Give young brains break from hockey: Lindros
Eric Lindros wants to see kids who play hockey year-round take a break. By doing so, maybe they’ll also give their brains a rest.
Speaking at the House of Commons’ health committee on sports-related concussions in Ottawa on Wednesday, the Hall of Fame NHLER suggested playing year-round inevitably causes head injuries that could be avoided by taking up another sport in the summer.
“I look back to when I played and hockey would start and it’s kind of like school,” Lindros, an advocate for concussion research, said in his testimony. “Hockey would start in the fall and we’d play until exams into May, and then you’d have June, July, August and most of September where you weren’t really doing much. And what that allows you to do — and the science has taught us — is it allows the brain to take a break, to grow. The brain always wants to grow and replenish itself and heal. By playing 12 months a year, we’re not giving the brain that chance, that opportunity to get back to where it was at the start of the previous year.”
Lindros, who also suggested body contact not be introduced until the age of 15 when players’ bodies have matured, compared the grind of playing a physical sport to driving a car into the ground.
“If you don’t once in a while pull it in for servicing, something is going to fall apart sooner or later,” said Lindros. “It’s inevitable. Maybe that truck will last a long time and hopefully it does, but I think we should really look at taking better care of ourselves.”
When asked if there were a specific number of days a player should spend resting to allow his brain to heal, Lindros said it differs from person to person. But he added he hoped common sense would prevail in a sport that increasingly has kids spending more and more time at the rink.
“You’re never going to find a black and white, definitive answer,” he said. “Every body is different, every brain is different, everyone is going to react differently to different things. Is there a specific time? You’re never going to come up with that. Nobody is ever going to agree on that.
“But common sense says if you continually bash your truck down the road, something’s going to give, right? I think we have to move along with a lot more common sense as opposed to the numbers here or the days here. We know what’s right. We know in our heart what’s right. Let’s move forward. And if you choose not to, that’s your choice. But let’s lay it out and inform people as much as possible what their options are and why.”
When reached by phone, Lindros was pleased the federal government was concerned with pushing concussion awareness into the public eye. But he shared frustration with the lack of a nationwide protocol in the diagnosis and treatment of concussions since Rowan’s Law — Ontario legislation that establishes removal-from-sport and return-to-sport protocols — was passed last March.
“Let’s get moving here,” he said. “We’ve had Rowan’s Law for a while now and if we take something that does well in Ontario, I don’t see why we can’t take it across the country. It’s effective here and allows people to be informed properly, simplifies it by cutting down on the confusion. I don’t know why you don’t duplicate it, because it would be cost-effective to run it across the country.”