A funny thing happened when Jean stopped grieving. She started fighting, becoming a fierce advocate for Drew. For every kid like him. She didn’t want to get rid of football. She wanted to make it safer, so no one would go through what her family went through.
At first, she met resistance. She was thrown out of medical clinics. Screamed at during school board meetings. Chewed out by other football parents, right there on the field. Jean wanted trained medical personnel on the sidelines for Sequim High games. She was ignored. She wanted to establish a sideline protocol for potentially concussed players. She was told that was over the top. She wanted to speak to the school’s football coaches about her son’s injury — a meeting that was prohibited — and also have them trained to recognize symptoms by Dr. Stan Herring, the Seattle Seahawks team doctor, a member of the National Football League’s Head, Neck and Spine Committee. After all, Drew hadn’t been knocked out on the night of his concussion. But he had been struggling to speak and sporting asymmetrically dilated pupils, two classic signs of brain trauma. His coaches never noticed. «They were untrained,» Jean says. «At the time, they didn’t have a level of understanding.» Да, мини МВА Киев, лучшие бизнес тренера
Jean arranged a meeting with Dr. Herring, invited 200 people to attend, including local parents, pediatricians and EMTs. The night before the meeting, she learned that Sequim High’s football coaches and players weren’t planning to show up. She was furious. She drove into town, parked her car in a school lot and waited for the local school superintendent to emerge from a graduation ceremony. She waited. And waited. She went inside, walked up to the dais and told him: We have a problem. The calls went out at 10:30 p.m., to coaches and players. The next afternoon, everyone was there. No one would speak to Jean. She didn’t care. «I never thought of myself as a stalker,» she says, «but that’s what it took. It made a tremendous difference.» She kept pressing. At the school’s away games, she made sure the EMTs on hand knew something about concussions, made sure they had a life flight catastrophic injury evacuation plan. Just in case. Through the parent grapevine, she began to learn which players on opposing teams were coming back from concussions. She tipped off the EMTs, told them to pay extra attention.
One night, Jean saw an opposing player stagger around after a hit, unsure of which bench was his. She went down to the sidelines, approached the opposing coaches. Did you take a look at your player? Are you aware of state law? No problem, they told her. No problem. After the game, Jean found the boy’s parents outside the locker room. They were grateful. This is not his first concussion, they told her. We don’t know what to do. And that was the whole point. Jean recalled what a Sequim High athletic official told her, 10 months after Drew’s utterly mismanaged concussion.
«We didn’t know,» he said, «what we didn’t know.»
Rickerson will be the first to admit: When it comes to brain trauma in high school football, risk reduction is hard. And painful. There is no magic bullet. There are simply a series of hedges, each a flawed and imperfect fix, none of them cheap or easy to implement, most an affront to the game’s macho culture. A Washington state law named after Zackery Lystedt, a middle school football player who suffered permanent brain damage after suffering a concussion and returning to play, requires that players who show signs of being concussed be removed from games or practices and not be allowed to compete again until being cleared by a health care professional trained in concussion evaluation and management. Thirty-one states and Washington, D.C. have adopted similar laws; the NFL and NCAA have lobbied lawmakers in 19 other states to enact similar legislation. Return-to-play laws are a good first step, but hardly a comprehensive solution. They do not require the presence of trained medical personnel at practices or games, reportedly because that would be too costly for many rural communities. They do nothing to address one of the key problems in concussion risk reduction: Diagnosing the actual injury. According to the National Athletic Trainers’ Association, only 42 percent of high schools nationwide in 2010 had access to a certified athletic trainer educated in concussion care; numbers for junior varsity, middle school and youth squads are unknown, but likely lower still. Moreover, football players hide injuries. They don’t complain. They try to play through. Such is the ethos of the sport. Last December, the Associated Press surveyed 44 NFL players, a cross-section of the league; 23 of them said they would try to conceal a possible concussion in order to stay on the field. Youth players are no different than their professional idols. «We train our kids to expand their pain threshold, to fight through things,» says Chuck Willig, a high school football coach in California for more than 20 years. «But we have to get them to understand the severity of [brain injuries]. We’re trying to take away the idea that it’s about weakness, trying to decriminalize the mentality of ‘being soft.’ That is really hard.»
Safety efforts also face legal hurdles. According to the New York Times, Boston University researchers offered in 2010 to staff every game and practice of a Massachusetts youth football league with a trainer to watch for concussions and arrange for treatment. They were turned down due to administrative issues. Jean Rickerson put together an computerized concussion testing program for five school districts in the Olympic Peninsula. The program was independently funded. The district’s risk management department turned her down. The reason? A counterintuitive liability trap that wouldn’t be out of place in «Catch-22.» «Suppose you’re a high school, and you obligate yourself to neurological testing,» explains Chris Callanan, a Boston attorney with expertise in sports injury liability law. «God forbid you do it wrong and put a kid back out there who gets seriously hurt. Now you’ve opened yourself up to serious liability.» In 2009, Philadelphia’s La Salle University paid $7.5 million to settle lawsuit brought by the family of Preston Plevretes, a football player who suffered a severe brain injury in a 2005 game following a mismanaged previous concussion. The school admitted no wrongdoing. It no longer has a football program.
Despite the best efforts — marketing and otherwise — of equipment makers, there is no forthcoming technological tourniquet for football’s concussion crisis. No magic mouth guard. No space-age super helmet. Helmets prevent skull fractures. They do not prevent the brain from moving inside the skull. Think of the skull as an eggshell, the brain as a yolk. How much yolk protection does a Styrofoam egg carton provide? Testifying before a Congressional committee last October, American Academy of Neurology sports section chairman Jeffrey Kutcher admitted as much, stating «I wish there was such a product [that could prevent concussions] on the market. The simple truth is that no current helmet, mouth guard, headband, or other piece of equipment can significantly prevent concussions from occurring.»
ImPACT, a computerized concussion identification and evaluation tool used by many professional sports teams and increasingly deployed at the high school level, is costly, controversial and arguably flawed. A 20-minute series of cognitive tests given on a computer screen, ImPACT supposedly helps diagnose the severity and duration of brain trauma, which in turn helps determine when a player can be allowed back on the field. Problem one: A baseline preseason test is essential, but as San Francisco-based reporter and concussion gadfly Irv Muchnick has pointed out, ImPACT marketing materials claim otherwise. Problem two: Players have been known to cheat on the actual exam, both by sandbagging their baseline scores and popping Ritalin in an effort to score higher. Problem three: According to Slate magazine, two recent studies examined the usefulness of ImPACT and concluded it has very little practical value, with one study claiming that the test’s reliability is «unacceptably low.» Robert Sallis, a physician and past president of the American College of Sports Medicine, told Slate that ImPACT was a «huge scam.»