By Connor Hawthorne, Staff Writer
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 – 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.
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,“Overtraining caused my injury.” 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.“When I first started the sport I definitely trained way too hard and got injured.” 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, “I dealt with shin splints most of my freshman season until I pulled a hip flexor which took about a month to heal.”
Junior Thomas Jayne, also “accumulated overuse injuries” such as “bust[ing] my shins and ankles.” These injuries are not only painful but they cause athletes to miss valuable training time and games where they help the team. Thomas explains, “ [I] missed a good amount of training and a lot of workouts that definitely set me back a bit.” Although stress injuries are more common in sports like cross country and soccer, more serious injuries can occur in contact sports like football.
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 “the more concussions you [get], the easier it is to get more.” The severity of the injury also increases in cases of recurring concussions. Cameron recounts how after his third concussion he “started noticing long-term effects with [his] vision and mental health.” His latest concussion came from “a pretty average football hit” but “landed me in the ER.” Luckily, Cameron managed to recover from the worst of it within a week, but the aftermath of the injuries still affect him today.
Sophomore Timothy Kim, a fullback on JV football, recounts the time a “teammate fell back on my knee and tore my meniscus.” 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 “we were solid in the beginning but towards the end our entire starting lineup was injured, so it definitely affected our performance.” 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.
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,“last year’s athletic trainer was super cool; she was a good athletic trainer but she’s not here a lot.” Quinlan Ballou, a sophomore, who developed persistent tendonitis running cross country recounts how “the experiences I’ve had were not the best.”
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 “our coach has gotten new equipment to help stretch and prevent injury.” The football coaches are doing likewise. With concussions being a serious injury in football, Tim explains that “this year we have new shells on our helmets to prevent concussions.” 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.