The Miami Dolphins are getting proactive about helping young athletes and will help fund concussion testing for high school athletes in the Miami-Dade area.
We will be paying to have approximately 15,000 Miami-Dade public HS athletes undergo baseline concussion tests.https://t.co/OkchvwWAam
— Miami Dolphins (@MiamiDolphins) July 23, 2017
Armando Salguero of the Miami Herald has the details on this fantastic story. He reports that these tests will include “sports and activities including football, soccer, wrestling, basketball, baseball and cheerleading.”
Doctors will establish baseline brain parameters for the athletes (both boys and girls) that will give them a valid comparison for when concussions do occur.
“It’s amazing and so proactive and intelligent of [the Dolphins],” said Dr. Gillian Hotz, the director of the University of Miami Sports Medicine Institute’s concussion program. “They’re loving their community like the community loves them. It’s a great partnership with the university, and it shows other teams around the country what they can do in their communities.”
Concussions are going to happen at every level of sports, and the more competitive things become the more likely they are to occur.
Per Salguero, the University of Miami has been working to catalog concussions at the high school level since 2012, during which time around 1,000 concussions have been recorded. Of those, Dr. Hotz says 65 percent of them have occurred in football players.
The Dolphins have pledged to help fund this program indefinitely, per the report.