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A Solutions Approach

July 13, 2015

I had not been to New Orleans since Hurricane Katrina devastated the city, and I expected to see much change since my several visits before the flooding. What I discovered when I attended national meetings there recently was little change ... including most of the same sights, sounds and smells of years before. I expected the same of the national meetings ... “same-ol’ same-ol’.”
It has become tradition that the executive directors of the 50 statewide high school athletic associations meet twice during the annual summer meeting of the National Federation of State High School Associations in sessions separate from all other delegates to that large convention. It has also been customary for me to leave those sessions depressed as problem was heaped upon problem by the directors, with little attention to solutions.
However, between the two sessions this year, a small group of the executive directors talked about strategies to redirect the conversation; and the result of the second session in New Orleans was to develop a strategy for identifying and prioritizing the most significant problems of school-based sports, and then identifying and prioritizing the resources and alliances currently available, as well as those that could be developed through cooperative effort and strategic partnerships, to attack the most pressing problems.
The expertise to solve such problems has been in our room for years. What has been lacking is the commitment to a process that could move us from a group accomplished in citing problems and suggesting reasons for them to a group accomplished in working together to solve the most significant problems.
So, the “Big Easy” is and may remain pretty much as it always has been. But maybe future meetings of the National Federation, wherever they may be, will be undergoing substantive change.

Girls, Boys and Concussions

September 13, 2016

On Monday the Michigan High School Athletic Association announced the major findings from the first year that member high schools were required to report all suspected concussions in the practices and competitions conducted in the 28 sports served by the MHSAA.

It surprises no one that 11-player and 8-player football ranked first and third, with 49 and 34 head injuries per thousand participants, respectively.

And while I’m told it’s not surprising to the experts that girls report more head injuries than boys, it is stunning to me how very many more head injuries are reported for girls than boys.

In sports with identical playing rules, girls reported head injuries with approximately twice the frequency that boys did.

In soccer, girls reported 30 head injuries per 1,000 participants, compared to 18 per 1,000 for boys.

In basketball, girls reported 29 head injuries per 1,000 participants, compared to only 11 per 1,000 for boys.

Girls reported concussions at the rate of 11 per 1,000 participants in softball, while boys reported just 4 per 1,000 in baseball.

Only a small percentage of either girls or boys were cleared by licensed medical personnel to return to activity in less than six days, and more than half were withheld between six and 15 days in soccer and basketball. The data suggests that clearance for girls to be returned to activity was slightly more gradual than it was for boys.

Researchers and reporters may find dozens of other observations and curiosities from the summary of 4,452 confirmed head injury reports submitted by the MHSAA’s 755 member high schools for MHSAA-supported sports in 2015-16; but what has the MHSAA’s attention is this giant gender difference.

Is this gender difference accurate, and if so, what are the physiological factors involved that make it so?

Is there a tendency for over-reporting by females, or under-reporting by males, and if so, what are the social and/or psychological factors that may cause this?

Regardless, what does this mean for how coaches work with boys and girls; and what does that mean for how we prepare coaches through the MHSAA Coaches Advancement Program?

The MHSAA will take to an even deeper level its nearly 30-year partnership with the Institute for the Study of Youth Sports at Michigan State University to explore the issues related to coaches education that have emerged as a result of the first year of mandated concussion reporting for Michigan high schools.

The 2015-16 school year was only a start; it identified some initial themes. The more important value will be realized after the 2016-17 school year, and subsequent school years, when year-over-year comparisons will be made and trends will become apparent that will demand action to further promote the welfare of participants in school-sponsored sports.