One of the most important issues currently facing the athletes, coaches, and sports fans today is that of concussions.  As lawsuits from former players inundate the NFL and doctors try to figure out how to best diagnose and treat concussions or even how to define a concussion, one side of the story goes untold; that of current high school athletes.

I experienced this firsthand with my concussion this past football season. In our week 7 game at Borgia, I was kneed in the head early in the 4th quarter. I had a headache immediately after I got hit, but it faded after a few seconds.  It did not, however, entirely go away.  As I had no other symptoms, I played the rest of the game.  My headache did not disappear all weekend. As the next school week started, I began experiencing other concussion symptoms such as light sensitivity and nausea and thus immediately concluded that I had a concussion.

I ran into an ugly side of sports medicine a couple days later during my doctors visit. When I told him that I had continued to play after being hit in the head, he informed me in no uncertain terms that I was foolish for continuing to play when I had a headache.  He told me that if I ever was hit in the head and the pain did not go away instantaneously, I should take myself out of the game.

While I acknowledge that doctors such as the one that I visited have much more education and experience than I do, I would disagree with him on this particular matter.  I know from experience that headaches occur on a regular basis in a game that involves teenagers clothed in padding hitting and tackling each other for three hours.  If everyone who got a headache during a football game was taken out for the rest of the game, there would eventually be no football game. And while I certainly do not want to sustain a permanent brain injury while I am still in high school, I do think that the standards that we as athletes are forced to meet with regarding concussions are too high.  It is definitely right and necessary to pull an athlete from a game if he or she is visibly affected by a hit or is not feeling normal because of a hit.  But this overcaution is getting ridiculous.

On top of this, the medical community needs to deal with a concussed athlete’s emotionally state in a better way than they do now.  Athletes are often able and willing to play through significant pain and injury.  We are conditioned to fight through pain and exhaustion and continue to strive for victory.  This is impossible to do if you are concussed because a concussion is unlike any other injury.  It is often hard for an athlete who is used to toughing it out and playing through injury to be sidelined due an injury that is usually not visible.  That is the way it was with me.  I did not feel like the doctors did a good job showing empathy for my situation and my emotional state.  While the doctors do need to make it absolutely clear that an athlete should not see the field until the concussion has fully healed, they need to show that they understand what the athlete is going through.  It they do this, they will naturally gain the trust of the athlete.

With the recent increase in concussion awareness, the lawsuits inundating the NFL, and the over caution that is flooding the world of sports, it seems as if society is beginning to overemphasize safety at the expense of character-building and the thrill of competition. With the progression of technology, especially through the last 100 years, and the number of people living in the cities and the suburbs, sports is often the only opportunity that kids today have to build character, learn self-sacrifice, and learn to work with others. If we take too much out of sports, we risk losing one of the last things of true value in mainstream society.

While concussions in sports are a big issue, they should not affect the love that we as a society hold for them. While we should be cautious, we should not be cautious to such an extent that we lose our love for these games that have shaped American culture and history. Rather, we should embrace sports as something fun that can bring out the best in us and help us learn hard work and how to work with others for a common goal.