When it comes to sports, it’s all fun and games — literally — until someone sprains their ankle. Or gets a concussion. Or breaks a finger. We know kids need physical activity to be healthy, but how do we keep them safe at the same time?
On this episode of Kids Health Matters, we talk with pediatric sports medicine specialist Dr. David Soma about kids sports injuries: What the risks are, how we minimize them, and how we help our kids recover and get back out there.
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Read the transcript:
Dr. Angela Mattke:
Hi! I’m Dr. Angela Mattke, a pediatrician with Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, and I specialize in helping parents make sense of medical issues. On each episode of “Kids Health Matters,” we talk to different medical experts to get the latest pediatric research and recommendations. This episode—sports injuries. Dr. David Soma doesn’t just treat sports injuries. He’s experienced quite a few himself.
I grew up doing sports my whole life. I played football, basketball, baseball, track, soccer, and did wrestling for a while. I’ve done them all. I had broken bones, I’ve had dislocations, [and] many other things—but just had injuries throughout my life.
I went to St. John’s University. The coach I played for, his name was John Ghilardi. He’s the winningest college football coach of all time, all levels. I was able to be a part of a national championship football team my senior year. But part of the reason I also like sports is that I was injured during that time. Even though I was on the team, I wasn’t able to play in that game, still enjoyed it, still loved every minute of it. But I can see the impact of having something you’ve worked for your whole life kind of being taken away because of an injury.
When I went through medical school, I realized that the two things I liked the most were kids and sports. That’s kind of where my energy was put. Then I really enjoyed my career, caring for kids and being able to relate to their experiences based off of my own. As an athlete, doctor, parent, and coach, Dave has had a front row seat to tons of injuries, like concussions.
I’ll be at a game and a kid goes down and all of my kid teammates know that I’m a sports medicine doctor [so] all the eyes start turning towards me like, ‘You got to go out there.’ You can tell a lot from when they get hit [and] what happens. Does the kid clutch their head; are they unconscious or are they really writhing in pain? Or do they hop right up and resume activity right away? You can glean a lot from just watching them.
One of the ones that has happened actually relatively recently is I’ve been covering a lot of the local high school football games and we had a game where there was an individual who had obviously been hit in the head numerous times. I didn’t see it, but what we noticed after a play was that one of his teammates was kind of helping him to walk, which raised a little bit of concern because usually you should be able to walk under your own power. Then that prompted us to go out there to bring him off the field and evaluate.
When it comes to sports, it’s literally all fun and games until someone sprains an ankle [injury], gets a concussion, breaks a finger—We could go on for days. If your kid plays a sport or enjoys any kind of athletic activity, injury comes with the territory. One in three childhood injuries is sports-related. It’s not just football players crashing into each other. Injuries can be sudden, like from collisions or falls—but they can also creep up gradually from overuse, or misuse.
There’s risk, but physical activity is also one of the most categorically beneficial things that a kid can do. How do we balance that good stuff against the risks? What can we do to keep our kids safe on the field, in the pool, wherever? That’s why we’re talking with Dr. David Soma. Dave is a pediatric sports medicine physician at Mayo’s Rochester clinic, where he specializes in pediatric concussions and overuse injuries. Dave, the benefits of sports and physical activity might seem a little self-evident.
Dr. David Soma:
Kids run around outside, they burn energy, they build muscles, and the parents are very happy and they rejoice. Yay! Right? We’re parents. We know. But there’s more to it than that. There’s more to the benefits of sports. I could probably go on talking about the benefits of sports all day long. But I try to categorize it into some different categories; the physical one, I think, is the most obvious, right? Exercise is good. It helps your cardiovascular health. It helps your general health. It actually has many, many physical benefits.
But the other thing is it has psychological benefits. There’s a lot of research that has shown that those who are involved in team sports or organized sports have less mental health concerns. They have lower incidence of suicide. There’s a lot of things that can provide those psychological or mental health benefits. Then there’s social benefits.
Socially, it’s an automatic way to almost build friendships. It teaches you social skills. It teaches you how to work in a team, things that are really just built in. You’re not even intending for these things to happen. They just happen automatically by being in these environments. Then the last one is that it keeps you out of trouble and sets you up for success. These are harder to quantify to a degree, but there’s been research that shows athletes typically eat healthier. They are less likely to do drugs. They are less likely to have teen pregnancies. They’re less likely to drink alcohol, a lot of these high risk activities, and then that’s the short term risk in the long term. When you look at studies, you can take high school athletes compared to non high school athletes, and you can see that they are more likely to go to college.
