Concussions in Youth Football

Concussions an issue beyond NFL
“WARNING: No helmet can prevent the serious head or neck injuries a player might receive while participating in football.”
Every football player's helmet reminds them of the dangers they face each time they buckle their chin straps.
NFL football player Ray Lewis calls football a “man's game,” but the hazards of football, particularly concussions, don't discriminate between men and boys.
A 2011 study conducted by the Center for Injury Research and Policy of The Research Institute at Nationwide Children's Hospital said over 8,000 adolescent athletes are treated for concussions each year.
Each day, an average of 57 six to 17 year-olds are treated in U.S. Emergency rooms for football concussions.
Such statistics have catapulted the concussion issue to the forefront of the American football community psyche.
Youth football players are at risk of incurring not only acute effects of concussions like loss of balance and dizziness but chronic effects like loss of long-term memory if they continue playing football on into high school and possibly beyond.
“Obviously the younger you start somebody getting little mini head traumas then the more opportunities there are for injury,” said LSU head team physician Dr. Jeffrey Burnham.
Greater awareness of the severity of concussion symptoms and effects has lead to increased emphasis on addressing player safety and well being at the youth football level.
Burnham believes the increased focus on concussions has lead to more detection of injuries.
“I think to some extent we may be seeing more concussions just because every year we're looking harder and harder, and we're making the athletes themselves aware of it,” Burnham said.
In 2008, the NFL began making concussions and player safety a higher priority.
The league released a pamphlet to players to educate them about concussions and opened a hotline to report instances of players being forced to play against medical advice.
The Louisiana Youth Football organization began taking action against concussions around the same time the NFL did three years ago.
Louisiana Youth Football sees kids between the ages of four and thirteen suit up to play football and director LeRoy Hollins believes the organization is ahead of the game on concussion safety.
“We’re getting NFL information at a youth level, and we’re getting it early,” Hollins said. “As soon as they get it, we get it.”
Because youth football players can start playing at such an early age, there's a greater chance to encounter the cumulative effects of concussions, despite the game not being as fast or physical as the collegiate or professional ranks.
According to Burnham, a player is more susceptible to concussions after suffering their first one and the consequences may be more severe.
“There's something called second impact syndrome, where an athlete can actually die on the field, almost immediately from a second impact that's added to a previous concussion,” Burnham said.
Herman Daigre coaches Louisiana Youth Football’s Baton Rouge Trojans and recognizes this fact.
“I absolutely think about it. Both of my kids play,” Daigre said. “Being a father I'm always thinking about the safety of the kids.”
Daigre and other coaches don't want to jeopardize the safety of the young athletes and choose to err on the side of caution when faced with a decision.
“Out here we just don’t take no chances. A kid gets hit hard, we believe it’s a head injury, under no circumstances whether he passes the test or not we just put him out just to be on the safe side,” Daigre said.
Daigre is a paramedic off the field and tests players himself to see if they show concussion symptoms.
“The finger test, eye coordination. We don’t have the actual staff to help the kids like in college or high school, we just play it safe and pull them out,” Daigre said.
While the organization doesn’t have the medical staff that high schools, college and professional teams have, every coach is trained to recognize and deal with concussions.
“All our coaches have to go through a certification program and within that certification program is a certification for the concussion,” Hollins said.
Coaches are able to recognize the symptoms of concussions so they can treat their players appropriately.
Football fans see concussions happen during games, but players can get hurt even when the stadium lights are off.
“They are sometimes an issue in practice,” Burnham said.
The Youth Safety Alliance reports that 62 percent of all team sports injuries actually occur in practice.
Daigre has structured his practices to make sure players remain healthy over the course of a season.
“I might have one day, maybe one day (per week), where we do contact,” Daigre said. “When I do contact, I do it very sparingly.”
When Daigre does conduct full contact practices, he stresses techniques that emphasize player safety.
“No head to head contact,” Daigre said. “We try to hit low, wrap up, put your head to the side of the player.”
A player that suffers a concussion may initially experience blurred vision and loss of balance and possibly loss of consciousness for a short period of time.
Burnham notes the acute effects of concussions can become bigger problems if a player doesn't take the time to fully recover.
“With your brain obviously, you want to make sure it's 100 percent back to normal because if you don't, you're going to get some cumulative effects over a period of time that can cause memory changes and mood changes,” Burnham said.
Football historically has championed toughness and playing hurt, and coaches for decades have been the ones telling players to “walk it off,” or “suck it up,” and stay on the field.
Along with being LSU's head physician, Burnham works with Episcopal high school in Baton Rouge and feels coaches at all levels are better educated to make informed decisions about player safety.
“I think coaches are better educated today and understand the consequences of some of those problems and I think they truly do want the best for their athletes,” Burnham said.
Daigre says some of the pressure for kids to play through injuries like concussions has actually come from parents.
“You might get some parents that might want to push you to put their kids in, them believing they're alright because they say they're alright, but we can't take that chance,” Daigre said.
Sometimes players are the ones pleading to get back on the field.
“They are so competitive and they want to be back in there and sometimes the symptoms are fairly subtle,” Burnham said. “We have to be strong with them sometimes.”
Burnham and Daigre both agree that safety ultimately comes first when they make a decision to sit or play an athlete.
“Sometimes you do have to make the judgment that's best for the athlete,” Burnahm said.
For Daigre that may mean player safety coming before team success.
“Safety comes first when it comes to the Baton Rouge Trojans and we'll win after that,” Daigre said.

