PositiveSports.net is an online education resource for adults involved in youth sports. Whether you are a coach, trainer, parent, program director, board member, educator, or game official, PositiveSports.net can help you help your athletes get the most out of sports.
This week the National Football League Players Association announced a grant of $100 million to fund a study designed to diagnose, treat and prevent injuries in active and retired players. This work is expected to produce important knowledge that will also inform efforts to improve the safety of youth sports for boys and girls. Read more at Boston's NPR News Station...
Up2Us is a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting youth development programs that use sports to improve the lives of kids across the country. Among many resources available from Up2Us is a set of practical tools for learning and advocacy produced by the Up2Us Center for Sports-based Youth Development. These tools can be helpful for educating parents, coaches, and coordinators. They can also be helpful in advocacy for supportive funding and policy.
Visit the Up2Us website to learn more...
The Institute of Medicine, the health arm of the National Academy of Sciences, has established a committee to study sports-related concussions in youth, from elementary school through young adulthood, including military personnel and
their dependents. The committee will review the available literature on
concussions, in the context of developmental neurobiology, in terms of their
causes, relationships to hits to the head or body during sports, and the
effectiveness of protective devices and equipment. The committee will also
review concussion risk factors, screening and diagnosis, treatment and
management, and long-term consequences.
Learn more about the study at the Institute of Medicine website...
MAYWOOD, Il. - One way to avoid injuries in young athletes may be for them to simply spend more time in unorganized free play such as pick-up games, a Loyola University Medical Study has found.
In a first-of-its-kind study, sports medicine specialist Dr. Neeru Jayanthi and colleagues found that injured young athletes who play a single sport such as tennis spent much less time in free play and unorganized sports than uninjured athletes who play tennis and many other sports.
Jayanthi presented his findings at the Society for Tennis Medicine and Science and United States Tennis Association-Tennis Medicine and Injury Conference in Atlanta.
In this collaborative study, Jayanthi followed 891 young athletes who were seen at Loyola University Health System and Lurie Children's Hospital of Chicago clinics. Participants included 618 athletes who sought treatment for sports injuries and 273 uninjured athletes who came in for sports physicals. Study participants included 124 tennis players (74 of whom played tennis exclusively).
Among single-sport tennis players, the ones who suffered injuries spent 12.6 hours per week playing organized tennis and only 2.4 hours per week in free play and recreation. By comparison, the uninjured tennis players spent only 9.7 hours per week playing organized sports, and 4.3 hours a week in free play and recreation, even while having a similar total number of weekly hours. In other words, the injured tennis players spent more than 5 times as much time playing organized tennis as they did in free play and recreation, while the uninjured players spent only 2.6 times as much time playing organized tennis as they did in free play and recreation.
Jayanthi found a similar ratio when he compared injured athletes who specialize in tennis with uninjured athletes who play all sports. The injured tennis players spent 5.3 times as much time playing organized tennis as they did in free play and recreation, while the uninjured athletes spent only 1.9 times as much time playing organized sports as they did in free play and recreation.
"Our findings suggest that more participation in a variety of unorganized sports and free play may be protective of injury, particularly among tennis players," Jayanthi said.
Jayanthi is director of Primary Care Sports Medicine, Tennis Medicine, and an associate professor in the departments of Family Medicine and Orthopaedic Surgery and Rehabilitation of Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine. Co-investigators in his study are Stritch medical students Erin Feller, Daniel Fischer and Courtney Pinkham, and Dr. Cynthia LaBella and co-investigators at Children's Memorial Hospital.
The findings are a subset of an ongoing, prospective study of young athletes who are seen in clinics and followed for three years. The study has enrolled 891 athletes so far, and has received two grants from the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine.
The study began as a project in a Loyola program called STAR (Student Training in Approaches to Research). More than one-third of Stritch School of Medicine students participate in formal research programs such as STAR. Evidence demonstrates that such students become better physicians by understanding and practicing evidence-based medicine.
