Injury prevention is an important aspect of youth and elite sports programs across the country. More and more kids today are choosing to partake in deep play sports such as football, basketball, hockey, etc. With the program attendance growing higher and higher the injuries are also increasing; more than 38 million adolescents and children participate in organized sports programs, and even more than that participate in informal and unorganized sporting programs. The CDC (Center for Disease Control and Prevention) reports that more than 3.5 million children/adolescents are treated in the emergency room for sports-related injuries every year (Powell & Foss, 1999). This is a staggering amount of …show more content…
(2014) go on to state that the injury itself becomes a stressful situation. The injury has an effect on the athlete’s emotional and behavioral responses which interact with other personal and social factors. Research focusing on the “after-injury phase” suggests that the athlete’s biological tolerance to pain and his or her perception of the incident play a major role in moving forward after the injury. Some athlete’s go on to rehabilitate and get back in the game, while others are much more resistant to resume playing. The Affective Cycle of Injury (Heil, 1993) suggests that the athlete experiences three grief phases post-injury: distress, denial, and determined coping. How the individual responds to the first two stages governs how effectively the individual successfully copes with the situation.
The importance of preventative injury programs and education is of the utmost priority. The media coverage regarding concussions on elite athletes has opened the door for more research on how to prevent the injuries, and the increasing number of youth who participate in contact sports has given way to the importance of enacting policies or protocol for ensuring the safety of athletes. Across the country, youth concussion laws are primarily similar (Cook, King, & Polikandriotis, …show more content…
The most frequently agreed on response by the interviewed professionals for possible intrinsic causes of sports injury consisted of: Inadequate sports technique, inadequate nutrition, and the belief that the athletes must push through the pain in order to keep playing. Possible extrinsic causes of sports injuries consisted of overtraining, inadequate surface, and movement integral to the particular