MC 7040 Profile Story

Tornado survivor left twisting in the wind
It started with a series of dreams.
For three straight April nights in 2010, Corbin White of Yazoo County, MS, dreamt of tornados.
On April 24, White’s dreams turned into a real life nightmare.
“I started to look up the meaning of tornado dreams and it just meant there’s gonna be turmoil in your life,” White said. “Literally that weekend, I was in a tornado.”
That Saturday an EF-4 tornado with winds of up to 170 mph tore across northeast Louisiana and into central Mississippi killing 10 and injuring dozens more.
The National Weather Service describes tornados packing such force as, “devastating.”
White began her day at her boyfriend Nathan Pepper’s house near Yazoo City, unaware that she would face one of nature’s most powerful forces hours later.
“It was sunny and I wasn’t worried about it,” White said.
A little before lunchtime, White received a call from Pepper who was at work, telling her she needed to get downstairs into the bathroom.
White was home by herself and argued with her boyfriend that she didn’t want to be home alone if bad weather hit.
“I told him, ‘I’m going to your parents,’ and I just hung up on him,” White said.
White knew something was wrong as soon as she stepped outside to walk to her car.
“People say it’s eerie before a storm,” White said. “It was just gray and eerie.”
Once White was on the road, she realized she’d made a mistake leaving home.
“Nothing was moving. There were no squirrels, there were no people outside. I was the only person stupid enough to leave and drive,” White said.

A Living Nightmare

It didn’t take long for the weather to get ugly.
White got into downtown Yazoo when she began to lose control of her car.
“My car started skidding to the left and I felt my wheels come off the ground,” White said.
Powerful winds pushed White’s car off the road into a ditch.
White saw a gas station near where her car had been moved to and left her vehicle to make a run for the safety of the building.
She had no idea a tornado was bearing down on the ground she was sprinting across across.
Once inside the gas station, White and the gas station owner watched as the tornado tore into the space she’d occupied only seconds before.
“The awning over the gas pumps totally blew away,” White said.
The sound was even more harrowing.
“It sounded like a train was on top of my body. That’s how loud it was,” White said.
White doesn’t remember how long it took for the tornado to pass over the gas station but can recall vividly what she saw when she stepped outside.
“There was this shopping center across the intersection and the left and right sides of it were completely flat. It was like rubble,” White said.
After looking at the surrounding area, White couldn’t believe how the little gas station she and the owner had taken refuge in managed to hold up.
“It looked like a warzone,” White said.

Sifting through the wreckage

White managed to start her car but couldn’t drive to Pepper’s parents’ house because of debris covering the roads.
“I ended up at his brother’s house,” White said. “His brother was in the carport on the phone and I don’t remember it but he said I got out of the car, I was pale and I walked under the carport and he said I collapsed.”
It was the first moment White had been still since she left her boyfriend’s house earlier that day and the first moment she could begin to understand her reactions to the tornado.
“I was scared but I didn’t even have to think. It (my body) just went into survival mode,” White said.
White and Nathan’s brother Jared Pepper decided to head back to her house to see if there was any damage.
White saw a different world beyond Jared’s truck window.
The town was ravaged. Buildings that stood an hour ago weren’t there anymore and trees were down everywhere.
“People are literally coming out of rubble,” White said. “People were cutting through trees to try to get to places.”
White reached her boyfriend’s house and was greeted by Nathan.
“He’s standing there just looking at his back yard, and I just ran and hugged him,” White said.
The house went largely undamaged, but the rest of the neighborhood did not.
“There was this woman and her three kids that lived in a trailer down the street from Nathan and apparently the tornado picked up her trailer,” White said.
Corbin returned to Jared’s house while Nathan, Jared and a police officer picked through the rubble of the trailer to find the family.
Later that evening the brothers returned to White and described to her how merciless nature could be.
The mother didn’t survive, leaving behind a baby and two little boys who survived with injuries.
“He (Nathan) had nightmares about it for weeks,” White said. “He told me that her body didn’t even look human, it was so mangled.”

Afraid of the Wind

For weeks after the tornado, White saw a city struggling to pick up the pieces.
“They had called in the National Guard, there were Army tents set up everywhere,” White said.
Looking at White and Yazoo, both still haven’t made a full recovery.
“I’m still very much in shock and afraid,” White said.
The tornado winds physically altered Yazoo City’s landscape, changing White’s appearance as well.
“I literally lost a lot of weight after that because I was always scared. Every second I was scared that something was just going to drop out of the sky,” White said.
The dreams haven’t stopped either.
“I have tornado nightmares all the time, and I also think I have panic attacks,” White said.
White isn’t the only one still affected by the tornado.
She and Nathan have since broken up, but they still share an experience that will stay with them for life.
“He still will call me to this day in tears, like something just triggered him thinking about it,” White said.
Natural disasters often serve as an unfortunate reminder of man’s helplessness in the face of nature.
With each catastrophe humanity endures, a new level of respect for Mother Earth’s awesome might is realized.
“I am scared of Mother Nature every day,” White said.
With each day White deals with the memories she carries from that April afternoon a year and a half ago.
Dark clouds that once beckoned her and her family out to the front porch to watch the rain fall now usher her indoors for fear of what may come.
But those dark clouds and violent winds have made her hold those she cares about closer than ever.
“I’m very much more caring about each second of my life and each person in it,” White said.
In the journey of life, one will face many storms, literally and figuratively.
For White, this one is a storm she believes she’ll never fully recover from, but with a newfound respect for nature and a reinforced love for her family and friends, she moves forward.