They typically have higher paying jobs, you know, 5 or 10 years after they graduate from college. They’re more likely to initiate exercise in their own children, so it passes on from generation to generation. These are things that not just impact people’s lives right now when they’re doing the sport, these are things that can carry on to make huge impacts in their lifelong decisions, whether it be keeping them out of trouble or setting them up for success.
Why that is, I don’t think we can fully say, but from my own personal experience, it’s just all the lessons you learn, like you learn to work hard. If you can run a mile and you have to push through pain and you have to push through perseverance and do all these different things that help you in life.
Learning to work on a team helps you in life. Just being around success, like if you’re on a team learning how to succeed, learning what it takes is really helpful. Also how to deal with failure. These are things that a lot of times in our society might be lacking, and these are skills that really set your kid up for success.
Dr. Angela Mattke:
Is there any specific age that you recommend kids start playing competitive sports?
Dr. David Soma:
I’m probably biased. I really don’t think it’s ever too early to put a ball in your kid’s hand or put a ball on their foot or put some special shoes on them. But there are milestones that are important to think about.
When you’re thinking about being 23 or 45-years-old. That’s just having fun with your kid or having fun with a young child. That’s just having them try to kick a ball into a goal, having them try to put a ball into a hoop, having them try to catch a ball or do different things. But you have to realize that the developmental abilities of these kids are different. You can’t throw a ball at a two year old and expect them to catch. They’re going to get hit in the face. They have a hard time following rules and their attention span’s relatively limited. You have to know what the goals are. But as they get older, they can start to do different things. When they’re maybe closer to five or six, then you can actually start giving them rules.
Commands, directions, more structure. They’re used to that. They’re in the school setting and then when they’re 10, 12, 13, then you can start to work more on maybe performance, maybe actually emphasizing winning a little bit, understanding the losing aspect of things. Each level has its own things that I would really emphasize, but it’s okay. Every kid’s different. Some six-year-olds can follow directions really, really well. They’re really engaged and interested. Other kids are a little bit more distractible or less passionate. You want to make sure that it’s something the kid wants to do as well.
Dr. Angela Mattke:
Any advice on how to pick a sport for your kid?
Dr. David Soma:
I would say most of the time the sport the kid does is usually based off the parent’s interest in sports. I can speak from my own experience. Football, basketball, track, and baseball were the main four sports I did growing up, and ironically, all three of my boys play football, basketball, and baseball.
My kids have tried soccer, they’ve tried wrestling, they’ve tried hockey, and I think that what happens, probably inadvertently sometimes, is the kids sense what you’re passionate about and kids tend to want to bond with their father or mother. They want to do things that they can do together and if you’re more comfortable with that, they’ll do it.
But the other thing to consider outside of what you’re interested in is what do you think your kids’ attributes are or their skills are that would help them to be successful. You don’t want to pigeonhole a kid at a young age and say, well, you’re fast at five so therefore you should do track.
I think that you want to expose them to a lot, have them try different things and then see what things they seem to excel in and what things they enjoy and then let that kind of guide the decision. Try out things, step outside of your comfort zone as a parent and see what the kids may like. But really all kids can play all different types of sports.
Dr. Angela Mattke:
Absolutely. What advice would you give to a parent who’s dreaming of their child becoming the next Serena Williams or Simone Biles or LeBron James? That’s every parent’s dream, for their kid to be the next G.O.A.T.
Dr. David Soma:
We get a lot of these for sure. The intentions are good, right? We all want our children to succeed, but being honest, I think that if they’re choosing to have their kids be in sports for the reason that they’re trying to be the next superstar or the next G.O.A.T, they’re in it for the wrong reason.
Just statistically, if you just look at the odds, I mean, I would say that a likelihood of a youth participating in sports, finding their way up to the NBA, the NFL, Major League Baseball, NHL, WNBA, MLS, whatever it might be, we’re looking at probably one in 10,000, one in 100,000, maybe one in a million, depending upon the sport you’re choosing.
