The High School Related Injury Surveillance Study produced by High School RIO was provided at our Jan meeting. It provided stacks of stats with the eyeopener being :
INJURY RATE PER 1,000 ATHLETIC EXPOSURES
COMPETITION PRACTICE TOTAL
Football 12.1 2.2 14.3
Girl's soccer 5.7 0.9 6.6
Boy's ice hockey 5.2 0.5 5.7
Boy's lacrosse 3.7 1.0 4.7
....
......
.....
Boy's swimming 0.1 0.1 0.2
Trying to deciper all the info is compluated but decipering that Mama Bear and Papa Bear's little Baby Bear has twice the chance of injury playing football than any other sport is not. Safety has to be the top priority of the officials, coaches and players. As a member of the rules committee, it is ours.
Ralph:
I sure hope they didn't present those numbers that way! The numbers for practices and competitions are NOT additive. For instance, the number of football injuries per 1000 athlete exposures in competition is 12.53, and for practice it's 2.08, but in total, it's 3.57 (latest RIO report). And yes, football is higher than any other sport, followed by boys' wrestling and girls' soccer (for some reason, ice hockey and lacrosse are not in the latest report).
And I get that football has the most injuries. But further digging into that study says that being tackled is the number one source of football injuries (29.3%) and tackling is #2 (21.9%). Blocking and being blocked, the primary sources for injuries on a kickoff are 15 and 10% respectively. If we really want to reduce injuries, don't allow tackling and 50% of all injuries go away!
The rest of that study doesn't break down football injuries by play type, so I'm wondering where all that negativity toward kickoffs and onside kicks has it's source. It does say 80% of all football game injuries occur between the 20 yard lines, with 18% in the red zone, and about 1% each off the field or in the end zone.
I'm still trying to figure out how 1% of injuries happen off the field. Tripping over the chains while running off the field?