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Soccer dads head up efforts for safer play
By John Tuohy, USA TODAY June 1, 2000
Bob Long and George Halvorson watched helplessly three years ago as their
sons were knocked nearly unconscious during soccer games in St. Paul, Minn.
In Pompton Plains, N.J., Donald Rumbaugh's son came home delirious and nauseated
after a heading drill at practice.
And in St. Louis, Stuart Zatlin's boy, at age 10, buckled to his knees after
a whistling soccer ball blindsided him in the head.
"I thought, 'This is crazy, somebody's going to get killed out there. The
players need something to protect their heads,'" Zatlin recalls.
He and the other fathers searched but discovered that no sporting goods stores
carried protective headgear for soccer players. So they each made and marketed
their own.
Now these soccer dads are positioned as pioneers in what could be a safety
movement in soccer. Citing recent studies suggesting that playing soccer can be
dangerous to the head, the fledgling entrepreneurs are betting that concerns
about safety and pressure from parents will make their products standard
equipment in the future.
"I think it is only a matter of time," says Rumbaugh, a family
physician. "Soccer has kept its head buried in the sand long enough about
this."
All this has made officials at the U.S. Soccer Federation defensive. They aren't
eager to see the world's most popular sport compared to football or hockey.
Soccer officials say the dads are rushing headlong with scant information into a
delicate area of sports medicine. The studies linking soccer head injuries and
cognitive problems are inconclusive and misleading, the soccer officials say.
Especially galling to them are some researchers' suggestions that simply heading
a ball could be dangerous.
"It has been sensationalized," says federation spokesman Jim
Moorehouse. "A great amount of testing has to be done before we could
advocate the use of these products. This is a complicated issue that requires
five- and 10-year studies."
The medical establishment, for now, agrees with Moorehouse. It isn't ready to
recommend that soccer players wear head protection.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) says more research is needed on the
topic. A panel of experts at a recent summit hosted by the Consumer Product
Safety Commission (CPSC) was split on the head injury risk to soccer players.
But the AAP did advise in March that young soccer players head the ball as
little as possible "until more is known about the risks for brain injury
and permanent cognitive impairment in this age group."
Meanwhile, there are signs that simply having the soccer headgear on the market
is having an impact on soccer:
 The National Referee Committee of
U.S. Soccer last year said referees could decide, on a game-by-game basis,
whether to allow players to wear headgear for medical purposes.
A school district in suburban
Milwaukee will require that soccer players at its only middle school wear
headgear in the fall.
Two California Youth Soccer League
teams of 11-year-olds played a game in Murrieta, Calif., in September while
wearing the headgear of a fourth inventor, Texas businessman Calvin Williams.
"We are where hockey was 20 years ago, when there was a lot of resistance
to helmets. Now they are mandatory. In soccer, they resisted shinguards at
first, and now they are mandatory, too," says Blois Olson, spokesman for
Soccerdocs, which makes a headband device called Headers, invented by Long and
Halvorson of St. Paul.
Designers say the products diminish the impact of fast soccer balls to the head
by 40% to 50%.
"Soccer has gotten more physical, and the equipment needs to reflect that
trend," Zatlin says. "The game is not the same as when I played it. It
is much more aggressive, much rougher. I have seen kids collide heads. I have
seen them get cold-cocked with elbows."
The products are available mostly over the Internet, but some makers, including
Long and Halvorson, plan marketing blitzes this summer that may put the headgear
on the shelves of major sporting goods retailers.
Unquestionably, soccer is a rough sport. The CPSC classified it as a contact
sport in 1988, and it remains the only team contact sport that does not require
helmets. According to the latest figures available, there were 169,734 soccer
injuries in 1998, and 10,372 of those were head injuries of all types, including
cuts and bruises.
While head bumping and even kicks to the head have long been risks of the game,
research indicates that they could be more damaging than previously thought and
that even the rudimentary skill of heading a ball could jeopardize a player's
health .
