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OP again. Here's an article about the original study: https://www.laboratoryequipment.com/602311-First-American-Female-Athlete-Diagnosed-with-CTE
Not much information is provided about the athlete because presumably her family didn't want to go public with the story. |
| Do you think this will change any parents' choice to sign up their daughter for soccer? |
In fairness, even though there was a 5% increase this year in kids playing HS football, the numbers are down considerably from 10 years ago primarily due to the CTE findings. Without a doubt, the easiest recruitment path for High academic D1 or D3 is to play football because the UMC kids with the grades/test scores are not playing in then numbers they used to play. Those schools still have to recruit a heck of a lot of kids to field teams. Soccer has already taken many steps to limit concussions...unfortunately, all of this happened well after this 28 year old woman started playing. |
| The other problem is that CTE is influenced not only by concussions, but by the number of sub-concussive hits to the head - hits that don’t cause a concussion but do shake the brain inside your head. It’s not only about the number of actual concussions a person has had. |
| Really cute that you all think concussions in soccer just come from headers. |
Girls/women’s soccer has a lot of concussions because the emphasis is on physical play and lack of technical skill. This is a chicken and egg thing. Physical play will disrupt play if the speed of play is slow. Slow speed of play means more girls/women making contact and wrestling for the ball. This results in more contact and players going to the ground. This leads to longer balls and more heading of the ball. Watch a college game. It is pretty typical to see a goalie punt the ball to midfield and two women fight to head the ball. One player usually ends up on the ground after the play and the ball is headed to another area to be headed again. One goalie punt will lead to 3-4 headers and 3 players on the ground. This would be an easy fix and improve play. No heading off goalie punts or goal kicks. Heading result in smaller impacts on the brain that accumulate over time. Also fighting to head a ball means jumping and getting knock to the ground. Many concussion happen when the player hits each other or hit the grounds. The head hits the ground when the body stops and head bounces off the ground. This happens a lot with the girls in the younger ages. Their core and neck strength is not strong enough to stop or mitigate the impact. For every 1,000 hours of playing or practicing in NCAA women soccer there are about 1.5 concussions. With fall and spring seasons they play about 600 hours a year for the school. For the men it is 1 concussion per 1,000 and the average for other NCAA sports .39(football is like 14). Concussions are a lot higher during competition. |
| ^ plus female soccer players don't have strong necks, like say a female gymnaist. |
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It's going to be interesting to see if people come after women's soccer.
Football is doing its best to limit head to head contact. Soccer is doing absolutely nothing. And in a few years, it wouldn't be crazy to think that they will have the same rate of head injuries. |