We all think our children are one in a million. When they hear you say the chance is one in a million, they might be saying, “so you’re telling me there’s a chance.” No. We’re really trying to say that we don’t want to shoot kids’ aspirations and dreams down. But if the reason why you’re having your kids do sports is to have them get accolades and fame and scholarship, then you’re in it for the wrong reason.
Already people put internal pressures on themselves because athletes are typically very competitive. But if you’re getting the added pressure of the coach and the parents and everyone else expecting you to do great things and you don’t succeed, then you feel like a failure.
You’re going to fail in sports. That’s okay. But if you’re failing people, that’s a lot of stress for an individual to take on. This is just a recipe for burnout. We see kids that are really gifted in the younger age groups, and they’re the star of their team, and they get to high school, and they don’t even like the sport they were so good at anymore.
Or they’re getting so much pressure. They’re pushing themselves so hard. They develop injury and then that causes them to miss time. We want parents to be supportive. But if the support is a pressure, then that’s really not the goal of their child participating.
If you start sensing that your kid is less motivated to work out, they’re not enjoying their participation, you really got to look inward and start thinking, “man, am I putting extra pressure on the child” and realize that this could be actually going against your ultimate goals of having your child succeed in sports.
Physical activity is so good for your kid’s brain and body. But sports can also strengthen social connections, help your kid learn to work as part of a team, set goals, and do hard things.
You can start pretty early, just remember to meet your kid where they’re at, developmentally. Focus on the basic mechanics first-—kicking, throwing, catching–then work your way up to rules, strategy, resilience in the face of defeat. Remember to let your kid’s passion drive. Supporting them is great and we all want our kid to succeed, but too much external pressure can undercut all that other good stuff. Now, let’s talk about injuries.
Dr. Angela Mattke: When we think sports injury, the first thing that probably comes to mind is some type of trauma or more like acute injury, concussion, a broken bone, a sprained ankle, but that’s just one type of injury. What else is there?
Dr. David Soma:
The way that I would phrase injuries and kids is there’s two flavors; one is those sudden injuries that we all know of when the kid falls or twists or gets hit. Those are the common ones. The other one that’s overlooked is when they do too much of the same thing, or they do too much training or whatever it is, [which] can have repercussions. When we think about overuse injuries, that just means that your body is put under repetitive stress, and at some point that stress becomes too much that you can develop various injuries. There’s a lot of them. You can get stress fractures. You can get tendonitis, you can develop a kind of impingement.
There’s a whole bunch of different things that can happen over time as a result of that repetitive stress.
Dr. Angela Mattke:
My college career was spent in surgeries with my physical therapist, with my trainers, because I had those chronic overuse injuries from being a collegiate runner. College athletes in particular are really high level high school athletes. Those chronic injuries sometimes get ignored. How can we teach families to notice these and also help to put the brakes on for some of those. Athletes, like we said, that are really competitive, that don’t put the brakes on for themselves.
Dr. David Soma:
Like you said, a lot of the times the sports you’re participating in tend to predispose to certain injuries, right? You can get various injuries in any sport, for sure. But I tend to think that we think of football, soccer, basketball, those sports are leading themselves more towards traumatic injuries because you collide with somebody else.
But you get your dancers, your runners, your swimmers, people that are doing kind of those repetitive motions without the risk of collisions or contact as much, they develop it. I think a lot of times it’s educating those athletes. Those sports aren’t maybe as popular or mainstream sometimes. Sometimes there’s a lack of awareness around those things.
But the other thing is a lot of times, the coaches, the parents, and the teammates normalize these things. It’s okay to have pain and push through it. It’s okay to have a stress fracture. It’s okay to have these types of injuries. Sometimes there is some truth to that. There are opportunities to push through the pain, but at some point, they require some medical attention or some rest, and the big part of that is just understanding how to prevent injuries, and then when does it cross a threshold to say, hey, this is actually more than just soreness or a minor thing and I actually need to seek medical attention and that sometimes can be a challenge, especially for the untrained medical professional.
But that’s where we got to educate, get out there and let them know that if you’re having to push through pain constantly, this is probably an indication to get some help.
Dr. Angela Mattke:
At the beginning of this episode, you gave the example about concussions that you’ve seen, especially this year at the high school football team as the team coach. Concussions can feel really extra scary to parents because they involve the brain, right? What does the concussion feel like for a kid and what do they look like to the parent, or the coach, or the team doctor standing on those sidelines?
