Increased attention is rightly being paid to concussions in youth sports as we learn more about the connections between head trauma, cognitive issues and brain diseases such as chronic traumatic encephaly.
The well-intentioned and necessary considerations about protecting youth athletes, however, should not be limited to one sport — and should focus on giving parents and athletes the best information possible to make informed decisions about what sports to play.
Maine legislators had been considering a bill that would create a commission to “study and recommend a minimum age for participation in tackle football.”
[Maine lawmakers consider banning kids from playing tackle football]
But as Dr. Paul Berkner, the Director of the Maine Concussion Management Initiative at Colby College, pointed out to the Education and Cultural Affairs Committee this week in an email, Maine already has an existing group well-suited for this discussion. A state law passed in 2012 created a working group tasked with advising the Commissioner of Education on the “prevention, diagnosis and treatment of concussive and other head injuries in students and student athletes.”
The sponsor of the age limit bill, Democratic Rep. Michael Brennan of Portland, rightly realized that the topic of tackle football can be included within the existing working group without creating a new commission. He voted against his own bill on Wednesday, and other members of the Education and Cultural Affairs Committee joined him unanimously.
This was a good move by the committee. Building on existing efforts to understand the health impact of youth sports in the context of new research is a good idea, but limiting that conversation to a recommended football age limit would have been both too narrow in scope and overly prescriptive.
A 2017 study published in the Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine, for example, found that concussions account for a higher proportion of the injuries in girls’ soccer than in football.
Berkner pointed out in his email to legislators that “girls sustain concussions as well as boys, and the creation of a commission on youth football, which is primarily a boys sport, prioritizes boys safety above girls.”
He added that “focusing a whole commission on football excludes one whole gender and their risk of concussions.”
In 2018, researchers from the University of Minnesota released two studies suggesting that more needs to be done around the country to inform athletes and their parents about concussion risks.
“Our view is that although the research is still incomplete, it is nonetheless informative. Concussion policy should encourage transparency,” a team of researchers wrote in the study, How Dangerous are Youth Sports for the Brain? A Review of the Evidence. “Specifically, concussion education — which is required by current law in most states to be provided to parents and athletes — should effectively communicate the actual concussion risk to student-athletes and parents.”
Those same Minnesota researchers also cautioned against policymakers overstepping with attempts to address this issue.
“Policy proposals calling for the elimination of youth football, hockey, and other collision sports are overly paternalistic,” the study authors continued.
While the bill proposed here in Maine would have move towards an age limit, and not an all-out elimination of youth football, it nonetheless ran that same risk of overreach.
Brennan is concerned about the long term health and brain development of student athletes. We share that concern. But the push for a commission to specifically look at a football age limit seemed structured to produce evidence supporting an already established conclusion.
“I think that fairly soon we will have enough evidence that will lead us toward setting, or looking at, age limits,” Brennan said earlier in March, as reported by the Portland Press Herald.
“What we’re seeing across the country is a decline in participation and parents are, in fact, setting that limit,” he added at the time.
Brennan’s point that fewer students are already playing football in Maine and nationally actually hurts his argument for a minimum age. If parents are already recognizing the warning signs and setting that limit on their own, then why does the government need to step in here?
State policymakers and experts should take a closer look at concussions in youth sports, with the aim of providing parents and student athletes with an accurate picture of the risks involved. But banning football under a certain age would have been excessive, and focusing only on one sport wouldn’t have truly tackled the issue.