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Corporate Care

March 10, 2015

One of the MHSAA’s newest corporate sponsors is arguably one of its most important ever because it will assist the MHSAA’s aspirations to go further beyond the ordinary in promoting student-athlete health and safety.

That new sponsor is Sparrow Health System, and you can read about our new relationship by clicking here.

During the many discussions with Sparrow’s leadership leading up to our partnership, we learned of its membership in the prestigious Mayo Clinic Care Network; and during our review of some of Mayo’s work we reviewed an April 2012 Mayo Clinic article about the risks of concussion in high school football.

The article presented the results of a carefully controlled study of individuals who played high school football in Rochester, Minnesota, during the decade 1946 to 1956.

The conclusion was that those participants did not have an increased risk of later developing dementia, Parkinson’s disease or amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) compared to non-football-playing high school males. The study notes that this was the case even though, compared to today, “there was poorer equipment and less regard for concussions and no rules prohibiting head-first tackling (spearing).”

There is no small supply of data that sheds better light on the head trauma hysteria in sports in general and football in particular. We cite such data as a counter-balance, not as a reason to slow the search for safer ways to conduct school sports. Our new sponsorship is evidence that we are increasing our capacity to do much more.

Double Win Practice Policies

February 22, 2013

The MHSAA’s third health and safety thrust for the next four years focuses on practice rules, especially early in the fall season.

Here we will be especially interested in finding “double wins,” that is, policies that simultaneously enhance acclimatization and reduce head contact.

In football, for example, this could mean increasing the number of days without protective pads before the first practice in full pads.  Michigan requires three days, but there’s a trend toward four or five days in other states.

Football might also limit any day to a single practice in pads, following the lead of colleges and a growing number of state high school associations that are restricting two-a-day practices in pads on the same day or on consecutive days.

Both of these changes could make acclimatization more gradual and healthy, and reduce the occurrences for contact to the head:  two priorities as practice policies are reviewed and revised.

The MHSAA’s sport committees, sometimes with their work augmented by that of special task forces, are being charged with these responsibilities.