Sports Injury Prevention

S ports participation during childhood, adolescence, and the teenage years is the focus of much attention by a variety of pediatric stakeholders. The physical, mental, and emotional development associated with athletic endeavors can play a great dividend in adulthood. Whether it is a team sport demanding the combined effort of various personalities and skills sets or the mental toughness required of individual competition, character development often benefits. Unfortunately, on the flipside of many athletic endeavors is the risk of injury, which can bring long-term consequences. Therefore, balancing the benefits and risks is often the best course to making reasonable decisions about athletic participation. This past football bowl season brought the topic of sports injury risk to the forefront when Louisiana State University's Leonard Fournette and Stanford's Christian McCaffrey bypassed their school's bowl games in difference to their professional football careers. The news surprised many and sent a shock wave through college football. While some players may not have participated in bowl games in the past for fear of injury, none that I can recall were as forthright in walking away from these contests citing the risk to their professional careers. Some have speculated that this development is the result of the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) football playoff arrangement now in place where the top 4 teams, picked by a committee, determine the route to the national championship, in effect diminishing the attraction of and attention to those bowl games not involved with the playoffs. Apparently, McCaffrey and Fournette felt that they had more to lose in their bowl games than gain. They certainly did not need further exposure; their talents are well known. Drawing further attention to this dilemma was the University of Michigan's Jake Butt, an All-American tight end and John Mackey Award winner in 2016 as the nation's best tight end. Butt left the Orange Bowl with a torn anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) in his final game as a Wolverine. He later stated that he had no regrets and never considered not playing in the Orange Bowl. It will be interesting to see which route elite players choose in the future with the expected expansion of the football playoff system and the diminishing lure of other bowl games: Will these athletes compete or choose to sit, protecting their National Football League (NFL) chances? With these risks of injury in college football in mind, it's worth taking a …