Reply to girl soccer and concussions/ACL

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]my wife would like enroll our 8 years old daughter into competitive soccer.  I've been researching into girls soccer particularly with concussions and ACL injury and it seems like girl soccer suffers concussions and ACL at a higher rate than other sports.  As a dad, that really worries me.  As she gets older soccer, she will be heading the ball and numerous studies have shown that it will increase the risk of concussions.  Multiple concussions are linked to CTE.  I also found this study https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/03/170314081533.htm

I would like her to participate in "safer" sports like swimming so that the risk of concussion is none.

What should I do?

[/quote]

You're wise to look ahead and think about these issues. As others have said, there seem to be very few ACL and concussion injuries in girls' soccer until players experience their adolescent growth spurts, and national soccer rules prevent heading in games and at practice until around that time. For these reasons, it would be fairly low-risk for your DD to play soccer through U11. After that, there are more concussions from clashes of heads as players jump to head the ball (not from the contact of the head with the ball necessarily, except under unusual circumstances, such as when a player ineptly heads an overinflated ball that a goalie has punted to midfield). Also, CTE damage is associated with dozens and dozens of sub-concussive impacts, and that's what some players go through when heading the ball at practice, even under controlled conditions, for coaches who put heading at the center of their advanced goal-scoring and possession strategies. For these reasons, the risk of concussion is much higher for U12 or U13 and older female soccer players, so maybe you would have DD quit the sport prior to the teenage years. All of this kind of misses the point, though, which is that swimming is an individual sport and soccer is a team sport. Some kids really, really aren't suited to one or the other. Perhaps use that distinction when looking to DD's sports future.[/quote]

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