Contact: Jim Ritter
[email protected]
708-216-2445
Loyola University Health System
Important insights about youth sports and specialization from Ron Goralski. Definitely worth reading in full at CheshirePatch in Cheshire, Connecticut.
http://cheshire.patch.com/articles/hopes-for-a-grandsons-future-in-youth-sports-5d70ad2d
At PositiveSports.net we have long advocated that the mission of youth sports programs should be positive youth development. The first and foremost reason for this position is that young people need and deserve positive opportunities for growth and development. A supplemental reason is that families, communities, and taxpayers invest substantial resources in youth sports programs. Society should receive something clear and valuable in return for this investment.
A new book by Mark Hyman of George Washington University provides important context to the discussion about the value of youth sports programs. In The Most Expensive Game in Town, Mr. Hyman defines youth sports as a $5 billion a year industry, and this may be conservative. He brings particular focus to the cost born by parents in terms of both money and time, and explores the reasons why so many of us are willing to make extraordinary investments in sports.
This is a challenging book because it forces us to ask a simple but profound question about our youth sports programs: "Is it worth it?" That question should keep us honest about what we are doing in our community sports programs, club sports programs, and school sports programs. It should also challenge us to identify our weaknesses and go to work on correcting them - just as we ask our athletes to do in their chosen sports. We highly recommend this book to every parent, coach, and administrator involved in youth sports.
Click here for more information about The Most Expensive Game in Town.
A lot of good work is being done to educate parents and coaches about preventing athletic head injruies. A new documentary called Head Games blows a loud whistle to remind us that there is much more work to do..
From the Head Games website:
Inspired by events from the book Head Games written by former Ivy League football star and WWE wrestler Christopher Nowinski, and featuring interviews with Nowinski, Bob Costas (NBC Sports), Keith Primeau (NHL All-Star), Cindy Parlow Cone (Olympic Gold Medalist, Women’s Soccer), and many more, HEAD GAMES exposes viewers to one of the leading public health issues of our time, raising the question: “How much of you are you willing to lose for a game?”
From the New York Times:
Steve James’s troubling new documentary, “Head Games,” reckons some of the terrible costs of modern American sports culture. Focusing on football, hockey and women’s soccer, the film looks at the widespread incidence of head injuries that threaten the well-being of competitors at every level, from youth leagues to the pros. Recent neurological research suggests that even mild and infrequent concussions can have terrible long-term consequences. Repeated impact, of the kind that is routine in football, especially, can lead to dementia and severe psychological disorders.
Guiding us through this grim medical information is Christopher Nowinski, a former Harvard defensive lineman who went from the Ivy League to professional wrestling. He is now the public face of an institute at Boston University specializing in chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or C.T.E., a brain disease that is believed to be caused by repeated blows to the head, and that seems to occur with alarming frequency among athletes.
Please check out Head Games. It might help you save a life.
Ten youth leagues in six states are participating in USA Football's study of player health and safety. The nation's governing body for the sport on the youth level commissioned the study with Indianapolis-based Datalys Center for Sports Injury Research and Prevention in February. The independent scientific analysis will document player health and any sustained injuries during the 2012 season in the leagues of varying size and demographics in Arizona, Massachusetts, South Carolina, Indiana, Ohio and West Virginia.
The Datalys Center sends athletic trainers to practices and games to manage and document player health using the same methodology as it does for the NCAA and the National Athletic Trainers' Association.
In partnership with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, USA Football has educated more than 82,000 youth football coaches since 2007 to best teach the sport and manage player health, including suspected concussions.
"This ground-breaking research will enable us to strengthen youth football player safety in an evidence-based way," USA Football executive director Scott Hallenbeck said. "USA Football is committed to continue to lead America's football community and discover how our country's favorite sport can be made even safer and better."
Approximately 3 million children age 6-14 play organized youth tackle football.
Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/sports/article/10-leagues-part-of-USA-Football-study-3922897.php#ixzz29IWc3oy8
A new study published online Monday in the journal Pediatrics conducted telephone surveys with 1,718 New Hampshire and Vermont high school students and their parents as part of a 7-year longitudinal study of adolescent health. Participants were asked about the number of sports teams they participated on in the past 12 months, participation in physical education, and involvement in other forms of daily physical activity.
Participation on sports teams was found to be the only form of physical activity with an inverse relationship to both overweight/obesity and obesity, according to the study.