The U.S. Soccer Federation held a first of its kind Medical Symposium during the recent National Soccer Coaches Association of America (NSCAA) convention in Philadelphia. The goal, according to the U.S. Soccer news report, was to spend 2 days focused on health issues that cut across youth, amateur and professional soccer. Player health is something you can point to at every level and say it can always be improved. There is no downside to a meeting like this.
But there is added significance to having a national conversation on soccer player health. Sports medicine is something that scales up. What happens at the broad-based youth level is not separate from what happens with the smaller number of elite developmental and professional players. For the U.S. to implement a truly national soccer program it will need to take advantage of every opportunity to unify culture and practices across the vast range of locales and communities in the country.
If soccer sports medicine clinicians can develop and share world-best practices it helps Federation goals of being among the world-best soccer nations. The developmental player pool grows if fewer young talents are lost to injury in the crucial practice windows that lead up to elite squad selections. But that can only happen if a culture is in place that emphasizes injury prevention. A national soccer medical symposium is a short-term move that helps to establish norms among youth soccer coaches that lead to those long-term culture and health payoffs.
It has to help U.S. Soccer that George Chiampas is the organization’s Medical Director. I met Dr. Chiampas back in 2011 reporting a story in journalism school on how American cities use major road races to carry out emergency preparedness exercises, a practice that Chiampas oversaw working on the Chicago marathon. Then and now Chiampas has an amazing feel for scale, understanding that a traumatic injury harms an individual, and that it can lead to cascading events that could debilitate, even cripple, a larger community or organization. Preparation and prevention are synonymous in emergency medicine, and it makes a good frame for thinking about sports medicine across the full scope of U.S. soccer.
Other sports have missed the window to put this kind of health-first culture in place. Basketball is experiencing a plague of overuse injuries among the best young American players. Football only recently realized that lifelong health problems stem from the culture and instruction players experience as teenagers, at the outset of their playing careers.
U.S. Soccer has tentacles that extend into youth sports, something that the other sports don’t have and it is hard to expect other sports can get on the same sort of path. Maybe the NCAA will help as it evolves a stronger orientation toward applied sports science, becoming a bridge to connect the broad-based youth participation sports programs and the elite talent development programs.
The Best Things I Read Last Week:
- Nebraska taking new directions in strength and conditioningNebraska taking new directions in strength and conditioning Omaha.com … The University of Nebraska football team is publicizing (and getting attention for) its sports science.
- THE MILAN LAB: JEAN-PIERRE MEERSSEMAN’S PIONEERING WORK AT AC MILAN These Football Times … There is not very much history written about sports science and its origins. This is a good example.
- Exercise Intensity Thresholds: Identifying the Boundaries of Sustainable Performance. Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise … Researchers from Canada and Italy are taking the path to explain/understand physiology by developing effective athlete performance indices.
- Hands On: Microsoft Surface Hub PC Magazine … Microsoft product announcement is the new commercial state of the art in computer-assisted collaboration. Sports teams that fail to adopt technologies like this are doing it wrong.
- Australian Open: Here’s the Skinny Wall Street Journal … There is increasing awareness that tennis, at the highest level, has become an endurance sport.