Athlete Injuries

Athletes are experiencing injuries while practicing or playing their sport due to safety issues in their equipment and court/field.

“I used a normal juke move and ended up on the ground,” Sophomore Andrew Johnson stated. During Johnson’s sophomore year, he faced a severe injury while playing football. His team rarely practices on turf, but one of the few times they did something terrible happened. Johnson caught the ball and tried juking and tore his ACL when trying to get away from the defender. Johnson was out for many months due to recovery and will be back for his next football season.

This turf incident has not only happened to Johnson but many professional, college and high school athletes. Athletes are calling this the turf monster. It is hard and expensive to maintain turf fields, so after being used a lot, turf fields start to deteriorate, causing injuries. Many NFL stadiums are switching to grass fields to reduce knee injuries and because it is easier to maintain grass fields. The problem is some colleges and high schools don’t have the money to switch and maintain, so athletes at this level are still getting hurt.

Football players are also facing concussion problems. In 2015 the NFL reported a whopping 275 concussions. However, that number decreased to 187. This is because many scientists are finding ways to improve equipment and keep players safe. Every couple of years new helmets are coming out for players to use to improve their skills by also upgrading their padding. Concussions will always be a problem in football and getting a concussion changes one’s lifestyle for the rest of one’s life. The NFL is also helping with this problem by strictly enforcing its concussion protocol, so players are safe before getting out on the field again.

“I quit football because my parents didn’t want me to have brain damage,” Junior Cam Rourke said. Getting too many concussions could cause CTE. CTE is chronic traumatic encephalopathy and happens when someone gets concussions throughout their life. Doctors have studied many former athletes’ brains and found that 87% of football players have CTE. They have been living like this with no clue that they had this. When getting hit in the head lots of times like what these football players go through ruins one’s lifestyle without them noticing.

These injuries are still happening in other sports. New equipment comes out all the time to help protect these athletes from these serious injuries.