Concussions Takes Its Toll

A major injury in sports threatening careers are concussions in sports - particularly hockey and football. Soccer has its share but they haven't begun facing that reality.

There has been a proliferation of cases in the last 15 years or so namely because diagnosis has evolved and

One of the first, if not the first, athlete I can remember calling it quits because of repeated concussions was Pat Lafontaine and since then it seems as though more and more and more people are afflicted with it.

Today we found out about a hockey player - someone we know through friends of ours - who suffered his third concussion.

He's 16.

Not good. In fact, he has to strongly consider pulling the plug on any dreams he may have had. It only gets harder and more vicious from this point on.

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Despite my intense interest in them, I don't miss team sports at all. I got sick of hearing coaches say stupid things like "be aggressive!" for its own sake or "first on the ball" even if it had little impact on the development of a particular play. We were taught more to be instinctual than to be thoughtful; to waste rather than conserve.

More often than not, coaches loved the aggressive lunatic who could barely control the puck, pass a soccer ball or bounce a basketball but could deliver a severe physical hit that put the fear into opponents.

I got a little fed up of watching those guys be praised.


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The NHL is heavily criticized for its perceived lack of will in dealing with concussions. On some levels, the criticism is fair and justified. A few suspensions they've doled out have been a complete and utter joke and lacked any consistency. But it's not really their fault players like Matt Cooke, Bryan Marchment and Ulf Samuelsson unleash their dirty play on the league. The NHL is not in the business of developing individuals or teaching morality.

For that, it starts with parents and coaches. It begins at the lower levels where sport is being taught at a young age. Somewhere along the line we're not teaching A) kids properly to play a sport and B) to play with any values. Somewhere along that line, someone is not taking a kid aside and saying, "hey, that's not cool."

One can even assert, probably, the opposite is happening.

Most kids can't even execute a slide tackle efficiently. Anyone can bulldoze someone and call it a "tackle" but there's an art to the slide tackle; and it can be achieved without injuring someone. Indeed, I used to pick the ball clean from players with little or no contact.

Not only that, even simple drills and skills like sending a through ball to a striker was lacking. If I were to guess, in both organized or non-organized sports - at least three quarters of people in them didn't know the art of the game they participated in. Someone can play a game and even look reasonably good at it and still be deficient.

It's at that point we fail to teach kids.

So it's not surprising I'm hearing what's happening at all. Kids are told to focus on an opposing player of high caliber and to pummel them. A good, clean, solid bodycheck should not result in a concussion anymore a slide tackle shouldn't result in a blown out knee (excluding bad luck of course).

It's not sport but bloodsport at that point.