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Concussion Concerns

May 29, 2012

The MHSAA has been concerned for many years with the need for heightened awareness of concussions.  For example:  

  • In 2000 the laminated card “Head Injury Guide for Trainers and Coaches,” provided by St. Johns Health Systems, was distributed in quantities to every MHSAA member school.
  • The following fall, 20,000 laminated “Management of Concussions in Sports” cards, a joint project of the American Academy of Neurology and the Brain Injury Association of Michigan, were distributed to schools.
  • In the summer of 2005 the video “Concussions and Second Impact Syndrome” was provided at no cost to every MHSAA member high school.
  • In the fall of 2007 the DVD “Sports Head Injury,” a project of Henry Ford Health Systems, was provided to every MHSAA member junior high/middle school and high school.

All of this and many other efforts have been provided at no cost to our member schools, and continue to be provided at no cost to these cash-strapped institutions.

In 2010, the MHSAA adopted strong return-to-play protocols for students with concussions and suspected of being concussed.  Under our rule, any athlete who exhibits signs, symptoms or behaviors consistent with a concussion must be removed from competition.  Furthermore, our rule clearly states that if a student is removed from play due to a suspected concussion, that student cannot return to play that day and must be cleared in writing by an MD or DO prior to returning on any later day.  And the rule has a strong enforcement mechanism:  if a school allows a concussed student to return to play without the written authorization of an MD or DO, that is the same as playing an ineligible athlete and results in forfeiture of the contest.    

The MHSAA’s website posts training tools for athletes, parents and coaches, including those of the Centers for Disease Control, and three free online courses – one from CDC, one from the National Federation of State High School Associations and the third from Michigan NeuroSport at the University of Michigan.  The “Parent’s Guide to Concussion in Sports” has been widely distributed to school administrators, coaches, students and parents.

During this school year alone, nearly 20,000 high school coaches and officials will complete a rules meeting requirement that, beyond basic playing rules, is dominated by information regarding head trauma prevention, recognition and after care.  

We welcome help in this effort from professional sports organizations.  However, if professional sport leagues want to make a meaningful contribution to this topic in this state and other states, they must do more to change the culture of their programs.  All of our collective efforts on this topic are undermined when a professional player gets his “bell rung” in a nationally-televised game and returns later to that game, or is carried off the field or court one day and returns to play the next.  These nationally-televised tragedies-in-waiting may send the message to our youngest athletes and their parents and coaches that concussions are not serious.

This is not merely a football issue.  For us, it’s also an issue for soccer, ice hockey, wrestling, lacrosse and almost every sport we serve.  Furthermore, this issue is but one of several compelling health and safety issues in school sports that deserve our attention and must receive it every year to help local schools whose resources have been so severely reduced in recent years.  

In Others’ Words

August 22, 2014

I’ve read and heard multiple times – so I’ve come to believe it’s at least partly true – that one of the techniques that marketing departments or agencies use when developing campaigns to promote a product or service is to look at it from the consumer’s, customer’s or client’s perspective.

The point is often brought home that if management would use this technique as much as marketers, then management would be more effective and would label itself, rather than marketers, as the “creative team.” It chafes me to hear a CEO say he or she wants to know what “creative” has to say about a sponsorship initiative before the CEO will offer an opinion.

Thinking about what our customers want doesn’t require that leaders suspend their personal beliefs or reverse experience-based opinions. It merely asks that we look at things from a different and sometimes even opposite point of view. And to be truly revealing, it asks that we try to put into words where other people stand on a particular topic.

It asks us to actually try to describe what our customers see from where they stand and what they say they want. For example, in our work, it would ask administrators to think about and actually describe what coaches want, and vice versa. And it asks both coaches and administrators to think about and put into their own words what student-athletes want, and what their parents want.

This has been an ongoing part of my life, provoked I suppose by my marriage of 42 years to a woman whose political views often point 180 degrees from my own. And this approach has been especially enlightening on school sports’ most troublesome topics, some of which we are tackling at this time, like ...

  • Out-of-season coaching rules
  • Junior high/middle school programming
  • Health and safety mandates