Contact sports cost high school and college athletes thousands of injuries each year. The New York Times reported making contact sports noncontact would save 49,600 injuries among athletes per year.
Here are seven takeaways:
1. Among male high school athletes, transforming contact sports into noncontact would create 601,900 fewer injuries every year.
2. In turn, medical cost and time lost savings could be as much as $1.5 million per year for colleges and $19.2 billion per year for high schools. However, these costs do not include long term effects, such as concussions or repeated injuries.
3. The repercussions of ligament tears, which are common among contact sport athletes, can lead to a greater than 50 percent risk of arthritis 10 years later.
4. High school students are reportedly more prone to injuries because they are not as skilled, have less experienced coaches and may not be physically mature.
5. Robert Cantu, MD, a founder of the Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy Center at Boston University found there are approximately 1 million high school football players and 100,000 college football players. And even if injury rates are similar, the total number of injuries in high school athletes is higher leading to
more expensive medical costs.
6. While states mandate concussion reporting, states do not providing funding for reporting injuries, and the data that exists is often times hard to collect for studies.
7. Various researchers and physicians at Yale University in New Haven, Conn., said they would not allow their children to play contact sports.