A study last fall in The Journal of the American Medical Association
showed that players who head the ball several times a game don't perform as well
on cognitive tests as swimmers and runners. Another study in JAMA found
that soccer players suffered the third-highest incidence of concussions, behind
football players and wrestlers. And a study out in May from the University of
California, Los Angeles, found that "mild concussions" may have more
serious long-term effects than commonly believed.
There are plenty of coaches, team physicians and soccer officials who dispute
the findings.
"People have the opportunity to injure themselves in sport, that's the way
it is," says Tom Sells of Altmonte Springs, Fla., the National Soccer
Coaches Association's national youth girls coach of the year in 1999. "We
now have data overload. We create issues that aren't issues. I think people are
overly concerned with a non-problem."
John Powell, a professor of kinesiology and an athletic trainer at Michigan
State University in East Lansing, says it is unlikely the headgear will make any
difference in injuries because so many variables determine a concussion. A main
cause is the brain bouncing around inside the skull, which can happen many ways,
he says.
"A protective headband may give you piece of mind, but it really won't
prevent injury," says Powell, whose study of 23,000 sports injuries
appeared last year in JAMA. "It won't do anything for whiplash,
which can cause brain trauma, and won't affect the integrity of a person's brain
tissue. Let's not sell 8 million of these and then find out they are bad for the
neck or something."
But the reports about head injuries have the soccer world concerned. The U.S.
Soccer Sports Medicine Committee issued a rebuttal this year to the slew of
studies, stating that "it is premature to conclude that purposeful heading
of a modern soccer ball is a dangerous activity."
Rather than require headgear, the medicine committee recommends that coaches
teach proper heading techniques and require neck-strengthening exercises and
that referees call more fouls on dangerous plays.
When parents in Minnesota last year bought headgear for their kids, referees
told them it was against the rules to wear the equipment during games. So the
parents complained to the state's youth soccer director, Steve Olson. The
parents didn't know it at the time, but they had an ally in Olson.
Olson had worked for the Institute of Preventive Sports Medicine in Ann Arbor,
Mich., which conducted one of the studies on soccer head injuries, so he had
empathy for the parents' concerns. Olsen approached officials at the national
board of U.S. Soccer to see about modifying the rule.
It worked. In April 1999, the National Referee Committee voted to let each
game's referee decide whether players may wear head protection.
A year later, the Fox Point-Bayside School District outside Milwaukee voted to
require players at Bayside Middle School to wear the headgear at games.
District superintendent Jan Sodos says the decision was consistent with the
school system's concern for its students' health.
"We require protective gear for Rollerbladers, we have a strong bike
policy, and we eliminated football years ago, so this is in keeping with the
safety provision at our school," Sodos says.
School district president Jeffrey Cameron, a doctor whose specialty is brain
injury rehabilitation, says the rule was "an inexpensive way to reduce
injuries."
"Kids shouldn't head the ball. They lack the skill and coordination at that
age, and their heads are unusually big for their bodies," he says. No other
school districts have indicated they would follow Bayside's lead, but Cameron
says, "Maybe parents at the other schools will ask their coaches why their
kids don't have protection."
But will the soccer headgear be a hit with kids? Hard to say.
Amanda Greenstein, 10, a soccer player in Ashland, Ore., wears the Headers band
at games and practice. "It makes my head feel more padded," she says.
"It doesn't hurt as much when I head, and I think it looks cool."
At a soccer field in Arlington, Va., recently, 13-year-old John Westgate, a
forward with the South Arlington Soccer Club Falcons, said he could see someone
else wearing the headgear, but not him.
Perhaps someone like Jeff Imperato, 14, of the Arlington Optimists, or his
teammate Frankie Hazera, 14, who both say they would have no problem trying out
the gear.
"I might wear it," Imperato says. "I have hit a lot of balls on
my head, and it hurts my noggin."
Adds Hazera: "I would try it if it helps my head and prevents brain
damage."
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