By C.J. Walker, Philadelphia. Follow C.J. on Twitter @pseudocj
Sometimes the discourse can be more painful than the injury.
Paul George. Victor Cruz. Josh Hamilton.
If you guessed injured sports athletes for $200, you’d be right.
Courtesy: gq.com
A veritable litany of changes has been implemented over the years in response to player injury. From the advent of union rules, to safety equipment, all the way to policy change, major sports leagues in the U.S. have taken strides toward mitigating the damage done to its players. Even still, injury remains unavoidable.
A by-product of competition, player injuries are the unpleasant consequence of sport that few like to talk about, at least not until it afflicts the star player. Fortunately for us sports fans, not everything is as gloomy as it seems. Advances in sports technology are helping to treat—and in some cases–prevent many of today’s most common sports injuries.
Take the hot-button issue of Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE). A damning and degenerative disease, CTE affects the brains of those who suffer multiple concussions or serious brain damage. One can quickly see how this might relate to players whose livelihoods are garnered from impact sports.
According to Brandon E. Gavett of Boston University’s School of Medicine: “CTE has recently been found to occur following other causes of repeated head trauma, suggesting that any repeated blows to the head, such as those that occur due to American football, hockey, soccer, professional wrestling, and physical abuse, can also lead to neurodegenerative changes.” As Mr. Gavett so succinctly states, getting hit in the head over the span of a professional sports career is bad.
For the sake of context, let’s take a look at the history of professional sports in the U.S. The cornerstone of the American pastime, professional sports can be traced back to as early as 1857 when the National Association of Base Ball Players was formed. America’s darling—football—saw the creation of the American Professional Football Association in 1920. With their long and lustrous histories, professional sports have been a dominant force in America, continuing the trend into the 21st century. The problem is that 19th-century problems still plague the Big Four in sports.
Courtesy: chicagonow.com
The Evolution of Sport From Steve James’s documentary Head Games, to fictional films such as Leatherheads, the ever-changing rules, gear, and attitudes surrounding professional sports have been well chronicled. Beau Riffenburgh stated in The Official NFL Encyclopedia that helmets weren’t mandatory in the NFL until 1943. Before then, players could legally take the field without any form of head protection.
Such an act would probably be unthinkable in today’s society, which speaks perfectly to my point: professional sports organizations are evolving in the way they manage and treat sports-related injuries.
Modern Day Practices Take, for example, external dynamic compression. A commonly practiced recovery method used by many professional athletes, this form of injury/workout recovery has pervaded professional sports for nearly a half century. Recent changes in this technology have injected new life into the practice.
Courtesy: twitter.com
Normatec threw their hat in the ring way back in 2007 when they entered American professional sports markets. Specializing in external compression technology, Normatec patented their own line of compression devices, which brought technological innovation into the 21st century. The practice of post-workout/post-operative compression treatment stagnated through its first 40 years of life, offering minimal results to athletes.
Normatec’s founder, Dr. Laura F. Jacobs, developed and patented Sequential Pulse Technology, a unique take on compression treatment. While standard compression equipment utilizes static compression to transport fluid out of the limbs, Normatec’s equipment utilizes pulsing compression, a process that more closely mimics the body’s natural muscle pumping. Though Normatec didn’t reinvent the wheel, their innovation in sports recovery has led to faster healing times for modern daily athletes.
While improved compression technology is a nice step forward, it offers no reprieve for head trauma. For that, let’s look to see what the NFL has done to address the issue.
The NFL helmet has taken tremendous strides forward in its implementation over the years. Brian Lancette covered the topic well when he wrote about the helmets progression. Starting off as nothing more than a rudimentary piece of leather, the helmet has seen the switch to plastic, as well as the addition of chinstraps, faceguards, visors, and airbladders.
Courtesy: team.riddell.com
In 1971, American sports company Riddell introduced energy absorbing helmets that featured air bladders. What has followed for the last forty years has been a procession of energy-absorbing improvements—all produced in an effort to minimize the effects of head trauma. Riddell has continued to study head impacts and refine their equipment, utilizing their proprietary Head Impact Telemetry System to analyze head impacts in real time. Never one to settle in one place, the company released its 360 model in 2011, adding even more padding around the front and sides of the helmet, while also increasing the flexibility of the facemask.
Injury Data Implementing changes to rules and gear is a smart step forward, but hard data is needed to draw an educated conclusion. Have any of the results been quantified?
While long-term injury data is hard to come by, the NFL did implement a data collection system in 2011. Designed to track the number of diagnosed concussions throughout the season, the figures can be daunting or reaffirming depending on the side of the aisle that’s asked. According to Jeff Miller, the league’s senior vice-president of health and safety policy, the total number of concussions was 261 in 2012—up 4% from the previous year’s total of 252. The 2013 football season saw a drop in the number of concussions, with 228 reported, for a decrease of 13 % from 2012.
With so many factors going into player safety, as well as such a small sample size, it’s difficult to arrive at a definite conclusion. Even still, the analytical work being conducted by the NFL, Riddell, and a plethora of upstarts, may ultimately bode well for the future of our athletes.
Although injury will forever remain a possibility in sport, the advent of technology is helping to better protect and treat our sports players.
