Youth Sports: Educating Adults and Jurors

I wrote before about heading the ball and sub-concussive events. It’s a big issue for young soccer players.

And football has been the epicenter of CTE discussion and research.

But brain injury isn't unique to soccer and football. It's an issue in every sport. As a result, there’s education about it for both coaches and parents.

There are online training courses and written materials. These need to be completed and reviewed before kids are allowed to play.

For a lot of adults, and a lot of jurors, this may be the first (or only) exposure to current thinking about brain injuries.

And—at least from my perspective (not only as an attorney, but also as a parent)—the materials are surprisingly detailed, up-to-date and good.

First I want to share some slides from the training I had to complete to coach soccer.

A lot of defense “experts” point to the fact that right after the collision the injured person seemed fine. They use this to argue the person wasn’t hurt.

Soccer USA basically debunks this thinking:

It's really important for people to know that symptoms may show up days later (and may not be perceived for even longer).

One of the biggest issues in brain injury cases is how come people respond differently to the same impact or forces. Why can most people “shake it off” and but some people can’t?

This is addressed front and center:

And, along these same lines, the materials explain that even though most people are able to work through post-concussive symptoms in a couple of weeks, not everyone is so lucky.

Very few injured people are able to accurately assess the extent of their own injuries. This is particularly true with brain injury. The following slide nails it:

This knowledge is so important in personal injury cases where the defense makes a big peacock like production out of the injured person telling first responders that they were (or hoped they were) "okay."

In a lot of cases the defense will highlight the fact that nothing hit the injured person in the head or that imaging doesn't show, e.g., a brain bleed.

This kind of false-flagging is really deceptive because it's not necessary to hit your head or have a brain bleed in order to suffer a serious brain injury.

This slide from Bellevue West Little League does a great job of summarizing the biology.

It does a really good job explaining that a quick movement back and forth can create chemical changes in the brain that are the start of a concussion.

Another one of the Bellevue West slides deals with a very interesting and prevalent concussion phenomenon. That's the difficulty injured people have in terms of pinpointing exactly what's wrong after being concussed.

It sounds weird to talk about not feeling "right." But that's exactly what comes out of a lot of people's mouths after they're concussed.

And same as the USA Soccer slide. The baseball slides underscore that everyone reacts differently and debunks the defense mantra that everyone gets better from a concussion in two weeks.

Besides spreading the word, these slides are wonderfully unbiased. USA Soccer and Bellevue West Little League don't have any skin in the game (besides their investment in kids and love of the game). So what they say about concussions really carries a lot of weight.

#concussion

#youth

#mTBI

#mtbi