New injury prevention text for coaches

The Times Union(Albany, NY) published an article today entitled “370 pages of injury prevention” about a new text book designed specifically for help coaches take an active role in injury prevention with their athletes. The book is entitled Applied Sports Medicine for Coaches and was published in October of 2008.

Here is a description of the book as shown on Amazon.

“The first sports medicine book written specifically for coaches and coaching students, this textbook provides the knowledge necessary to integrate optimal performance training with an injury prevention program. Readers will learn how to recognize the causes and symptoms of overtraining and prevent its occurrence; help athletes deal with the psychological effects of injury; and encourage a healthy lifestyle with nutrition, fluid intake, and weight control guidelines. Moreover, the book helps coaches communicate with health professionals and understand the nature of an injury, its treatment, and the injured athlete’s limits and rehabilitation needs.”

Now, I have not read this book but in reading about it, two thoughts came to my mind:

1. Obviously, being an athletic trainer myself, I don’t think that their is any substitute for the professional care that an athletic trainer can provide. That being said, we all know that the number of schools without an ATC is large and that does not even include the grade schools and AAU, sports clubs, etc.
2. So if there is a next best step, what is it? Education. Education for those who are going to be with those kids. As was referenced in an earlier post, Concussion Management: Have you reevaluated your approach lately?, some coaches are allowing athletes to return to sport activity the same day as being unconcious from a concussion. Unfortunately, some coaches still act as though giving medication to a student-athlete is doing them a favor. Whether it is ignorance or whatever, the fact remains that poor decisions are being made on behalf of young athletes.

So if we are not able to have an ATC on site to care for these athletes, isn’t the next step to inform schools and coaches about resources such as this? Obviously, our hope would be that every school would have an athletic trainer but at this point and time, that is simply not going to be a reality any time real soon. So shouldn’t we at least do our best to make sure that athletic directors and coaches are aware of resources that can help prevent injury?

What are your thoughts on this subject? Any other ideas that are in between the two ideas shared? Feel free to share any experiences as well.

Photo Credit, by tj scenes

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