Wednesday, August 8, 2012

The OHSAA sneaks one in

The Ohio High School Athletic Association (OHSAA) always tries to keep the safety of the kids at the forefront of their efforts governing interscholastic athletics.  Nobody can ever argue that.  They work hard each and every day to make every sport as safe as possible.  However, it does seem that on occasion, they make significant policy changes that can have a sweeping effect on one or more sports, but don't advertise the change as well as they should.

As if to demonstrate this again, the OHSAA made a significant change to their heat illness prevention policy and created a scale that requires increasingly restrictive guidelines at increasing thresholds of heat index.  The policy is very specific and includes the cessation of competition in high heat and humidity.  The policy is long overdue and welcomed by every AT who wanted something in writing to define more clearly what a high temperature is.  It will eliminate many of the heated conversations (pun intended) between the AT and coaches about when to modify and cancel practice.

The problem with the policy is that is was added to the manual mailed to all coaches in mid-July.  Most coaches never even look at this manual, I would wager.  Also, the policy was briefly referred to in the state rules interpretation meeting for football coaches and officials.  However, the people that will most often be asked to enforce the policy, the athletic trainers (where they exist at schools,) were never told of the policy.  We found out about it mostly by chance.  I find this to be very disturbing since a policy like this greatly increases our liability, but if we don't know about it, we can do nothing about it.  It would have only taken a simple phone call from the OHSAA to the Ohio Athletic Trainers Association (OATA) to make them aware of it and they would gladly have released the information in our monthly emails, I'm sure.

The other problem with this policy is that it is in effect for football only.  While football does have the highest risk with all of the pads that trap heat and inhibit cooling, every outdoor sport that competes in hot, humid weather would benefit from the new policy.  I believe tat this should be applied to all sports, and not just football.
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