Due to overuse injuries from sport specialization that is too early, too intense and too prolonged, youth may be increasingly susceptible to sports-related injuries; but school sports themselves have never been safer – for obvious reasons:

• Equipment is the best it’s ever been.

• Coaches have never been better trained in health and safety.

• Practice and competition rules have never been more safety conscious.

• Officials have never had more authority to penalize unsafe play.

• Medical care and insurance has never been as available as it is today.

Our objective is not merely to keep making school-sponsored sports safer and safer year after year. In school sports – educational athletics – we also have the objective that students learn habits of a healthy lifestyle they can carry into adulthood.

In this way, school sports mitigates some of the damage of youth sports and contributes to the general good, to improved public health in America.

All that we do has that goal, and it’s a finish line we have not yet crossed.