{"id":2869,"date":"2022-12-12T11:08:42","date_gmt":"2022-12-12T16:08:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/?p=2869"},"modified":"2022-12-12T11:08:43","modified_gmt":"2022-12-12T16:08:43","slug":"how-injuries-are-affecting-river-hills-student-athletes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/how-injuries-are-affecting-river-hills-student-athletes\/","title":{"rendered":"How Injuries are Affecting River Hill\u2019s Student Athletes"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

By Connor Hawthorne, Staff Writer\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Cheering crowds, triumphant victories, and hard work, however, beneath the surface there can be pain, suffering, and missed seasons brought on by injuries that are all too common for high school athletes. One of the most dreaded things, an injury, can put a student athlete on the bench for weeks, sometimes even months. Injuries can be caused by many things –\u00a0 in more physical sports like football, injuries caused by contact with other players such as broken bones and sprains are by far the most common. In other sports, overuse injuries such as shin splints and tendonitis make up the vast majority of injuries.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jazil Khalid, a sophomore on the cross country team, developed shin splints his freshman season that caused him to miss a large number of practices and races. He explains,\u201cOvertraining caused my injury.\u201d In a sport with such high volume practices, shin splints are by far the most common injury due to the amount of miles that the students run. Jazil explains that instead of jumping right into training, an athlete must build up an athletic base.\u201cWhen I first started the sport I definitely trained way too hard and got injured.\u201d According to Jazil, the problem with shin splints is that if you push through the pain and keep running, they just get worse over time. It eventually took a more serious injury for Jazil to stop running. He shares, \u201cI dealt with shin splints most of my freshman season until I pulled a hip flexor which took about a month to heal.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Junior Thomas Jayne, also \u201caccumulated overuse injuries\u201d such as \u201cbust[ing] my shins and ankles.\u201d These injuries are not only painful but they cause athletes to miss valuable training time and games where they help the team. Thomas explains, \u201c [I] missed a good amount of training and a lot of workouts that definitely set me back a bit.\u201d Although stress injuries are more common in sports like cross country and soccer, more serious injuries can occur in contact sports like football.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the most serious injuries in contact sports like football is a concussion –  a blow to the head that causes the brain to crash against the skull. Over the past year, sophomore  Cameron DeMasihas, a running back, suffered from four concussions: two from football and two from lacrosse. Cameron explains that \u201cthe more concussions you [get], the easier it is to get more.\u201d The severity of the injury also increases in cases of recurring concussions. Cameron recounts how after his third concussion he \u201cstarted noticing long-term effects with [his]  vision and mental health.\u201d His latest concussion came from \u201ca pretty average football hit\u201d but \u201clanded me in the ER.\u201d Luckily, Cameron managed to recover from the worst of it within a week, but the aftermath of the injuries still affect him today. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Sophomore Timothy Kim, a fullback on JV football, recounts the time a \u201cteammate fell back on my knee and tore my meniscus.\u201d That combined with a broken wrist earlier in the season put Tim on the bench for much of 2022. This type of occurrence is not uncommon amongst the football team. The football team has been plagued with numerous injuries this past season, which severely set back the team. Tim explains how \u201cwe were solid in the beginning but towards the end our entire starting lineup was injured, so it definitely affected our performance.\u201d With River Hill coming so close to making states, one must wonder what would have happened without all these injuries. With all these detrimental effects of being injured to not only the athlete, but also the team, it should come as no surprise that River Hill has an athletic trainer to help athletes recover quickly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although the athletic trainer can help athletes recover from injuries, one hindrance to that goal is that the trainer is shared amongst multiple schools and is only at River Hill a few days a week. Tim recounts,\u201clast year’s athletic trainer was super cool; she was a good athletic trainer but she’s not here a lot.\u201d Quinlan Ballou, a sophomore, who developed persistent tendonitis running cross country recounts how \u201cthe experiences I\u2019ve had were not the best.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Although when an athlete is injured treating their injury is important, it is optimal to take measures to prevent injuries in the first place. Thomas explains that \u201cour coach has gotten new equipment to help stretch and prevent injury.\u201d The football coaches are doing likewise. With concussions being a serious injury in football, Tim explains that \u201cthis year we have new shells on our helmets to prevent concussions.\u201d The best way to treat injuries is to prevent them in the first place and hopefully these measures will reduce the number of injuries for athletes.   <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

By Connor Hawthorne, Staff Writer\u00a0 Cheering crowds, triumphant victories, and hard work, however, beneath the surface there can be pain, suffering, and missed seasons brought on by injuries that are all too common for high school athletes. One of the most dreaded things, an injury, can put a student athlete on the bench for weeks,…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":21,"featured_media":2870,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2869","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-feature"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/12\/Screenshot-2022-12-12-110824.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2869","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/21"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2869"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2869\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2871,"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2869\/revisions\/2871"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2869"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2869"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/riverhillcurrent.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2869"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}