<p>I know I horrified some of my acquaintances , when I let my D go to Africa and supporting her decision to return in the fall.</p>
<p>I also encourage her to go snowboarding etc- although I am relieved she doesn’t go off jumps after reading about how poorly some of them are designed.</p>
<p>But until this year, she was in track & did pole vault even though they didn’t have a dedicated coach & I wonder, since coaches may be volunteers or have other primary jobs, how much training do they usually have re: safety? </p>
<p>I remember in grade school, when older D had a friend who had broken her arm twice during gymnastics practice, and her parents paid a lot for the priviledge. I think sometimes we assume that if a school is involved, etc, that it is safe, or precautions have been taken, but I also wonder if we are torn because we don’t want to say no.</p>
<p>My daughter has been a competitive gymnast for about 8 years. She’s always tumbled on mats and has trained with professionals that we trust. She just made cheerleader and at the parents’ meeting, I asked about safety, specifically safety while tumbling (It freaks me out to think of her tumbling on a gym floor without a mat!) They all looked at me like I had 5 eyes and that it was a silly question. They gave me a very dismissive answer but I did find out that they at least use mats in practice.</p>
<p>There are ways to minimize the risk (and I don’t think worries or questions about safety should be dismissed), but sports are inherently risky, even when the standards and qualifications of the people in charge are impeccable.</p>
<p>I’ve done sports most of my life - I’m no good at most of them, but I enjoy them. I’ve broken two bones while playing sports. Neither was because of coach error/lack of precautions. I broke my collarbone playing softball when I was 10 (collided with the pitcher at the plate while trying to steal home), and I broke a rib grappling in jiu-jitsu last year (simply got squeezed too hard for too long).</p>
<p>I have also gotten heat exhaustion at a swim meet (my own fault for waiting so long to tell somebody that something was wrong, but I didn’t know what my symptoms meant), and hit my shin on a diving board.</p>
<p>It happens. You just have to be as safe as possible. In my jiu-jitsu club, everyone red belt and over is certified in CPR, and the head sensei is an EMT (in fact, it was because of his EMT training that he knew that my symptoms after that grappling round meant that one of my ribs was probably broken). When I ran cross-country, we kept plenty of water around to prevent heat exhaustion, did strength training for injury prevention, and stretched between warm-up and the full workout. In baseball or softball, you wear batting helmets, etc.</p>
<p>The only time I was ever injured because of a coach problem was when I was about seven and doing karate. We were supposed to warm up by running around the block without shoes - the sensei thought that wearing shoes was wimpy. I stepped on broken glass, which a doctor had to remove from my foot later. That was the end of the no-shoes policy.</p>
<p>jessiehl, as a mom/observer, I think I’VE gotten heat exhaustion at swim meets! After my kids did summer rec swim league a couple of summers, I swore I would never complain at any other sport in which they were competing…outside for maybe 7 hours in the Texas summers…brutal!!!</p>
<p>Comic relief: my eldest had to be rushed to the hospital because he injured himself while reading.</p>
<p>Time: a mellow summer day in l990.
Location: Grandma’s barn attic in New Hampshire (l840’s, old dried wood boards make up the floor). </p>
<p>Barefoot boy with cheek, lying on stomach, reading a book and happily kicking feet behind him. Kicking foot lands on a long, wide wood splinter which embeds deeply into top of boy’s foot. </p>
<p>Town rescue squad sends ambulance. Upon arrival in hospital emergency room, the natural question, “How did you hurt yourself?” </p>
<p>“Reading.”</p>
<p>“You mustn’t do that, young man. It’s very dangerous.”</p>
<p>Nothing in life is completely safe. And people need exercise, which entails moving around, which raises the risks. Having said that, my own observation is that injuries come in unexpected ways. One of my sons dislocated his shoulder playing baseball (dove awkwardly back into base on an attempted pickoff). My daughter broke both collarbones playing soccer, along with suffering the usual ankle-sprain type injuries - then dislocated her kneecap at a dance - just dancing! Other than the ankle sprains those injuries aren’t what you’d worry about or plan for with a kid engaging in those activities. The only one of my kids to reach adulthood relatively intact was my other son - the wrestler! (Does that mean that martial arts are the safest sports?)</p>
<p>I have never broken a bone in my body (where’s that piece of wood I should be pounding on??) and I played 3 sports in high school. I’ve had couple close calls playing baseball. I found out a pitched baseball does not go well together with the flesh that makes up your face. I apparently didn’t figure that out in 4th grade when I got a blackeye and a hospital trip so I found out again sophomore year of high school when I got to get stitches inside the lip after a baseball landed there;)</p>
<p>Football I probably suffered a concussion or two, but played right through. In fact, I probably suffered several in high school between football and baseball. I sprained an ankle and sprained an MCL playing football.</p>
<p>Yeah, sports can be dangerous, but I’d consider them pretty safe too.</p>
