School sports add up to ER visits

WASHINGTON — Back to school can mean back to the emergency room for a lot of young student athletes.

“We can track and point to 1.24 emergency room visits in 2013,” says Kate Carr, president and CEO of Safe Kids Worldwide.

She says that adds up to 3,400 kids every day ending up in the ER, or one every 25 seconds.

The figures — the result of data compiled by the Consumer Product Safety Commission — are alarming, and Safe Kids decided to take a good long long at the story behind the numbers.

“We surveyed 1,000 parents, 1,000 coaches and 1,000 kids,” says Carr.

What the Safe Kids researchers found is a lot of these injuries occur because of the very culture of youth sports — a culture where too many kids try to hide injuries, and unnecessary roughness is all too common.

Forty-two percent of the 7th- to 10th-grade athletes surveyed by Safe Kids said they believed it was OK to have a hard hit or play rough, even though many had once been victims of dirty play themselves.

Another problem is pushy parents, who encourage coaches to play kids who are hurt, or who overreact on the sidelines, urging their children to hit their opponents a lot harder.

Carr says there has to be a change of attitude, or mindset. In a list of recommendations accompanying its “Changing the Culture of Youth Sports” report, the staff at Safe Kids offers a series of recommendations.

The report calls on parents, coaches and young athletes to get together at the start of the season and set ground rules to prevent injuries. It also says kids need to be encouraged to speak up when they are hurt. And, everyone needs to make an all out effort to end dirty play.

Carr says the message to parents is “make sure you teach kids that the right way to play is to go out there and play your hearts out, but not to intentionally hurt an opponent or another member of your team.”

Safe Kids found a number of teams, schools and communities that are making an all-out effort to turn these disturbing injury statistics around.

That’s especially important when it comes to preventing and detecting concussions, which account for roughly 12 percent of the injures that result in an ER visit.

But the Safe Kids report also cites a big increase in recent years in knee injuries, especially ligament tears, which are eight times more likely to occur in girls than boys.

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