Changing the Game by John O'Sullivan

Author:John O'Sullivan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Morgan James Publishing
Published: 2024-09-12T00:00:00+00:00

Physical Safety

It is critically important that your child’s sports environment be a safe one. Environmental safety refers to:

Your child’s overall health and conditioning: Make sure your child is cleared by your doctor to participate in sports, and after an injury, again cleared by a doctor to resume participation.

Proper nutrition and hydration: Most kids do not drink enough water or eat a diet conducive to athletic performance. Sports is a great way to improve your entire families’ eating and drinking habits and to recognize what foods help performance and which ones hinder it.

Proper equipment: Out-of-date protective equipment can be extremely dangerous, and ill-fitting shoes can lead to blisters or far worse injuries. Make sure your child is properly equipped to play their sport of choice.

Injury prevention and treatment: From first aid kits to CPR training, there should be an adult on site who is capable of dealing with injuries as they occur. Most sports clubs also do injury prevention programs, such as limited pitch counts and knee injury prevention exercises.

Safety goes beyond your child’s physical well-being and also refers to the environment he is placed in. No one should ever leave their child in the care of a coach, volunteer, or administrator they feel uncomfortable with. Despite the fact that nearly every sporting organization requires its coaches and volunteers to undergo background checks, every week around the country there are instances where known sexual predators have slipped through the cracks and are around children. If it can happen at Penn State University, it can happen at your local club.

Parents cannot turn a blind eye to the fact that danger may lurk around every corner for our kids, and we cannot bury our head in the sand. We have a responsibility to educate ourselves, and we cannot be indifferent, hoping nothing will happen to our child. There is no profile for sexual predators; they may be rich or poor, high IQ or low-functioning. They may be good-looking and well-mannered, and are often not the scruffy and disheveled characters we see in mug shots on TV. We must do our due diligence to ensure that whomever we entrust our children with are safe and responsible.

How important is this? The U.S. Department of Justice reports that 96 percent of all sexual assaults were perpetrated by males, and 23 percent of those were assaults by males under age eighteen. Over two-thirds of victims are under the age of eighteen, and more than half of those are under the age of twelve. More worrying is that over 90 percent of sexual assaults were committed by an acquaintance of the victim. For children under six, only 3 percent of assaults were committed by a stranger; that figure only rises to 5 percent for children ages six to eleven. The point here is not to lock your child in your home. It is to make sure that when you choose the athletic environment for your child, you are doing your research, considering all factors in your decision, and not basing it solely on wins and losses.

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