It’s crunch time for girls
EVERY parent dreads that call from school. The one that tells you your child is sick or injured.
Over the years we have had many of those calls.
We are well practised at the dash to school, the surveying of the colour of our child’s face and knowing, if grey, the bone is broken and if quiet, a doctor’s visit is immediately required.
Last week I received one of those calls.
It was to advise me that our eldest daughter Bella had sustained a concussion while playing football at an inter-school footy match.
Before that match, other than the occasional school sports lesson, Bella had never played a game of footy or undertaken any real skills training in the sport.
When I arrived at the sporting oval Bella was sitting up and was lucid.
We immediately drove to hospital where, over the coming hours, she was examined, X-rayed, vitals checked, observed and ultimately released with information relating to the management of concussion injuries in children.
Of interest in our time at hospital was the number of comments by the medical staff about the frequency with which girls Bella’s age are attending the hospital with concussion injuries from playing footy.
The next day we attended our local doctor as recommended.
He made the same comment about the frequency of concussion injuries he was seeing from girls Bella’s age playing footy.
His theory was that Bella’s generation was the first group of girls seriously recruited to the game, but that many of them had not grown up playing the sport.
He said that footy was a contact sport and that concussion was an expected consequence of the game, but that many girls had not learnt the necessary skills needed to minimise the risk.
He said there was skill in avoiding a tackle, making a tackle and landing when tackled, and all of those skills were learnt with skills training.
Unlike Bella, her brother Harvey and her younger sister Georgia have been learning the skills of footy since three-year-old Auskick.
Only last year, when playing under-10s (six years of skills training after he first put on a pair of footy boots), did Harvey and his team graduate to be able to tackle while playing.
As a personal injury lawyer, I see risk in the lives of my loved ones through the experiences of my clients and the devastation of injury on their lives.
In short, as my children will tell you, I am the fun police.
And yet, in this instance, I had not given a second thought to signing the permission form to allow Bella to play girls footy for her school.
I knew she was fit, fast and strong. In terms of risk, I hadn’t thought beyond her getting grubby knees, a rolled ankle and organising a mouth guard to protect her braces.
Upon reflection, I had let her play a contact sport without ensuring she had the skills to avoid the contact or if unavoidable, the skills to minimise the impact of the contact.
A recent American concussion study by Northwestern and Wake Forest universities looked at 6400 concussion injuries sustained while playing high school sports over a 10year period and surprisingly found that gridiron was only the fourth highest concussion sport.
Girls’ soccer, girls’ volleyball and girls’ basketball all were higher.
Dr William Roberts, chairman of the Minnesota State High School League’s sports medicine advisory committee, said in response to the study that, potentially, it was due to the difference in neck strength between boys and girls.
“When there’s a blow to the head, if the neck strength isn’t as high, more of the force can be transmitted to the head and brain,” he went on to say.
Concussion injury is as much a part of sport as any other category of injury. It is a risk you accept when you enter the sporting field.
However, Bella’s lack of training, experience and skill development in footy may have placed her at greater risk for concussion as she had no skills training to assist her to avoid or minimise the impact of the contact.
And, if the results of the American study are referable in the Australian context, then once contacted, as a girl she may be more likely to suffer concussion than a boy.
Should our girls be playing footy? Yes. Definitely.
Should our girls who want to play footy but have not had proper skills training walk on to a competitive field and play?
No. Definitely not. Rachel Schutze is a principal lawyer at Gordon Legal, wife and mother of three. [Ed’s note: Ms Shutze is married to Corio MP Richard Marles.]