Dr. David Soma:
I’ll start off with a little personal story. I played football and did basketball and baseball sports, and I’ve had numerous concussions. The number, I don’t know for sure. It’s probably in the order of five, six, seven. I say that for two reasons; number one is to say it’s okay. Right.
I’m a little weird. Maybe I would be a neurosurgeon or something else if I didn’t have these injuries. I’m just kidding. But in general I’m okay. Not everyone who has a concussion or two turns out to have these major problems in the long term. I don’t want to dismiss that possibility. But the majority of people who have concussions or head injuries do quite well. However, the flip side of that I also share about concussions is that I understand what it’s like to have one. When you have a concussion, not all of them are created equal. Sometimes they’re very profound. An athlete I’ve seen recently couldn’t remember his middle name at the time of the injury.
He didn’t know where he was. He was very impaired. He had to miss a few days of school. He was quite symptomatic. It took him a long time to get back to normal. But then I’ve had others where you kind of get hit and you have relatively mild symptoms, maybe a headache, a little bit off, you’re not feeling quite right, but you’re very well oriented, your balance is okay, but you’re not quite there, and that one maybe you recover a little bit more quickly from.
It’s hard to say that there’s a cookie cutter or a recipe that fits every single concussion but I think it’s just kind of being aware of what are the signs and symptoms. Then kind of getting it in the hands of somebody who’s used to seeing these because usually kids do great if they just get the proper medical attention, they take themselves out of the game and they get the proper instruction. It’s something to take seriously, but I would say not something to be scared of, if that makes sense.
With the student we talked about at the beginning, the football player who needed help walking–was it a concussion? And what do you do in that scenario? We discovered that he did indeed have a concussion. But these types of things are usually something you observe with your eyes or maybe an athlete comes to you complaining of a symptom. Those are usually a good clue that we should be saying, “Hey, this is something we should take seriously and does require that more in depth evaluation.”
If you have the ability to do that evaluation on the sidelines with someone who’s got some medical training, that’s ideal. But if not, then you just pull them out of the game and you make your own best decision. You can wait for them to get a more formal medical evaluation, whether that be in the clinic emergency department or otherwise.
Dr. Angela Mattke:
We hear a lot in the media about concussions and the long term consequences of concussions, movies, books, everything’s been made about them. What are the long term consequences of concussions or traumatic brain injuries?
Dr. David Soma:
We’re still learning. I wish I could say that we know that if you have a certain number of concussions, this is what happens to you later on. But, like with many things in life, it’s multifactorial. Genetics probably play a role. How many concussions you had probably plays a role. The number of sub concussive blows, just repetitive head trauma over time, might play a role.
When you did have your head injuries, did you treat them properly and fully recover between the episodes, or did you just keep on playing and kind of hide them and continue to play? There’s a lot of factors that go into determining what the long term risks are.
30, 40, 50 years ago, even when I played in high school and college in the late 90s, early 2000s, when you had a concussion, it was like, hey, how many fingers am I holding up? If you could answer the question, you could go back into the game. We’ve come a long way and we’re much more sophisticated in helping to diagnose these.
A lot of the time, maybe some of the reason we’re dealing with problems is because back then we didn’t realize the importance of them, we were letting people go back prematurely. They were stacking up numerous concussions and having problems.
Now we identify them better. We take people out of sports. We allow them to fully recover—that typically results in better outcomes. Maybe what we’ll find in 15, 20, 30 years is that some of these long term effects that we’re worried about, hopefully will be less prevalent because we’ve been managing them and recognizing them better, but I don’t think we really know all the long term effects.
Not everyone with dementia or depression or memory loss or chronic headaches has had multiple head traumas and not everyone with multiple head traumas who develops that is because of the head trauma. It’s an evolving topic. It’s very important to figure this out because we want to protect people in the long term. But at this point in time, it’s really hard to say what is the risk for every individual.
Dr. Angela Mattke:
Are athletes the only people who get sports injuries?
Dr. David Soma:
No, thank you for bringing that up. Because I think as we talked about earlier, we can’t wrap kids in a bubble, right? I actually have had some of my bigger injuries not doing sports. It’s usually like me jumping off a playground or doing something I wasn’t supposed to do and getting an injury.
