Michigan High School Athletic Association Concussion Report - 2015-16

During the

2015

school

year6, the Michigan High School Athletic Association conducted an unprecedented study of head injury

report

s from its member

school

s designed to quantify and further reduce future incidents of such injuries. The required

report

ing came from 99% of member

high

schools and found that 4,452

concussion

s occurred during the past school year, an average of 5.9 per school or 1.6 per thousand participants. The

association

anticipates that several groups will study the data to apply it to equipment and playing rules designed to make competition safer and will also work with the Michigan State University Youth Sports Institute will develop educational programming for coaches around the results.

This will allow us for the first time to establish baselines by which we can measure our year-over-year progress in reducing head injuries in all school sports and will help us raise questions that we will seek answers to with our partners. research across the state and perhaps across the country. 2/3 of verified

concussion

s occurred in competition. 28% of concussed athletes returned to play within 6 to 10 days. and another 20% required 11 to 15 days of rest, perhaps most interesting was the fact that head injuries suffered by girls and boys in the same sport had a large disparity in soccer (30 girls per thousand in compared to 18 per thousand for boys in basketball (29 percent). thousand for girls, 11,000 for boys and softball players reported 11 concussions per thousand, four per thousand for baseball.

We hope to identify the physiological, social, or psychological factors that contribute to this disparity and the reporting of head injuries by boys and girls, and we want to use the answers to these questions to better prepare school personnel, especially coaches who can be coaching over-reporting girls or under-reporting boys in competitive interclastic

athletic

s, soccer recorded the most concussions, followed by ice hockey, eight-player soccer, girls' soccer, and girls' basketball. Data collection is already underway for the new school year as part of a comprehensive and sustained mhsaa concussion CARE program. It is also running the largest concussion testing program in the country and was the first state

association

to provide

high

school participants with a concussion insurance gap designed to pay deductibles and co-pays that other policies have not. paid We are addressing education, screening and aftercare in unprecedented ways We are proud of what we have done but we are far from satisfied that we will continually be looking for ways to make school sports even safer than they already are for boys and girls competing in educational

athletic

s Michigan was one of the first state associations to adopt a return to play protocol that prohibits further competition on the same day of a suspected concussion and only allows the athlete to return with an approval unconditional of the medical staff.

Their modified full-contact policies at in-season football practice have been found to reduce head impacts by more than 40% in one study. This is reported by John Johnson in East Lancing.