<p>In Illinois, to be a high school coach you have to be certified as either a teacher or from an outside source specifically for coaching. The outside certification that is required includes a First Aid component.</p>
<p>Also you are starting to see more and more secondary schools who have a certified athletic trainer on staff at least part-time.</p>
<p>My mother-in-law forbade my husband and his younger brother from participating in dangerous sports like hockey and football. Being the Irish-Catholic inner-city hoodlums that they were, they were very athletic and very aggressive, and so they settled on the next-most-physical sport, and what seemed to my mother-in-law like a safe compromise… soccer. My husband remembers playing Australian-rules football during soccer practice warmup one day in high school. His next memory is waking up in the ER with a massive concussion.</p>
<p>Now, he and his brother and cousins are all avid skydivers.</p>
<p>Nothing’s really ever safe. Even if you try to curb their danger streaks when they’re kids, they’re going to end up participating in “bad ideas” well into adulthood. I think, given my husband’s history, our kids are going to be hyperactive terrors, and I’m just going to have to duct tape foam rubber around their limbs, keep an eye on how the coaches run things, slather 'em with sunscreen, send 'em with Gatorade, and hope for the best…!</p>
<p>The hard part with track is the few coaches for so many atheletes. Talk to the coaching staff to see how they handle training. There are alot of safety issues that coaches need to be reminded of time to time. We had a kid hit in the head with a javelin some years back. He got a settlement, but I am sure he’d rather have his short term memmory. </p>
<p>Another time we had the soccer coach and track coach at odds because of limited fields. The soccer team was warming up jogging around the perimeter and a track kid had stuck several javelins “pike style” (think mel gibson’s movie and what they did to the english horses) to catch the soccer players unaware. One kid got impaled enough to leave a bruise and mark. Track coach came very close to losing his job. Safety practices were reintroduced to the kids there after. </p>
<p>Talk with your child too. Make sure that she follows coach’s instructions and limits the goof around time to the stadium steps. Track is a very social sport. </p>
<p>good luck. </p>
<p>p.s. mine is on his way to play in new orleans this weekend. He playing fly half and outside center. I wish I could see him play. My safety advice for rugby… have three mouth pieces in different bags or the car. Forgot mine in Canada when I played, and 47 stitches later I had my lower lip reattached. That and vasoline on the forhead and ears. </p>
<p>It’s a double edged sword because the better shape you are in, the less likely you are to get hurt; but to get in better shape, you have to be athletic. My kids got hurt playing sports, but nothing life threatening. My nephew never played sports and broke a bone falling out of a dinner chair.</p>
<p>I second the recommendation of finding out who the trainers and coaches are, who is on staff, what their qualifications and philosophy are. You don’t want someone telling your child to keep playing or running if there is a serious underlying problem.</p>
<p>Everything has an inherent amount of risk. If one avoids risk completely they end up living in a hermetically sealed plastic bubble… and that’s not a desirable life by any measure. Taking risks is an inevitable part of life and so long as proper precautions and measures are taken then there isn’t really a reason to avoid an activity like sports. Sure if one participates in sports there is an increased likelyhood that they will sustain some sort of injury, but rarely are such injuries life threatening or life altering and on the hole the benefits of participating in sports far outweight the risks.</p>
<p>One of my daughters has been a lifelong athlete (though the other did many sports growing up but no longer does). She was a three varsity sport athlete in high school. As many who know me on here know, this daughter is also an alpine ski racer and has been since she could walk. She has just finished out her racing career as she is a senior in college and raced for her college. Let me tell you, skiing and racing are very dangerous. We personally know kids killed doing it and/or paralyzed, among many other injuries. I would never stop my child from doing it though. Every time I watched a race (and I have watched LOTS of them from toddlerhood through college), I would just say to myself, “Please get down the course in one piece!” whereas I think many parents are hoping their child places well (well, I wanted her to do well too!). If she ever crashed, I just held my breath until I could see from a long distance that she got up and was OK and I could breathe again. After her final collegiate race recently, all I could think of was how fortunate she was to have had this deep passion and enjoyment and on my end of it, that miraculously in her 19 years of ski racing, that she has never ever been injured, even slightly. I feel lucky. But I would not trade any of the experiences she had doing it. </p>
<p>Yes, skiing and ski racing are dangerous and have risks. So much of life has risks though. I mean here my ski racing kid never got hurt. I blew out my knee skiing. My other kid almost died in a severe car crash. Driving is real dangerous too but I still let her drive.</p>
