I shared some information earlier this evening with a few posters on here privately, and I wish I could share more publicly, but I don't believe that I can do so due to health privacy. I know I have not been a frequent poster for some time, so while there are plenty who surely know who I am, I'm sure there are others who do not. So real quickly, I am a Certified Athletic Trainer working at the high school level. I have been a member here for close to 10 years I believe and I've read a lot of experiences and opinions in the great game of baseball. Baseball has been good to me and baseball has been not so good to me. It was one of my first loves and its something I grew up around.
But I titled this "The Unfortunate Side of Sports" because I believe that many parents and athletes are ill-informed, naive, or simply uneducated about how real the dangers and risks of playing baseball are. And not just baseball, but any sport. I was asked to share some insights, based on my recent experiences, but also some big picture thoughts. In 2015 44 young athletes lost their lives in what we would consider to be direct or indirect sport fatalities. This is according to the Youth Sports Safety Alliance, spearheaded by the National Athletic Trainers' Association. Over 50% of those were cardiac related deaths. The average age was just 14.39 years of age. But it's not just fatalities that are a concern, we have athletes who suffer life-altering injuries every single day. They may be an ACL tear or for all of us in the baseball community and ulnar collateral ligament injury. They may be a spinal cord injury or a traumatic brain injury. The fact is these injuries are very real. And they happen in all sports. Every day I see relatively minor injuries, but more and more I'm seeing injuries that have the potential to affect a child's life the rest of their lives! My school has experienced at least two such injuries this school year already where those kids' lives will never be the same. Not intentional, they were accidents. They were the result of play on the field. But nonetheless they are life-altering.
Remember always: there is more to life than sports. There is more to life than baseball. Some day your son will hang up his cleats. The question that you must ask is this: Did you do enough to protect your son from serious injury? Did you do enough to protect your son from the preventable, overuse injuries? Injuries happen, without them I wouldn't have a job! But we cannot accept injuries just because "it's part of the game." As a parent, you must take an active role in injury prevention. Remember that for many of your sons, this game is simply a game. A hobby. Please allow your kid the opportunity to look back at this game in 20 years and remember the good times; not the injuries and the torture.
