Change Youth Sports Rules

I was only 10 years old and I was playing AYSO soccer, I was running with the soccer ball when I got slide tackled. When his legs slammed into mine I felt my legs go straight up into the air. As I fell back my head landed right on his knee.  Instantly pain shot through my head, later that day I found out that I had a concussion and I couldn’t do anything for days. I was still in elementary school and I was playing with middle schoolers. Why are these dangerous things allowed in youth sports? These moves like slide tackling often go unnoticed,  like they aren’t dangerous at all. More than 3.5 million kids under the age of fourteen receive medical treatment from sports injuries each year. (international classification of diseases).

Youth sports injuries are the second leading cause of emergency room visits, and the second leading cause for injuries in schools. Getting hurt from sports injuries is terrible and there’s been a lot of discussion to make changes but have the numbers of sports injuries gone down substantially? No. What has to happen is the rules need to change. Why are you able to slide tackle in youth soccer? A similar study published in the October 2008 issue of The American Journal of Sports Medicine looked at high school soccer injuries over a three year period in the United States. Overall, the authors found that player to player contact caused 42% of these terrible injuries, making it the most common reason of injury in youth soccer.

AYSO one of the two main national organizations for youth sports needs to change the rules for the league. Too many young children are getting hurt for no reason, you should be able to have fun and play sports without fear of getting hurt. All they would have to do would be to change just some of the rules to prevent smaller children from getting bad injuries. While in football there may be a lot of injuries soccer has zero padding except for a pair of shin guards that most youth players don’t wear to practice most of the time. I know this because when I go to soccer practice 90% of my team doesn’t even bother to wear shin guards.. Did you know that sports and recreational activities account for 21 percent of all traumatic brain injuries? Right now so many children across the globe are getting hurt for no reason because these massive organizations can’t change one rule. and tons of children doing school sports are getting hurt and getting put in emergency rooms every single day! When will big organizations that have millions end this terrible epidemic?

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