Aigles d’Or football team in project on concussions
It’s a Saturday afternoon in Lachine, and the players from the Dalbé-Viau secondary school football team are practising.
As they run through hitting and running drills, a handful of cameras capture their every move.
The Aigles d’Or football team is participating in a research project — led by a couple of the team’s former players — that aims to reduce the risk of concussions while also improving player performance.
“We’re trying to isolate a few variables that will allow us to prevent concussions before they actually happen,” said Vincent Distefano, who coaches the under-15 team at Dalbé-Viau and is part of the team behind the project, called Elite NeuroKinetix.
Each player is filmed as they run through drills and scored according to a model that aims to identity specific risk factors in the way they move that can lead to injuries.
By identifying individual players’ risk factors, they can be coached to play in a safer way, said Allen Champagne, who is currently studying medicine — and for a PhD — at Queen’s University, where he’s researching sports-related concussions.
“You analyze and you identify the weaknesses in players and you coach them from that. It’s almost like individualized medicine, but for sports,” he said.
Champagne played on the DalbéViau football team with Distefano before attending the University of North Carolina, where he played for the Tar Heels varsity football team while doing his undergraduate degree.
For Champagne, it’s important to put his research into practice because young players like those on the Aigles d’Or aren’t likely to read scientific publications directed at neuroscientists.
“What it comes down to is who’s getting the information. Is it the scientific community, at the conferences and in the papers? Or is it the 12-, 14-, 16-, 18-year-old football player who wants to learn and get better in a safer way?” he said. “The risks are not going anywhere until we change them.”
Champagne said he believes proper technique is not only safer, it will also lead to better performance on the field.
“Technique is the underlying denominator to performance and safety,” he said.
While players are taught how to avoid concussions, it can be hard to put that into practice during a game, which is why the ability to coach individual players on specific skills is so important, Distefano said.
“The game is very quick, so you want to make sure that when you get into that situation where you don’t have time to think, you have the proper reaction,” Distefano said.
While the project is still in its early days, it’s already getting interest from coaches, said Marie-Michelle Boulanger, who is studying for her PhD in School/Applied Child Psychology at McGill University and is part of the Elite NeuroKinetix project.
“Coaches are interested because there’s a lot of pressure from parents to keep kids safe,” she said.
Part of the goal is to reduce the parents’ fears around contact sports.
“Team sports, especially football, are great teaching tools. We teach kids teamwork, we teach them perseverance, we teach them how to stick with what they’re doing, we teach them responsibility,” Boulanger said. “This is our little effort to improve the sport.”
Jonathan Mambela, who plays quarterback for the Aigles d’Or, said he doesn’t worry about injuries, but he’s happy to participate in the program.
“I think it’s really something big for the program because it helps them to help us,” he said. “It helps us to prevent every injury that could happen in the future.”
Ultimately, the goal is to make the sport safer.
“Football is physical, hockey is physical,” Champagne said. “We’re not trying to say ‘don’t play football, it’s dangerous,’ we’re trying to say ‘let’s play football in a safe way.’”