Editor’s note: Longtime Baton Rouge sportswriter, author and television host Lee Feinswog takes his unique approach to sports to dig deeper into LSU Athletics. Look for these features online and in official athletics department publications throughout the 2014-15 season.
The sight of an athlete staggering on the field can be sobering.
It’s scarier when it’s a head injury, which has been a sports focal point the past year, not the least of which comes from the publicity generated by the issue plaguing the NFL. But it goes deeper than that, from college football to soccer – where the object is often to direct the ball as hard as possible with the head – to even volleyball.
And that’s not lost on LSU.
“We have coaches that understand, we have a staff that understands and we have players that understand that if they have any symptoms they’re going to report them,” LSU director of athletic training Jack Marucci said. “We tell them this is a different injury than an ankle. You can go out there with an ankle if that hurts. If your head hurts, we’re not going to put you back out there.”
The situation was magnified a couple of weeks ago when Michigan quarterback Shane Morris got hurt and appeared out of it. At first the thought was he was reacting to an ankle injury – he had, in fact, hurt the ankle – but as it turned out he sustained a concussion. Morris, wobbly, stayed in the game for a play, came out, but later went back in. It created a firestorm for which Michigan later apologized.
“It is imperative that you get good information that you rely on all the way,” LSU football coach Les Miles said. “Jack comes over to me and says he’s in, he’s out, this is what he’s got, this is what he doesn’t have.”
In the mayhem of a football game on a field that’s crowned, it would seem possible to the average person for the coaches to miss it.
“First and foremost is us paying attention,” LSU senior associate athletic trainer Shelly Mullenix said. “There are three of us on the field, so we have three sets of eyes, not including our doctors – two or three family-practice doctors who are prepared and dedicated to the science of concussions — not including our student-trainers. And not including our athletes.”
The last one is important. But first, at football games LSU’s training staff – Marucci, Mullenix and Andy Barker – keep their heads on a swivel, so to speak. Paying attention to what’s happening on the field is nothing new for them, nor is awareness of head injuries.
“I can tell you that when we see a good hit,” Mullenix said, “we don’t go, ‘Oh! Good hit!’ No, we walk over, we’ll look at them, we’ll watch them interact and may ask one of their teammates how they’re doing.”
And that’s a big thing for the football trainers. Relying on the athletes themselves to tell the trainers if one of their teammates is struggling.
“A lot of the things get picked up on the field by our student-athletes,” Mullenix said.
Much of what fans notice are big hits to skill players. Quarterbacks getting leveled. Running backs taken down. Wide receivers in vulnerable situations.
But the trainers say that the repetitive head colliding that offensive linemen endure might be the worst. Marucci said that LSU averages about six concussions in preseason practices in August and about three during the season “and about 75 percent of them are offensive linemen.”
Accordingly, Marucci said he’s against two-a-day practices.
“It’s not really during the season, It’s not during the game when you’re watching and this kid was staggering or whatever,” Marucci said. “It’s training camp when you to examine the repetitive blows by a player.”
That’s why LSU’s athletes are tested and educated about head injuries. They’re all given tests to see, in essence, what their brains look like when not concussed. That’s actually common procedure these days on the high school level, too.
“When they first get to every sport there’s a baseline impact test,” LSU volleyball coach Fran Flory said. “And that allows them to know whether they are able to return or not return after a concussion.
“There’s a comparison used and they have to score a certain percentage to be deemed OK to go back on the field or court or whatever. When I was on the (NCAA) rules committee, we had a lot of discussions about this.”
LSU has the players sign a student-athlete accountability form.
“It basically says that we educate them on concussions and that it’s their obligation to let us know if and when them or a teammate has symptoms,” Mullenix said. “And I can’t tell you how often a player will come off the field and point to a teammate and tell me, ‘He’s not right. He’s so not right.’
“And that might be something we didn’t see, but we know now that many of these concussions are not about big blows. A lot of them are about repetitive smaller blows. They’re getting these lower-impact micro-traumas. You can get a smaller ding and have no memory of it.”
In soccer, heads bang into balls on purpose and into each other by accident. In the case of head-to-head, the collisions can be vicious in that sport. LSU soccer coach Brian Lee credited the NCAA, saying it’s precautionary moves are ahead of FIFA, the world governing body of soccer.
“We played Arkansas two weeks ago and their best player and our best player were both out by the end of the game because of two separate incidents,” Lee said. “They were both fine, but they both missed probably 30 minutes of the match just a precaution because they had taken hits. Ten years ago that never would have happened. Three years ago that never would have happened.”
Head injuries in soccer were discussed quite a bit this past summer during the World Cup. Chelsea goalie Petr Cech, for example, wears a soft helmet when he plays, the result of a head injury. Not that it’s fashionable, but the brand-name Full90 headgear is seen more and more in youth soccer.
“The research on those isn’t entirely conclusive that it’s helping prevent concussions,” Lee said.
Either way, this is not the old days.
“There’s no shaking it off now. There’s no coming back early from the protocol. As a parent myself of a 9-year-old girl and a 10-year-old boy, if they had two of them (concussions), we would stop. They wouldn’t play any contact sports. Maybe after one if it’s a bad one.”
Even in volleyball it’s a problem. Players diving for balls can hit their heads on the floor, there’s always the chance of getting hit by a teammate’s elbow or colliding head-to-head, and even the ball can knock a player down and out.
“I haven’t had a kid out for an extended time due to a concussion in years,” Flory said. “Partially because we’re strong enough (physically) to go to the floor. That’s part of being prepared physically. You go to the floor and your core is strong enough you don’t hit your head.”
But sometimes they do, of course.
“We pay attention to it and if they do take a ball to the head or have some collision with the floor or another player, we pull them immediately and we sit them.”
Just like in football, where if you watch the Tigers play, you certainly have seen Marucci, Mullenix and Barker on the field attending to injured players.
“You’re watching the interactions of the other people, you’re listening to the stands, there’s a lot of visual and auditory things that are coming into play,” Mullenix said. “We have relationships with the trainers on the other side. Sometimes other trainers flag us to the problem. We do that for them, they do it for us.”
And here’s another one. Mullenix said they will literally take a player’s helmet away when he’s being evaluated for head trauma.
“We’ll hold it until we’re done,” she said.
Sometimes players aren’t happy about that, either. Coaches want those players back in, too, but “Les is very, very supportive,” Mullenix said. “He’s never second-guessed us. And it’s something that athletic trainers have lost their jobs over.”
On the wall of the training room in the LSU practice facility is a sign that comes from the Southeastern Conference guideline on concussions that is labeled a must-read for student-athletes.
“Do we miss stuff? Yes, we’re not perfect,” Mullenix said. “But I would say we’re very in tune to not only the high-impact concussions but also the low-impact concussions. And I think our student-athletes play a critical role in that, even when we need a player out there, whether it’s a starting offensive lineman or a quarterback, whatever may be.”