Concussion awareness welcome addition to football season

It's that time of year again. The Bears are in training camp (thankfully, the league and players came to terms) and high school football is just around the corner.

Nothing like a few hot weeks in July and August to get us longing for autumn Friday nights in the suburbs, cheering on our favorite football teams under the lights.

But parents, players, coaches and trainers have their share of worries as well, especially when they hear stories like one reported by the AP and carried by the Daily Herald late last month.

Seventy-five former NFL players sued the league, claiming it concealed information about the danger of concussions for decades. Filed in Los Angeles, the suit seeks unspecified damages from the NFL and Riddell, the league's official helmet supplier. While the league said it would vigorously contest the suit and Riddell refused to comment, the action sheds one more light on the effects of concussions on players and raises new concerns about safety at all levels of the sport.

Those concerns have been noted here in Illinois and we are supportive of a new law signed just last week by Gov. Patrick Quinn. That law will keep student athletes from elementary to high school from playing too soon with concussions and will help train all involved on how to identify concussion symptoms. Repeated concussions and returning to play too soon have been noted to raise risks for permanent brain damage.

Former Chicago Bear Dan Hampton, a Hall-of-Fame defensive lineman, told a group of Illinois coaches, trainers and administrators last week that he supported the new law, and he welcomes a change in attitude in the sport. In his day, he said, “the more barbaric it was, the better.“ Now, he warned, young players need to police themselves with the help of the adults around them.

The federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that about 135,000 U.S. children ages 5 to 18 are treated in emergency rooms each year for sports- and recreation-related concussions and traumatic brain injuries. It's a serious problem, and we applaud the schools in our area that have been working for several years on minimizing those injuries, whether from playing football or any other sport.

One of the main things to remember, said Dr. Hunt Batjer, chair of neurosurgery at Northwestern Memorial Hospital in Chicago in an AP story on concussion awareness, is that any blow to the head must be treated as “a traumatic brain injury.”

We look forward to all the excitement that football brings at all levels of play this year. But we also will breathe a sigh of relief when we see athletes removed from play under this new law until they are cleared by a doctor to participate again. As a high school referee was quoted in the same AP story, we “are definitely going to err of the side of safety.” There is no better way to err.