By Sam Prickett
When it comes to preventing athletic injuries, said Drew Ferguson, one population has been largely overlooked. It’s not the roughly 10,000 professional athletes in the U.S., or the 500,000 college players or the 6.7 million high school athletes. It’s the 67 million athletes aged 14 and under.
“Park-and-rec, church league, whatever you want to call it – that’s the most underserved and the biggest population” of athletes, he said.
Ferguson is the director of Sports Medicine at Children’s of Alabama. But, separately from that, he serves as president of the CoachSafely Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to researching and advocating practices for preventing youth sports injuries.
“This is basically a pediatric population,” Ferguson said. “They’re more susceptible to concussions because their brains are developing – and musculoskeletal injuries, overuse injuries. They don’t have the ability to dissipate heat like the older kids whose bodies are developed, so there are a lot of issues with the growth and development of the 14-and-under (age group) when they participate in sports.
“In other words, they’re not just small adults,” he added. “They’re children that are in their phases of development, and that needs to be understood and recognized in order to prevent these injuries and conditions.”
CoachSafely initially was founded by Jack Crowe in 2013 as a consulting group for national organizations, but in August 2017 it was converted to a policy-lobbying organization. Eight months later, the Alabama Legislature passed the Coach Safely Act, which mandated that all volunteer coaches of children 14 and younger take a course in sports injury recognition and prevention. After that, CoachSafely evolved into its current form, which is largely focused on educating those coaches.
“Whenever possible, we’re offering this course free of charge,” Ferguson said. Corporate partners – which include Alabama Power, Encore Rehabilitation and PowerSouth Energy Cooperative – cover the costs involved in creating and delivering the course.
Most of the volunteer coaches taking the course are parents, Ferguson said, which means “you have a lot of turnover.”
“Parents like to coach their kids, and when their kids move up to middle school and high school, then another group of parents comes in,” he said.
That means the state’s volunteer coaches – approximately 60,000 of them, Ferguson estimates – are required to complete the training every year.
“It’s a challenge,” Ferguson said. “We’ve already educated 12,000 coaches (so far this year), and we’re going through a big onslaught of youth football now, getting them educated. We’ve done baseball, softball and some of football.”
Being Prepared
The course, which Ferguson calls “real comprehensive,” covers how to identify and respond to acute and chronic overuse injuries, sudden cardiac arrest, heat stroke and more, as well as broader topics such as children’s growth and development. Coaches can take the course and gain their certification online through the Alabama Recreations & Parks Association. For coaches without WiFi access, CoachSafely has partnered with Encore Rehabilitation to provide live group sessions of the course in high schools.
Part of the program has involved outreach to some of the state’s more rural communities, “where the population’s not as large and there’s a lot of poverty,” Ferguson said. “There’s just an overall need for medical care, because some counties don’t have a hospital or a medical facility or even have EMS.” He adds that CoachSafely is doing a study on several counties through the University of West Alabama “to assess their needs and where people that live in those counties go for their medical care.”
In those areas, he said, the training CoachSafely offers might be valuable off the field, too. “If (a coach who had completed the course) had a neighbor or someone who was having a medical issue, they would know how to do CPR or how to transport them,” he said.
CoachSafely has “caught the attention of the rest of the country,” Ferguson said. “We’ve made a lot of headway and are really getting some traction, both here in the state and on the national level,” he said.
CoachSafely has partnered with several national youth associations to share its course, Ferguson said, and there are plans to pass similar legislation in other states. Georgia will likely be next, with a draft of the bill scheduled to come before its legislature in 2020.
In Alabama, though, Ferguson said he hopes parents can already feel reassured about their student athletes. The goal, he said, is to “increase participation” in youth sports, “instead of having parents worry about concussions and musculoskeletal overuse injuries that could affect them later on in life … . We want to encourage getting the kids moving and make it safer for them to learn the values of being on a team and participating as a team member, which they can carry throughout their life.”
