A Call to Coaches & Directors

Dear ,

Please help guard your athletes from the an ACL tear or overuse injury. Please.

As a father of 2, protecting their health and well-being is of utmost importance to me. I believe sports participation offers our youth physical, emotional, and leadership benefits. Unfortunately, sports injuries are costly both physically and emotionally. It seems that injuries are just part of the package. Or are they?

These injuries can be reduced. That’s right . . . we know how to reduce ACL tear risk and all of the subsequent misery. We know how to prevent ankle sprains, hamstring strains, shin splints, and other maladies. The real challenge is that we just can’t get our youth athletes tested to get these risk factors addressed.

Numerous physical therapists, myself included, have dedicated their lives to injury risk identification and prevention. So, what do we know? By combining multiple, easy to perform movement tests and other evidence-based risk factors, we are able to identify and categorize an athlete’s injury risk. We use a 3D camera and software application called Kinetisense, making injury risk identification available to all athletes in less than 5 minutes.

But what can I do as a coach or director?

There are several steps coaches and directors can take to decrease their club’s risk of injury. Begin by embracing prevention. Like vehicles, bodies require preventative maintenance. Youth does not insulate your athlete from injury. A comprehensive movement “check up,” annually at minimum, is essential for musculoskeletal health.

In addition, here are some suggestions you can implement as a club leader to help protect your athletes from injury:

1)   Find a provider using the best evidence available for your child’s movement screening

2) Be sure research-validated testing is performed pre-season and between sport seasons

3) Ensure that the risk factors identified during testing are corrected and verify that they have been corrected with re-testing

4) Once screening and testing are clear, have your athletes perform one of the many validated prevention programs (FitTo Play, SportsMetrics, Santa Monica PEP)

5) If your athlete does get injured, insist on a standardized, evidence-based return to sport testing prior to being released from medical care. Being pain-free and “feeling great at practice” is not sufficient.

I realize it is hard to make injury prevention measures a priority between all of the practices and games, but identifying and correcting faulty movement patterns is essential to musculoskeletal health. We schedule maintenance for our cars to avoid inconvenient breakdowns. We see the dentist twice a year for precisely the same reason. It’s time we embrace the wonderful truth about injury prevention—the chance of injury can be reduced.

In Health,

Dr. Okon