Despite growing concern about the potential for brain injuries in football, more young players than ever are playing the game in this country. Researchers at Virginia Tech have been tracking some of them to identify the risks they may face from hits to their heads. Now, they’re out with the first findings of their five-year study.
Researchers are finding that it’s not so much the games, but something that happens in the practice sessions that pose the highest risk to youth football players.
“Certain types of practices are where w really need to focus.”
Stefan Duma is a world-renowned expert on the biomechanics of injury at Virginia Tech. He’s leading a study where young players wear special helmets to gage and record and study impacts to their heads.
“So for example, in youth football you rarely have people running right at each other at full speed it’s almost always diagonal. So you have tangential impacts as opposed to linear, head to head. So you want to be careful that we don’t create practice situations where we have people running directly at each other, have a high risk of high head impact and then repeating that over and over.”
Now that the first results are in, researchers will share what they’ve learned with coaches. Duma says the goal is to get them to stop using certain repetitive drills that involve direct hits. Just as many did after Duma published results of a previous study.
“It is something that can be readily done. You have to have coaches and leagues that are willing to do that. To be honest, when Pop Warner has made their changes, some teams have pulled out of Pop Warner because they didn’t want to make the changes. So you have to affect the culture and you have to have coaches and organizations that are willing to be progressive about the sport.”
Duma says no one yet knows what the long-term effect of head impacts like these may turn out to be. In fact, in his 15 years of using these tracking helmets, his team has never recorded an actual injury that resulted in a concussion. The question is; what do those hits add up to over time?