Concussion bill needs a little tweak

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 06/06/2017 (3285 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

If there’s one word that seems to have dominated the sports injury lexicon, and strikes fear in a lot of people, during the last few years, it’s concussions.

One mention to anyone in football circles can make them shiver. People are learning more and more about them and how serious they can become, which is why the provincial government introduced a bill last Monday that will require youth and high school sports organizations to establish detailed concussion protocols for anyone under the age of 18.

The bill is the first of its kind in Canada, and it seems like one that will only do good by raising the awareness and education level of people about concussions. However, a concern with it is making sure player safety will always come first.

Bill 37 requires any youth athletes suspected of having a concussion to be removed from the field of play and not allowed to return until medically cleared. It puts the responsibility of removing the child from play on the head coach.

It also says the return-to-play protocol will “set out the responsibilities of parents and guardians and those associated with a youth athlete’s team, club or entity, such as coaches, trainers and managers, if they suspect a youth athlete has sustained a concussion during a youth sports activity.”

That seems like a lot of responsibility to put on a coach, and it can get more complicated at a high school level. There are times when freshmen teams are coached by Grade 12 students or people who just graduated high school. That puts a lot of pressure on people just entering adulthood.

One thing this bill will hopefully do is change the way people think about sports so that games are competitive but also safe and people care most about the athletes’ health.

That is definitely the case for the Westman Youth Football Association. Most of the coaches are trained in concussion awareness and protocols and they have the option of holding a child out of practice and games for up to a week after getting cleared by a doctor. Blaine Moroz, WYFA’s president and a coach with the Crocus Plainsmen football program, and all the other high school football coaches in the city — based on his remarks and my personal discussions with them — think the same way when it comes to this issue.

With all the contact, football is one of the sports that leads to the most cases of concussions. And that’s why they take this issue so seriously.

“We just live by the adage ‘When in doubt, sit them out.’ That’s the only way this can be handled until we get proper diagnosis,” Moroz said. “You’ve got to remember there’s a kid in that equipment and no win, loss or otherwise is going to jeopardize that child’s safety, not in the league I run.”

Rugby’s concussion education and protocol system is one of the most impressive of any sport. Rugby Canada has implemented PlaySmart, which mandates all coaches and referees take World Rugby’s RugbyReady and concussion management for the general public courses. World Rugby also has a concussion app.

PlaySmart states that “any player with concussion or suspected concussion should be immediately and permanently removed from training or play. Appropriate emergency management procedures must be followed … Once safely removed, the injured player must not return to any activity that day and should be medically assessed.”

These are procedures that should be in every sport and is exactly why competitiveness needs to become a second priority, which Westman High School Rugby president and Rugby Manitoba high performance director Brian Yon agrees with.

“I think if a coach isn’t putting a player’s safety ahead of the competitive side of the game then they probably shouldn’t be coaching,” he said. “No high school game or provincial game or game of any level is worth jeopardizing a player’s health.”

Yon wants to work with the provincial government with concussion policies, but doesn’t want to see contact taken out of sports.

“There has been a movement where people try to ban contact in rugby and all that and I’m dead set against that,” he said. “I think people play contact sports because of the challenge. Tragedies happen in life and tragedies happen in sport, but I think everybody who goes in to play contact sports know the risks and 99.9 per cent of the time things are played in a safe environment.

“It’s that less than one per cent when a tragedy happens, whether a hockey player breaks their neck or a guy gets concussions. These things are tragic and you don’t want them ever to happen, but unfortunately when you play contact sports these things do tend to happen. What we can do is educate ourselves, make ourselves more aware and efficient in preventing these things from happening.”

Don Thomson brought a different perspective entirely. Thomson is the head of Neelin’s athletic department and sits on the Manitoba High Schools Athletic Association, Coaching Manitoba and Sports Manitoba boards. He also coaches high school volleyball and basketball.

He agrees that the proposed bill will be a good thing and feels education is key, but he would like to see more than just coaches and referees get trained for concussion awareness. What he has seen in hockey arenas while following the career path of his son Jake, a sixth-round pick of the WHL’s Red Deer Rebels, through different levels of the sport in worrisome.

“I’ve had the fortune of being around the hockey rink the last five or six years and just as a physical educator sitting back and watching what goes on there, it’s the parents who believe ‘Rub a little dirt on it and we’ll get back in the game and everything is fine,’” he said. “You know what, the statistics and information are telling us completely different things.

“It’s always a concern when you’re putting that responsibility on a volunteer coach. It’s very rare that our coaches are professionals and getting paid to coach … Education is key. You don’t just have to educate the coaches but also the parents and the athletes too that you know what, this isn’t good. If you’re not feeling right then you need to express to people at that time and place and score doesn’t matter. You need to be able to express that.”

Educating parents isn’t anything new. Parents of kids who play hockey in Calgary must take a Respect in Sports program. Adding educational courses on concussions would be a good thing, even if it costs a little more money. After all, sports are temporary and Thomson may have said it best with “At the end of the day they (children) have to outlive us.”

Thomson has talked with fellow Neelin staff members about taking an extra step in concussion safety at their school by having all athletes take a test in September that would establish a mental baseline. In the unfortunate event an athlete does get concussed, they have something to compare the concussion test to right off the hop. This is something he said competitive hockey teams do every year.

“Right now, (the baseline testing) doesn’t happen in a school, but for the parents to take the 20 minutes to make an appointment and get it done, I think it’s a great bit of information if that time happens. If it doesn’t happen, it’s money well spent.”

I couldn’t agree more with Thomson, and would take it further that every kid in every sport should be tested.

In fact, having that test done before every season for every athlete would make a nice addition Bill 37. Hopefully someone will bring that up to Rochelle Squires, the minister responsible for sport.

This proposed bill is a good thing, but the one thing that needs to be discussed before second and third reading in the legislature is how to ensure competitiveness is always second to player safety and the best way to educate everyone involved.

I can’t wait to see the end result.