<p>When questioning the relative safety of sports, you must consider the alternatives. To me, one of the greatest benefits of participation in competitive sports (at either the high school or club level) is that it keeps many teenaged boys too busy to get in as much trouble as they might otherwise. Even back when I was in high school I knew that when a guy I knew stopped participating in sports he was much more likely to get involved in using drugs, alcohol, etc., because of the extra free time he would have to do nothing. This is not to say that athletes do not drink or get in trouble, but I think sports participation generally helps keep them occupied in a good way.</p>
<p>Of course sports are inherently risky. That shouldn’t be taken too lightly, though. There are precautions that can be taken to minimize that risk, or at least to increase the odds of effective response in the case of injury. </p>
<p>For one thing, it’s important for parents to poke around a bit and question the qualifications/certifications of a coach or club, and then weigh the ups and downs (in some sports, the most ‘successful’ coaches might also be those whose athletes suffer the highest rates of injury…particularly at the elite level, the choice may not be intuitive). It’s also important for parents to be involved (to an appropriate degree)…ask your kid about what goes on in practice; observe once in awhile (if possible); and, within reason, speak up if something makes you uncomfortable. The reason I say “to an appropriate degree” and “within reason” is because I was in a sport that was notorious for its over-involved parents, and there is certainly a healthy and happy medium to be found. Awareness, more than direct involvement, is what I really mean to be addressing. </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>^ Agreed. To add to that, though, I also recommend talking to your kid about safety and making sure she knows that you won’t be disappointed if she does stick up for herself when she’s really reached her limits. Of course, sports often involve a certain amount of discomfort–pushing boundaries, getting up when you’d rather sit out, working through pain, testing one’s own limits, and so forth, but if serious lines are being crossed, a kid needs to feel that she can say “no.” If you know that your kid is the type to ignore her own needs, then pay special attention to things + be willing to bring it up with a coach.</p>
<p>A few last thoughts:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Not all sports are played through schools, or on teams. A particularly close eye should be kept on independent coaches as well as individual athletes. </p></li>
<li><p>When there is no coach, i.e. recreational snowboarding (as mentioned by the OP), well…other posters have addressed this. Of course there are risks, but that’s true of everything. Whether the risk is worth the reward is, in most cases, a personal decision.</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Bottom line: Understand that some risk exists, but take that fact seriously.</p>
<p>There are more soccer injuries than football injuries. Check with any ER Dept.</p>
<p>Helmets and other safety gear greatly decrease the incidents of injuries.</p>
<p>The NYT has been running a series about a new helmet to cut down on the incidences of concussions in football players. It isn’t the one concussion that is the concern. THINK MOHAMMED ALI. This repetitive injury to your brain over time is the main damage. It occurs in soccer (during heading and has been a hotly debated topic for years), as well as football and boxing.</p>
<p>Soccer players who head should wear protective head gear which is being implemented, gradually.</p>
<p>Because it is not the popular sport in the US that Football is, it is not getting as much publicity.</p>
<p>Soccer - Football - Mohammed Ali</p>
<p>Snowboarding and skiing are other sports that should never be practiced without helmets. Recenty in Vermont, I saw many adults without helmets. Kids were wearing them, but not adults.</p>
<p>Remember Bono and Kennedy? Famous but not isolated incidents.</p>
<p>All through D’s competitive gymnastics career I worried about her safety. As she progressed to the higher levels and did increasingly difficult “tricks,” I watched every meet w/ a combination of fear and awe. Thankfully she was never seriously/permanently injured and has “retired.”</p>
<p>S played lax, hockey, and some football, but somehow the amount of padding calmed my fears – even though I knew he could be hurt. His current sports (waterpolo & riflery) don’t worry me much at all. But, his just having started driving himself to school (30 minutes each way) worry me beyond measure!</p>
<p>“Soccer players who head should wear protective head gear which is being implemented, gradually.”</p>
<p>Heading a soccer ball does not generate large head accelerations, and the loading direction is wrong (i.e. predominantly sagittal plane motion, such as nodding your head “yes”) to contribute significantly to concussions. No one has ever sustained a concussion from properly heading a soccer ball (i.e. with the forehead / frontal bone). It is possible to sustain a concussion by being in the wrong place at the wrong time and inadvertently taking a hard shot to the side of the head by a kicked soccer ball from close range. Professional soccer players may sustain concussions due to head-to-head impacts or due to contacting the ground or the goalpost with their heads, but never from volitionally heading a soccer ball. Soccer headgear is unlikely to ever become popular.</p>
<p>Also, Mohamed Ali has Parkinson’s disease, which was not caused by boxing.</p>
It’s very dangerous.”</p>