People can fall off their bikes. They can collide, there’s many opportunities for people to get injured. I’ve seen concussions, broken bones, sprains, strains, you name it. In sports, out of sports, walking down the street, slipping on ice. You really can’t escape life without taking some risk. Yes, we do see them maybe at a certain higher frequency in some activities than others, but I would say these types of injuries can occur anywhere.
Dr. Angela Mattke:
I would throw out their caution to the parents when you play the team versus the parent game. We just had that in our soccer league and all I could think of is like, don’t tear my ACL. Don’t pop my achilles tendon. Like just don’t get hurt, right?
Dr. David Soma:
Yeah, we want kids and parents to work together and collaborate and do things together. But yeah, anyone can get injured. Sometimes those weekend warriors or those people that are living in the past, like myself, get out there and things can happen if you’re not ready to do it.
Dr. Angela Mattke:
Okay, Dave. Here’s the big question. You’ve kind of answered this already, but should parents let their kids play football? I get asked this all the time. In the office.
Dr. David Soma:
Yeah. I’m biased. I played college football. I have three kids. The younger two play flag, but my older one he’s in seventh grade and he does play tackle. The fact that I’m letting my own kids play tells you that I think it’s okay. But that being said, I wouldn’t let my kids do something that I didn’t think was okay or safe for them to do.
There is risk in football. The incidence of concussion in football may be higher than in some other sports. Totally acknowledge that. But at the same time, football has some beauty to it. It’s one of a few team sport out there where typically high schools and such and younger sports don’t cut anybody.
There’s not a tryout for the football team. If your kid is big, small, short, whatever it might be, size, speed, whatever their skills are, there’s room for them on the team. The other thing is I think it does teach not only physical toughness to play a sport that has contact, but it teaches mental toughness, and that’s something that’s really, really important in our youth.
Another thing that’s really nice about football is it’s a sport that has a finite season. Football typically starts in August and ends October, November, and it’s not a sport that kids play year round. We see just an epidemic of overuse injuries from kids playing the same sport all year round.
I don’t know any kid in the world who plays football year round. Most football coaches encourage kids to do a second or a third sport. Football gets a bad rap. There is a risk of injury. I don’t want to minimize that, but there’s a lot of things that make it great.
I don’t think you should force your kid into it if they don’t want to play it. But if they say mom, dad, whatever, I really want to play football, you should really consider it. If they start stacking up injuries or they have a couple concussions, then maybe there’s an opportunity to reassess. But, there are people that can go through their football career and never have a concussion and then they get to play and catch in baseball. It’s not a guarantee yes or no, whether you play football, whether this is going to happen or not.
Dr. Angela Mattke:
Is there anything you can do to make football safer or minimize injury?
Dr. David Soma:
Yeah. I would speak outside of football in general. there’s constant research looking at ways to make sports safer as a whole, and I kind of categorize it into a couple different areas. One is rules. Changing the rules, making it so that we adapt the sport to keep the sport, but yet make it safer.
In the NFL, they’ve modified the kickoff because they realize that there’s a high volume of concussions in the kickoff. In hockey, in the youth levels, there’s like checking and being near the boards. That’s a high area. In modifying soccer, they’re talking about headers because headers are kind of a big thing.
We want to still keep the sport relevant in the same sport we love, but there are simple modifications to the sport that we can do to inherently make it safer and still make it very fun for kids. That’s one part of it.
Second is equipment. When we think about equipment obviously helmets are the first thing that comes to mind and helmets are important, but they’re not a concussion proof device. If you think about it, where do most concussions occur? In football, and what are they wearing? Helmets. It obviously doesn’t protect them, but what it does is it protects against more severe injuries.
Helmet technology is constantly evolving. There’s things out there that we’re looking at where there’s padding on the helmet, mouth guards, different types of helmets, and that maybe there’s some promise there. I don’t think that the evidence is overwhelming at this point in time, but we’re looking to find ways to provide technology or equipment to improve the safety of various sports, which is also very good. Lastly is just training. When you have an injury or you are doing something, decreasing unnecessary risk in your training.
I played college football and we didn’t tackle in practices. The coach I had was really ahead of his times. We would really just go through the motions of tackling and then kind of stop. The whole point of that was to decrease injury. He did that 40, 50 years ago, and the number of concussions we hadn’t practiced throughout the course of my college career was just a couple and it was usually fluke. Whereas you’ll see these other colleges where they line up kids across from each other, 10 yards and they’re running full speed and colliding.
Well, what do you think is going to happen? So modifying training, decreasing unnecessary risk, and playing smart and safe. All things are things that we can do to mitigate some of that risk. But I don’t want to get caught up too much in concussion. I also want to be mindful that there is a prevention of other injuries too. We can prevent overuse injuries. We can prevent traumatic injuries. Concussions is just one aspect of injury.
Dr. Angela Mattke:
Absolutely. Do you feel like the athletes you know, the kids themselves have any?
Dr. David Soma:
Oh, that’s a tough one. I do think they have a responsibility. Not every kid plays the same. Some kids play with reckless abandonment.
Dr. Angela Mattke:
Yes.
Dr. David Soma:
Go around and they are running and flying all over the field and that’s their nature, right? That’s sometimes what makes them good. They play fearlessly. There are other kids who play a little scared and they don’t want to get into the mix and that is there makeup, and so there is something inherent in just how the kids play the game that do it playing dirty or playing really afraid that I also think can be dangerous because if you’re playing where you’re going in to do something and you’re kind of avoiding something, then you’re putting something else at risk because if you’re not leading with your head, then you’re leading with your shoulder.
Maybe that’s not proper. If you’re playing really scared or protecting something, then you’re actually putting something else at risk. Or if you’re playing dirty where you’re like, “Oh, my job is to get this guy out” or this person, “I’m going to play extra physical with them,” then that’s kind of unsafe in that regard. You’re either going to injure yourself or injure that person that you’re going after. There’s responsibility from an individual level to make sure you’re not doing that. The other thing that you’re responsible for as an individual is to recognize when something’s wrong. I feel something is different, then you gotta seek medical attention. I know it’s hard because everybody wants to keep on playing and they worry that if they go tell the trainer or the coach or a parent or a doctor that they’re not feeling right, that they’re going to get pulled out of the game.
But what I’ll tell you is that oftentimes if we can recognize it early before it gets too bad, you’re going to miss less time than if you keep on going through things. If you have just some foot pain, maybe that’s an early stress injury and we recognize it early, then you might only miss a couple weeks.
Whereas if it gets a full blown stress fracture and it’s really bad and you’re gonna miss a lot of time. If you get hit in the head and you think you might have a concussion, but I’m not gonna tell anybody and I keep on taking hits instead of missing maybe one game, you’re gonna miss three or four. If you roll your ankle just a teeny bit and you’re not feeling quite strong or steady, but then you keep on playing, maybe that turns into a worse ankle injury or maybe you hurt your knees.
A lot of times people are a little short-sighted with these things, and they don’t want to recognize something’s wrong and share it. Typically, a good team coach, a good team athletic trainer, a good team doctor, they’re going to try to really balance those risks and benefits, and if you can play, we’re going to get you out there.
Dr. Angela Mattke:
As a parent, what’s the best thing I can do to support my kid while they’re recovering from an injury? Because it’s really hard. We’ve both talked about having lots of injuries and now we’re on the other side. We’re the parents.
Dr. David Soma:
There’s a lot of different things you can do. One part of it is just being there emotionally for them. Listening to them. Asking them questions. Some teenagers don’t want to talk to their parents, but just ask “how are you doing? Anything I can do for you?” Just letting them know that you’re there is a good start.
The other thing is to encourage them to be around their team. A lot of times, what happens is that they think they’re injured and so they can’t contribute. Then they stay home because they’re like, “well, I can’t be out there, I can’t play.”
Get them on the practice field. Be on the sidelines of the game—because that that social context is really important, and then you realize there actually is a role even if you’re not playing in the game. You might be helping to coach. You might be one that’s cheering. You might be helping to keep stats.
There’s many different things that you can do to really still help the team and still feel a part of it. Like I said, I missed the national championship football game because of injuries when I was growing up and it hurt. But you know what? I was still there. I was still in silence. I was still cheering. I was still helping to plan out how we can be effective with our strategies to help you feel a part of it, but also to help your team.
Even if it’s sometimes hard, it is emotionally hard to not be able to be out there. The benefits typically outweigh that little negative and the teammates typically are very supportive in my experience. They want you to be there. They are there. They include you. Being around the team is important.
Then finding other outlets. Some people just love to exercise and be a part of it. Let’s say your leg is hurt. Maybe you’re weightlifting your upper body or you’re doing something different to remain active or doing things to train. That will still allow you a quicker recovery. So sometimes it’s physical therapy. Sometimes it’s working on other parts of your body, but there are oftentimes, even amidst injury, things that you can do to train so that when you finally are healthy, you’re more equipped to be out there.
Emotional support for your child, getting them around their team, and finding other physical or other outlets for them to stay well and healthy.
Dr. Angela Mattke:
Dave, what’s the final assessment? Like if my kid plays sports, should I just assume that they’re going to just get injured at some point?
Dr. David Soma:
This is gonna sound a little off, but I hope your kid gets injured. The reason I say that is because that means they’re being active. If you are actively playing at the playground, if you’re doing sports, if you’re doing something, you’re probably going to scrape your knee. You’re going to get a bruise. You’re going to maybe break a bone.
I’d never wish for a major injury. I don’t want people having surgery, but I want kids to be active and scrape their knees and get out and live a little bit. That teaches them some life lessons. It means they’re active, which we know is good. If we’re not letting our kids do things out of fear of injury, we’re doing them a disservice because life has risks and we want to let them do that.
Sports are great because it’s in a controlled environment. You have coaches, you have people there, you have supervision. This is the place to allow your kids to take a chance, get out, have fun. And yeah, an injury probably could happen, but that’s where, if they have an injury. You have support.
You can get to the coaches. There’s a lot of time for athletic trainers. You can come to the clinic. We can decide and help you make a determination on getting back out there. But let your kid live a little bit. If they get injured. That’s just part of life.
Dr. Angela Mattke:
Exactly. Don’t keep them in a bubble. There’s a like ability to reframe it too and be like this is an opportunity for my child to develop some resilience, right? And perseverance and have to maybe set out and work their way back up when things feel hard.
Dr. David Soma:
Totally agree. When it comes to the benefits of sports, the list is so long. And the risk of injury is there. I’m not denying that. But the vast, vast, vast, vast majority of injury kids recover from, and they do great. The number of lifelong injuries that kids experience is so few and far between that you’d really be doing a disservice by saying I’m not going to let my kid have a chance to participate in something that provides so many benefits just out of the fear of something that may or may not actually happen. And again, what sport your child chooses depends on how much they participate. That’s maybe a different question, but the benefits are very clear.
Dr. Angela Mattke:
Is there one sport that really hits that sweet spot that has the perfect balance between minimal risk and max reward?
Dr. David Soma:
It’s the sport you sign your kid up for. And the sport that they enjoy. There is really no sport that is off limits and there’s no sport that I think is injury proof. If it’s a sport that you and your family and the student or the athlete is passionate about, and it’s something that you can get them signed up for you’ve won in my eyes, so there isn’t one that’s the perfect balance.
There’s not a kid on the planet for the most part that can’t find a sport, even [for] our adaptive athletes. There is really something for most kids. Again, there are some kids with really severe medical complexity, but even in those situations, a lot of times you can still find ways to get them around sporting environments and teams that can be still valuable.
Dr. Angela Mattke:
Awesome. This is so good, Dave.
Dr. David Soma: Thank you, Angela.
Dr. Angela Mattke:
If we haven’t convinced you already, I’ll say it again—sports are so good for your kid! And injuries are a part of life. Just make sure they’re playing safe, not overdoing it, and listening to their bodies. If your kid says something feels off or hurts, talk to a trainer or your doctor. If something does go wrong and they have to sit out a bit, encourage them to find ways to stay involved with the team: go to practice, go to games, help the coach–and find ways to stay in shape or strengthen other parts of their body so they can bounce back faster and come back stronger.
That’s all for sports injuries. But if your kid has something else going on, or you have a topic suggestion, send us an email at mcppodcasts@mayo.edu, or leave us a voicemail at 507-538-6272, and we’ll see if we can help you out.
Please remember, this podcast cannot provide individual medical advice and the discussion presented here cannot replace a one-on-one consultation with a medical professional. Those earbuds are kinda shaped like an otoscope, but I can’t see anything from here. You’re gonna have to come in. Thanks for listening!
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