Safety First: Colleges Increasing Sports Safety Rules to Help Prevent Injuries
By Fran Kritz
May 15, 2012
When college athletes return to their games this fall, they'll be met by some new rules from the National Collegiate Athletic Association including that football kickoffs will move from the 30-yard to the 35-yard line to increase safety for players and football players whose helmets snap off while playing will have to leave the field immediately. "We get pushback as we discuss new rules, but player safety is our driving force," says David Klossner, head of health and safety for the NCAA.
NCAA Funds Multi-Center Concussion Study
New and updated safety rules are put in place regularly both by the NCAA and individual schools, but experts say college sports, particularly football will continue to see even more scrutiny going forward because of recent studies that show that some injuries, particularly concussions, can have long lasting effects.
"Not so long ago players who took a blow to the head would often get right back up and play," says Christopher Giza, MD, an associate professor at the UCLA School of Medicine and a director of a head injury-effects study, partly funded by the NCAA, at four centers around the U.S. "Now we know those injuries can cause irreparable damage and that's why we need to be proactive in keeping team members out of play if we see any head injury symptoms," says Giza, who says experts are starting to learn how to prevent many concussions as well.The ongoing study will look at the effects of head injuries in contact and noncontact sports in both genders through the course of a college career. The researchers plan to study more than 1,000 student-athletes competing in 11 sports at three schools to learn more about the effects of contact on the brain. The other centers include the University of Michigan, the Medical College of Wisconsin and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whose affiliated universities field dozens of collegiate sports teams.
Decades of Data on College Injuries
Staying on top of player safety has been an NCAA priority for decades. The National Athletic Trainers Association and the NCAA have collaborated since 1982 on the NCAA Injury Surveillance System, a collegiate sports data base. Sixteen years of findings were published five years ago on fifteen sports. The data show that between 1988 and 2004, participation in college sports increased by 80 percent among women, and by 20 percent among men – which is also one reason why injuries and injury awareness is increasing.
Other findings included:
- Rates of concussions and anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injuries increased significantly during the study time period, likely due in part to improved reporting and identification of the injuries.
- More than half of all college sports injuries were to the lower extremities.
- Preseason practice injury rates were two to three times higher than injury rates recorded during the regular seasons.
- Sports involving collision and contact, such as football and wrestling, had the highest injury rates in both games and practices; men's baseball had the lowest rate of injuries in practice and women's softball the lowest rate in games.
Study Shows Improvements to Training Also Prevents Injuries
A study released just a few weeks ago in the Journal of Athletic Training found that overuse injuries – found most often in low-contact sports that involve long training sessions or where the same movement is repeated numerous times – make up nearly 30 percent of all injuries sustained by collegiate athletes, and a majority of overuse injuries (62 percent) occurred in women. While an overuse injury may not seem as serious as a concussion, researchers say they can have significant short and long term effects.
"Overuse injuries may present not only physical challenges but also psychological ones that could significantly affect an athlete's recovery and performance," said study co-author Tracey Covassin, a certified athletic trainer at Michigan State University, and an author on the new study. "And," says Covassin, "understanding the frequency, rate and severity of overuse injuries is an important first step for designing effective injury-prevention programs, intervention strategies and treatment protocols to prevent and rehabilitate athletes with these types of injuries."
The most common overuse injuries were general stress (27 percent), inflammation (21 percent) and tendinitis (16 percent), and this type of injury was found most frequently in rowing, softball, volleyball, cross country, track and field and other low-contact sports. Four women's sports - field hockey, soccer, softball, and volleyball - had the highest rates of overuse-injury rates. "Better strategies for the prevention and early intervention of overuse injuries in all sports and for both sexes are imperative in order to reduce their number and severity," says Covassin.
Rule Changes Do Prevent Some Injuries
While rule changes can be frustrating for players, coaches and spectators, NCAA data shows that new and updated regulations for players have reduced injuries including: improved training to reduce ACL tears in women; rules about response to players who bleed from injuries to help prevent HIV transmission among players; encouraging reduced hitting from behind and contact to the head in ice hockey games to reduce head injuries; and modifications in preseason football to help avoid heat illness such as heat stroke.
New Technology Will Individualize Player Training and Injury Prevention
Both the NCCA-funded concussion study and other studies are also making use of new technology to help them assess and prevent injuries. Accelerometers in sports helmets help researchers study the magnitude of impact forces on players. The researchers at the NCAA funded concussion study will also use accelerometers mounted in mouth guards for sports that don't use a helmet, such as soccer, a technology also being used by researchers at Ohio State University, which, at 1,000 players, has the largest number of college athletes of any US college.
OSU will also be using motion capture technology – the kind used in films such as Shrek and Matrix to measure how much force, torque and acceleration is expended when players are in their games. "Our athletic directors want us to keep our players safe and on the field, so we're using the using the latest technology and research to try to drop rates of injury," says Tim Hewett, PH.D, director of research for the OSU Department of Sports Medicine.Beginning in June, OSU will start collecting a variety of measurements on all the football players including body fat and bone density which they'll record on computer records. "On each player we'll have well over 100,000 data points and then if we observe a deficit we can intervene and based on their own information – such as strength and range of movement – we can suggest changes that are targeted to the individual rather than team-wide. We think that will go a long way toward decreasing injury risk," added Hewett.
One theory is that if you train the body to activate their core, their hip, their hamstrings, at the least impactful angles, you can reduce injuries. For ACL tears, you might reduce those by half. That's huge since an ACL tear can take them out for a season and then impact the rest of their lives. "We haven't done this before because the technology wasn't there." Hewett, who lectures worldwide on preventing injuries in college athletes, hopes to publish data on the OSU interventions within a year "and make an impact across all collegiate sports."
Hewett says the cost of the motion capture technology and the other systems needed to compile data on the players "is in the millions" but that the university has received funding from the NFL and other sources, which are banking on the research to keep players on the field longer and less injured. The value of this research got some wide attention earlier this year, when Kevin Guskiewicz, PHD, chairman of the department of Exercise and Sport Science at the University of North Carolina, got a McArthur "genius" grant of $500,000 for his research studying the biomechanics of concussion.
Correction: May 15, 2012
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
A reference to an upcoming safety rule related to eyewear for field hockey players was removed.
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