Sports Safety

Most of the buzz about the commercials that aired during this Sunday's Super Bowl was about the Chrysler ad featuring Clint Eastwood, but, for me, the one commercial I won't forget was the 60-second spot by the N.F.L. at the end of the third quarter touting the league's progress since its founding to make the game safer.

Every day at MomsTeam the staff talks about the best and worst youth sports stories of the day. Each year we vow to post a Top Ten list, as do our friends at the Positive Coaching Alliance, with their "Top 10 Responsible Sports Moments," or, select the top youth athlete, as the folks do at Sports Illustrated for Kids.

But we realized that selecting ten stories or one kid to highlightt when there are over 50 million kids playing sports in fifty states just isn't possible. The simple fact is that there are thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of "responsible moments" and millions of great young athletes whose spirit, desire to excel, and sportsmanship deserve to be recognized.

The alleged sexual abuse of boys by a longtime coach at Penn State has focused media attention once again on the issue.  For the parents of the alleged victims, of course, their worst nightmares have come true. But what could have been done to prevent it? And is the culture of male sports itself at least partially to blame?

The sad fact, as noted in an article by Michael Hartill, a lecturer in the Department of Sport and Physical Activity at Edge Hill University, Ormskirk, Lancashire, England who has studied sexual abuse of boys in sports extensively, is that "the largely unregulated world of children's sport has typically been slow to address the issue of sexual abuse of youth athletes." 

The other day I was asked in a radio interview what I thought were the biggest recent developments in concussion safety, and what I saw happening in the near future to protect our kids from the dangers of brain injury in contact and collision sports.  Here are the five developments that I view as the most significant, and a seven-point "wish list" for what I hope to see in the not too distant future to make such sports even safer: