Safety

Soccer players across the country will be safer thanks to a national public awareness initiative focusing on safe soccer goals called Anchored for Safety started by the family of Zachary Tran, a six-year-old who was killed when an unanchored goal fell on him in 2003, who created the initiative to prevent tragedies like Zachary's from happening again. "If only we had known the dangers of unsafe goals, we would have been vigilant in keeping our kids away from them. We didn't know," stated Michelle Tran, Zachary's mother and initiative co-founder.

Many of the more than 477,500 youth soccer injuries serious enough to require treatment in hospitals, doctors' offices, clinics, ambulatory surgery centers and
hospital emergency rooms are preventable. Here are some prevention tips.

The data does not support a finding that purposeful "heading" of a soccer ball leads to either short-term (acute) or cumulative brain damage, such as cognitive dysfunction, says a new study in Pediatrics, contradicting earlier studies.  Heading should only be taught, the study says, when the
child is old enough to learn proper technique and has developed
coordinated use of his or her head, neck, and trunk to properly
contract the neck muscles and contact the ball with the forehead. 

Athletes with poor muscle
flexibility experience more soreness, tenderness and pain after
exercise. The less flexible the muscle the more easily it sustains
damage. An youth athlete's natural flexibility varies by age.  You can use simple tests to test flexibility of the major muscles and tendons prone to injury in soccer.

During a college lacrosse game, I stepped into a hole on a poorly maintained field, tearing my ACL and the menial meniscus cartilage in my right knee. My knee was so badly damaged it required two surgeries and months of casts and rehabilitation. I never played lacrosse again. If someone had taken a few moments to check the field before the game began, I probably would never have been injured.

Believe it or not, a soccer player's shoelaces can pose a risk of injury. Patrick Kelleher, President of the Adirondack Youth Soccer Association in upstate New York, once saw a soccer shoe come off a player's foot during a scramble for the ball. Because the laces were tied around the player's ankle, when he stepped on the shoe he suffered a career ending severed Achilles tendon. "Tying laces around ankles is a very dangerous practice," Kelleher says. Long laces should instead be wrapped under the center of the shoe between the toe and heel section of rubber cleats.

Soccer shinguards that meet the NOCSAE (National Operating Committee on Standards for Athletic Equipment) are essential soccer safety equipment.

There are between 450,000 and 600,000 soccer goals in the United States. Many are unsafe because they are unstable and either unanchored or not correctly anchored or counterbalanced.

Chances are, if you have watched more than a few youth soccer games, you have seen a player injured in a collision with the goalpost. In fact, goalies suffer a disproportionate number of injuries compared to those playing other positions. The American Journal of Sports Medicine reported in 1995 that, even though goalies comprise only six percent of soccer players, they suffer nineteen percent of all soccer injuries. When a player collides with the post of a heavy, stationary goal post, the player absorbs all of the impact of the collision.