Brain Injury Avoidance in the Young Athlete

Townsend, MAWhen you're a young athlete and you sustain a brain injury, the situation can prove both frustrating and dangerous. For most youngsters, the requirement to take time away from a beloved sport to heal from a concussion is more painful than the injury itself. And yet, the avoidance of a correct response could result in life-changing problems down the road.

Chris Nowinski knows this all too well. He's the founder of the Sports Legacy Institute in Boston, and is on a mission to educate athletes, teams and institutions such as schools about the importance of preventing traumatic brain injury.

According to the May 18 edition of the Sentinel & Enterprise in Fitchburg, there are an estimated 135,000 concussions and other brain injury cases treated at US hospitals. In recent years, there's been a groundswell of interest in how to both avoid and treat brain injuries such as concussions—a topic that in recent months has even been discussed amongst those in the National Football League (NFL).

However, while there is little argument as to treatment protocols for brain injury, prevention is another matter. While parents are always at their kids to wear the proper gear and proceed in their sport with caution, are teams and sponsoring institutions doing all they can to help prevent concussions?

A concussion that seriously impacts a young athlete—perhaps even ending a promising professional sports career and introducing life-long health problems—could be reason to contact a brain injury lawyer if the sponsoring institution did little to help prevent such injuries.

Nowinski should know. A former college football player and professional wrestler, Nowinski sustained a total of six concussions over the course of his career that, in his words, were not managed properly. He told a group of parents, coaches and athletes at North Middlesex Regional High School on May 17 that his symptoms included intense headaches and memory impairment. He would also act out his dreams, to the point where he required medication just to sleep through the night.

The author of Head Games: Football's Concussion Crisis, Nowinski was forced to retire following his most recent traumatic brain injury.

"We've been failing a lot of young athletes in terms of providing the right information for them to play safely," he said in comments published in the Sentinel & Enterprise. "When we're exposing kids to games that were invented for adults, trauma is much worse for kids. Their brains are still developing. Their brains are more sensitive to the shock of the concussion."

Failure by a school, team or sponsoring institution to help prevent brain injury might expect a call from a brain injury attorney…