud of what we have accomplished and the impact we have had in concussion education, and we are proud to partner with the Sports Concussion Institute and others in this important and critical educational effort.

Yet we know there is much more that we can do. In the coming months and years, we at MomsTeam will be doing everything we can to provide a forum where everyone with a stake in concussion education and management — parents, including parents of children who have died from second impact syndrome or suffered lifetime impairment from repeated concussions, athletes, coaches, officials, administrators, clinicians, and sports safety equipment manufacturers — can meet in our community to exchange ideas and information and share concerns.

To that end, I am pleased and excited to announce that, in three weeks, MomsTeam will re-launch  providing the kind of tools that I believe will allow us to harness the incredible power of the Internet to build the largest social networking community of sports parents in the world and make it possible for the message to get out, not only about concussions but about other safety topics, nutrition, hydration, the need to balance fun with winning and to involve more woman and mothers as coaches and administrators, to the largest possible audience.

I invite each of you to become active members of the MomsTeam community, to post on our forums, to start your own MomsTeam blog, to submit your journal articles to our editors, to see MomsTeam as a place to inform everyone in the youth sports community about your technological and product innovations, and as a place to share your expertise with parents around the country and the world.

When there is total accountability and transparency and every stakeholder is talking with each other we will begin to see the code of silence broken. Sports programs will begin to value safety before winning. If we all work together towards our common goal, I am confident that we can make youth sports safer and more enjoyable for everyone, and parents, in particular, will be able to sit in the stands comfortable in the knowledge that all of us are playing our part, that we are all part of the same team, that everything that can reasonably be done to reduce or prevent injuries is being done.

It has been a pleasure speaking with to you today——thank you.