If you’ve got a child that plays high school sports, it’s not always fun and games. Although high school sports are rewarding both physically and mentally, there are many dangers involved. If they play a high-impact sport like basketball, football, or soccer, they’re at risk of some pretty bad and potentially long-lasting injuries.
Today, we’re going to talk about high school sports injuries and how you can do your best to avoid them and mitigate their effects when they do happen. It’s your job to make sure that your child is learning how to work well in society, which sports can help with, but it’s also your job to protect them.
The best thing you can do is to educate yourself, so read on.
Statistically speaking, the most common injuries in high school sports are relatively minor things like twists and breaks. These happen all the time to many children, but don’t have any lasting effect on one’s quality of life.
Instead, we’re going to talk about some of the less common but serious injuries in high school sports. Three of the more common and dangerous injuries are concussions, spinal injuries, and heat exhaustion.
The problem with concussions in football has been well-documented in the last 10 years, mostly with regards to the NFL. A study came out a few years ago showing that CTE was found in 99 percent of donated brains from deceased NFL players.
That’s a pretty staggering number if you’re the parent of a young football player. A concussion can go unnoticed and a child might just write a minor concussion off as getting their bell rung, but repetitive minor hits create long-term issues, as we’ve seen in pro football players.
Something that can have a more immediate and no less-devastating impact is a spinal injury. They’re among the more common life-changing injuries in high school sports.
They can occur in football games, basketball games, wrestling matches, soccer matches, or any other sport where a child is running and jumping around, landing awkwardly, or contacting other kids.
Many studies over the years have shown that sports injuries count for around seven to eight percent of all spinal injuries in the US. This can range from a stinger or a cervical injury to paralysis in more serious cases.
As you probably know, those summer months in the South are getting hotter and hotter. It’s not uncommon to see and hear of children collapsing on the football or soccer field due to heat exhaustion.
Dehydration is a big problem, but it’s hard to tell a child to stop and have a drink of water or go inside. Children are less responsive than adults to heat exhaustion, so it can be difficult to diagnose before it’s too late.
Most of the time, this ends up in minor cramping and can be quickly remedied with hydration. Other times, dizziness, disorientation, weakness, headaches, and vomiting can set in. In serious cases, a child could end up in urgent care and there have been instances of sudden death.
It’s okay to pull your child out of a sport if you’re worried about their well-being. Unfortunately, it often requires a visit to the clinic or hospital before you get the full picture of how dangerous high school sports injuries can be.
Luckily, most are extremely treatable so you don’t have to worry too much. If your child gets injured playing high school sports in the Bossier City or Haughton region, bring them to a doctor you can trust at Coastal Urgent Care.