Senate Minority Whip Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) has introduced a bill called the “Protecting Student Athletes from Concussions Act.” In a release, his office says this bill would “strengthen elementary and secondary school procedures for preventing, identifying, and treating student-athletes who suffer concussions.”
That sounds helpful, but what does that really mean? After all, a lot of proposed congressional legislation is right-hearted but very wrong-headed.
In addition to requiring schools to post educational information about concussions, Durbin’s bill would require states to adopt “when in doubt, sit out” policies, which would prevent players “suspected of having sustained a concussion” from returning to play the same day and only returning to play once they have been cleared by a qualified health care professional.
This raises several questions, like what does Sen. Durbin (and the federal government) mean by “suspected of having sustained a concussion,” and how is a “qualified health care professional” determined?
Keep in mind, this proposal would be a product of the federal government, which means that it would likely cause coaches and administrators to have to be extremely careful in making sure they aren’t violating federal law. The litigation and culpability that could potentially result from a wrong decision is enormous to think about.
Again, this legislation, which is endorsed by many of the major college and professional sports associations, sounds great on the surface. Who doesn’t think the most possible should be done to protect young athletes from concussions?
But it’s important to think about what this is. The federal government would be making laws governing what takes place on football teams across the country.
Let’s be clear, a lot (a whole lot) of progress has been made in recent years toward making youth sports safer and reducing the number of concussion exposures that players have. With a few possible exceptions, you aren’t going to find any coaches who would dare continue to play a child who was suspected of having a head injury. Perhaps that wasn’t true 20 years ago, but today things are different.
At some level, we have got to trust our school administrators, the coaches, the officials, the athletic trainers and others who have decision-making power when it comes to injuries in youth sports. They need to be able to make determinations based on the health and good of that player in that circumstance, not some law written by Sen. Durbin in Washington.
There is nothing wrong with Sen. Durbin’s “when in doubt, sit out” philosophy as a general rule for youth athletics across the nation. But it’s when we start making federal laws that things tend to get complicated and unintended consequences result.
References used: Sen. Dick Durbin press release