Tampa Bay Online- Hits to the head focus of Berkeley Prep football study.

Hits to the head focus of Berkeley Prep football study

By MARY SHEDDEN | The Tampa Tribune
and KATHERINE SMITH | The Tampa Tribune
After every football game and practice, as Vic Pellegrino’s Berkeley Prep teammates head for the locker room, he goes straight to the trainer’s room.

The junior wide receiver and defensive back can’t wait to see how the hits he delivered and absorbed registered on a computer screen linked to tiny electric monitors inside his football helmet.

“I got run over during a field goal and I couldn’t wait to see that one,” Pellegrino said. “I felt like I got hit pretty hard because I was looking down and wasn’t expecting the hit.”

Pellegrino is one of seven Berkeley Prep players volunteering in a new University of South Florida study that will look beyond the dangerous knockout blows that make crowds gasp at games.

Researchers will focus on the repeated minor hits, especially those in practice, that have enormous potential to increase long-term brain injury risk, said Gianluca Del Rossi, director of the USF Concussion Center.

“The tendency in the past is to just shake it off,” he said.

This USF study is another sign of increased attention to brain injuries in high school sports. This fall, the group that oversees game officiating adopted new standards for athletes with suspected concussions. Berkeley head athletic trainer Eddie Bunton said it’s the most awareness he’s seen in more than a decade on the job.

“A few years ago, we saw a change in the helmets for better protection,” he said. “Now there is more technology coming into play, and we have the instant access of having some objective measurement instead of having the kid telling us they don’t feel right. It’s a bonus.”

Berkeley joins a number of professional and collegiate football programs nationwide using the Head Impact Telemetry System, which uses accelerometers inside football helmets to track how heavy hits to the head affect a player’s brain activity.

The volunteers, who play positions from linebacker to running back, wear helmets outfitted with six small receptor patches. They are much like what a cardiologist uses to measure a heartbeat. Here, however, the monitor records blows to the head.

Trainers will follow up with a player when any hit registers at or above a force of 96, a level at which concussion risk increases significantly.

Five weeks into the season, four of the seven players in the study have experienced hits that hard in practice or during games, Del Rossi said. None has been knocked out or diagnosed with a concussion.

He said several recorded multiple “sub-concussive” hits. Those players received a follow-up exam that compared their cognitive skills to results of an identical test taken before the season started.

“Our goal is to determine whether these so-called minor hits are as benign as people think,” Del Rossi said.

Players participating in the study aren’t holding back on the practice field or during games, Del Rossi said, because they are “competitive young men who want to win.”

But they are curious, and they ask trainers questions after practice. Sometimes, they’re surprised by the results.

“In our first game, I didn’t think I had many hard hits, but it turned out that I had a couple that were high,” said Jake Kennedy, a Berkeley sophomore running back and linebacker. “They seemed like pretty run-of-the-mill hits, but then it showed up on the computer a lot higher than I was expecting.”

During Berkeley’s 35-14 victory against Tampa Catholic on Sept. 10, results showed that the seven players in the study combined for 259 hits. Of those hits, 60 percent registered at a force between 0 and 20 range, while 1 percent of the hits fell in the 100 to 120 range.

This data is helpful, but the focus on what happens when players collide at practice, and not just at games, will give researchers a broader, more realistic picture of the damage done.

New research sponsored by the National Institutes of Health estimates college players participate in 12 practices for each football game. That equates to about 2,800 significant hits to the head each season, including 300 with concussion-causing potential, the New York Times reported.

With Berkeley participating in roughly four practices per week for each of the 10 regular season games, trainers estimate nearly 3,000 hits will be documented and studied. Each hit is time stamped, so video footage from a game can provide visual support to the data collected.

This local study will add to the growing body of evidence that repeated, often unnoticed blows to the head may cause long-term cognitive impairment. In the past few years, undiagnosed concussions and sub-concussive hits have been linked to the deaths of several professional and college football players with a degenerative brain condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.

It’s also a concern at the high school level, where football is played by more than 1.1 million teens. Repeated studies show that adolescents recover far more slowly from concussions than adults.

“When I first heard about the study, I was kind of intrigued, because I’ve always wondered if football is causing me any damage,” Kennedy said. “I think this will be good to know for everybody. I’m sure all the parents are worried about their kids, I know my mom is worried about me out there, so it will be good to know for sure if it is causing damage.”