Despite all the successes that we’ve had in the past fifteen years surrounding youth sports and pediatric brain injury, there still seems to be reluctance on the part of some parents and guardians to minimize, if not outright ignore, brain injuries sustained by their children. I’m struggling to figure out why that is, and I’d like to float a theory.
The year 2009 marked the time youth post-concussion Return to Play (RTP) laws made their first appearances in Oregon and Washington. By 2014, there were analogous laws in all fifty states, and so began our legally mandated efforts to educate the public about brain injuries in the context of youth sports.
What this also means is that for athletes who turned eighteen between the years 2010 and 2014, there is a strong likelihood that they never participated in youth sports when the post-concussion RTP protocols were mandatory. As a result, neither those players, nor their parents or guardians, received any type of youth concussion education, and they never played in a league where laws requiring the mandatory removal of a young athlete suspected of having sustained a concussion were in effect.
So, please consider this theory: A young athlete who turned eighteen in 2010 would be thirty-four years old today, and if that thirty-four-year-old had a child at age twenty-six, their child would be eight years old today. If the eight-year-old is just now starting to play youth sports where mandatory post-concussion RTP protocols are in place, the mandatory RTP paradigm would be “new” to the eight-year-old athlete’s parent or guardian.
When something is new, it’s easier to dismiss it as unnecessary. Prior to Max’s Law being passed in Oregon in 2009, I heard from many adults who said that we did not need post-concussion RTP protection. More than once, I had coaches tell me that the proposed post-concussion RTP protocols were unnecessary because “We didn’t need them when I was a kid.” Invariably, I would hear from these coaches that all we’d need to do was rest the player for a couple of minutes on the sideline before sending them back into the game or practice. Again, the coach would say, “This is how it worked when I was playing in youth sports. “Just rub some dirt in it and get back out there.”
So, my theory is this: Right now, we have the last set of parents or guardians who grew up playing youth sports at a time when there were no post-concussion RTP protocols in place, and those parents and guardians may not see the need for RTP protocols. They may hold the mindset of, “It’s not how we did it when I was a kid.”
This group of parents and guardians represents the last group that will be able to rely on this explanation. After this group, there will be no future generation able to say, “That’s not how we did it back in my day,” and that will be a good day, indeed.
