N.C. House Of Representatives Passes Law To Reduce Head Injuries In Sports

May 4, 2011 /
Fayetteville Observer, Paul Woolverton and Earl Vaughan, Jr.

http://fayobserver.com/articles/2011/05/04/1091441?sac=Sports

The N.C. House of Representatives on Tuesday unanimously voted for a proposed law aimed at reducing head injuries and deaths among school children playing sports.

The bill awaits approval of the state Senate and governor. If this bill becomes law, the state Department of Public Instruction will develop a training program to teach coaches, school nurses, other staff, students and parents how to look out for concussions.

Further, students who appear to have suffered concussions won’t be allowed to continue to play until evaluated for a head injury and cleared by a doctor or other person trained to do so.

The bill, sponsored by Rep. Rick Glazier of Fayetteville and three other legislators, is called the Gfeller-Waller Concussion Awareness Act in honor of two North Carolina high school students who died from concussion injuries while playing football. It applies to all sports.

Nationally, high school football players suffer 43,000 to 67,000 concussions a year, Glazier said during a news conference to promote the legislation, and in all sports, players of all ages suffer an estimated 1.6 million to 3.8 million concussions annually, he said.

Pros in attendance

Professional athletes attended the news conference to support the bill, including hockey’s Carolina Hurricanes associate head coach Ron Francis and Mike Rucker, a former player for the Carolina Panthers.

Jeff Miller, the National Football League’s senior vice president for public policy, said that 16 states have similar laws and four, including North Carolina, have such laws pending.

The bill won’t represent a major change for North Carolina’s high schools as they have already been dealing with policies designed to cut down on injuries and deaths from concussions.

“We have some things in place,” said Davis Whitfield, executive director of the N.C. High School Athletic Association. Both the association and the National Federation of State High School Associations already require any athlete suspected of suffering a concussion to be removed from competition and only allowed to return after being examined and cleared by a doctor.

The National Federation also offers a free online training course for coaches, parents and athletes on concussions. It can be accessed at the NFHS website at http://nfhslearn.com.

Russell Stone, football coach at Douglas Byrd High School, used to coach in Winston-Salem. He knows both the family and the coaches of Matthew Gfeller, one of the two North Carolina high school players the bill is named after. Gfeller died in 2008 after suffering a traumatic brain injury in a helmet-to-helmet collision while playing for Reynolds High School.

“Right now the big deal in football is teaching kids to play the right way,” Stone said. “You don’t want the main point of contact to be the head. If you keep your head up and see what you’re hitting, 98 percent of the time you’ll be safe.”

Stone said it’s also important to teach players to let their coaches know if something is wrong. “Our kids, if it feels funny, they’ll come to us and ask us about it,” he said. “We’ve encouraged them to come tell us when we have an injury.”

South View coach Randy Ledford thinks the bill is a good idea, but wonders if it goes far enough. “They could have head injuries years before they come to us and not know it,” Ledford said. “We need to find that out. When we get them, we sometimes don’t know their past history.

“You may not be able to detect they’ve had something happen to them before.”

Larry Tearry is athletic director at Terry Sanford. A former star football player at E.E. Smith and Wake Forest, he played professionally for the Detroit Lions.

“I think a training program would be great,” he said. “We’ve got to be concerned about the safety of our student-athletes, to assist in keeping them healthy.”

Terry Sanford football coach Wayne Inman said he has skilled medical people on the sidelines for nearly every game, but he knows that’s not the norm.

“Everybody is not that fortunate,” he said. “I’m all for anything that promotes safety among the kids.”


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