1 September 2023
WICHITA, Kan. (KSNW) – Friday football kicks off tonight across Kansas. As teams have practiced for game day, they have been focusing on preventing head injuries.
“The most important thing is that you recognize those symptoms and that you do something about that if you have the symptoms, you don’t ignore it,” Dr. Andrew Porter, sports medicine, said.
Jennifer Hudson, athletic trainer at Wichita High School East, says they have spent the last few weeks talking with students about the topic.
“The importance of why they need to make sure they let somebody, an adult, know if something doesn’t feel right, what some of the symptoms can be and things to look for,” Hudson said.
Those symptoms include nausea, dizziness and confusion, just to name a few.
Concussions don’t just happen in sports. Hudson says a concussion is a brain injury, and your brain affects everything you do.
“It affects school, it affects your ability to sleep, it affects your ability to hang out with your friends and your family, and it affects your sports,” Hudson said.
She keeps an eye out to see if anything is out of the ordinary for any of the athletes. If a head injury does happen, they are prepared.
“We have tools to use on the field for quick assessments. This person needs to be pulled out, and we sit, then we can reassess them more and get more information with the different tools that we use,” Hudson said.
She says research that is done throughout the world on concussion management and understanding of concussions has boomed.
“Concussion treatment has changed tremendously over the 25 years that I have been here because, for one thing, on the concussion and the medical side, we know so much more, and there is so much more research, but there’s also there are more conversations being had.”
Dr. Porter says if you hit your head and something feels off, it is crucial to tell someone because you can make the concussion more severe, it can take longer to recover, or you could get second impact syndrome.
“You’re honest with how you feel, you’re honest that you just don’t feel quite right and that you let somebody know, let a coach know, let your athletic trainer know, let your family physician know, your team physician know that you just don’t feel quite right because I think one of the most important things is that the sooner you seek treatment, the quicker you can get back to playing,” Dr. Porter said.
He and Valley Center football coach Scott L’Ecuyer say sports are valuable; just be aware.
“We don’t want to scare athletes that you shouldn’t play sports,” Dr. Porter said. “I think sports are a great thing, but if you don’t feel quite like yourself, you know your head hurts, you just need to be honest with how you feel and just make sure that you let somebody know.”
“I think the rewards of football far outweigh the risks,” L’Ecuyer said. “You know, there’s a lot of things that football players can gain from playing, you know, how to work in a team, how to overcome adverse adversity.”
In their weight class, they do neck strengthening stretches because a strong neck helps stabilize the head.
“We want to keep them healthy on the field, that’s important, but the other thing is, you know, they’re gonna live an entire life, and they’re going to need their cognitive process,” L’Ecuyer said. “We want to make sure we’re protecting that beyond their years of playing football in our program.”
They also practice keeping the head out of blocking and tackling to eliminate contact while also eliminating contact time in practice by not doing as many contact drills.
“You just have to be as proactive as possible and teach them how to get their head out,” L’Ecuyer said. “So a lot of that, teaching them how to do it the right way in practice, can prevent some of those contacts. We also incorporate into our warm-up, you know, neck warm-up exercise to get their neck activated and ready to go to support the head.”