Play Through Pain
Young, impressionable athletes are some of the hardest people to reign in. Their bodies will never be fresher and they’ll never have more time and energy than they do now. Their stars burn bright when they are young and every second of youth is a resource to be mined.
As long as there has been sport, there has been injuries that derail the athlete’s journey. Sometimes they rob us of the highest of talent, and sometimes they pave the way for an unexpected star to burst onto the scene.
Some injuries are too devastating to shrug off. A torn ACL or a broken clavicle is going to be the death blow to an athlete’s season. These are damaging to athletes bodies of course, but they are almost always accompanied by a lengthy rehabilitation process with lots of regimented training and protocol. The real danger that athletes, particularly young and uninformed ones who are hiding injuries from those around them, causing significant damage over time.
This is a problem typically seen in younger athletes, typically at the high school level. According to a 2014 study of 3000 players, coaches and parents, 42% said they have hidden an injury at some point in order to keep playing.
It’s at this level of play that you see the least sophisticated equipment and team managers, the most inconvenient schedules and the most reckless, uninformed behavior. Team doctors and assistant coaches tend to be recruited on a volunteer basis, so it’s not often you have people in positions where they can spot an injury at a cursory glance. At the professional level, players are seen as investments to their owners and will be protected as such, putting them on an IR/DL spot and providing them with state of the art care and technology.
That is not to say that the problem is only at the lower levels, remember Quincy Pondexter, who intentionally skipped MRI’s to practice or Mets ace Noah Syndergaard, the god-like Thor who has the future pitchers of tomorrow with 100 mph dreams who sets examples like playing through pain and landing on the 60 day DL
Therein lies a sort of pain sweet-spot, a threshold to be worked around that for a myriad of reasons athletes are constantly trying to push to its breaking point.
So it begs the question: why would any athlete go against every human not divulge information about their injured body and ignore every single instinct of human preservation?
There are a host of reasons, and many of them can be chalked up to the naivete of youth.
There is an economy of starting spots that exist on each and every sports team in the world that athlete feverishly protects. The old adage of not getting hurt or else someone will inevitably come in and take it from you permanently. Ask Trent Green about how Kurt Warner got his shot.
There’s 11 starters on offense and defense in football, with many young athletes playing multiple positions on both sides of the ball. Take a look at basketball and you’ll find only 5 starting positions. Some players will go their entire careers riding the bench, and for a nagging injury to nick you up just enough to be painful but not enough to totally put you out of commission, players will seek to hold onto that starting spot.
Speaking to that idea of a roster economy, another exists for talent. It’s also up to the coach to put out the best quad they can possibly muster. 53% of coaches polled in 2014 said they felt pressure to put in a player they knew or suspected was injured because they felt it gave them the best chance of winning.
When the players want to play and the coaches want them in, it’s easy to see why both parties think nothing wrong has happened. But it’s up to the coaches as leaders of these impressionable kids to know the warning signs and be proactive in their decisions.
Sometimes players play for pride. “No way I’m going to miss my senior year when I can still get on the field.” It’s easy for them to convince themselves what they’re doing is feasible because they lack proper insight.
Weakness is also a common reason why players will be tight lipped about their body. Being perceived as weak to their coaches and teammates is not something anybody wants to feel, even if it is the logical thing to speak up about if your body is truly in pain. There is a culture that exists that shames the injured, one that is embarrassingly present at the professional level as well.
Anna Ladd is a former track runner at Dominion High School in Sterling VA. An earlier injury had forced her into surgery to repair her damaged leg, but even as the season drew closer, she knew it wasn’t ready. Even a steady diet of ice baths and distance running could not get her to her peak performance.
And yet, to everyone else’s knowledge, she was fully recovered.
Her way of circumventing her coaches prodding and surveliance goes to show how imperfect of a system we have in place.
“ One of the coaches knew me well from basketball so she was always asking how my knee was and I would always tell her that it was fine.” Ladd said. “I never mentioned it to my teammates. I’d wrap it and ice it constantly but I would deny that it was hurt pretty much up until I had to quit.
The complications of these decisions often linger long past the athletic careers of young athletes, impacting their life outside of sport.
“ I did a season of AAU basketball a year later, but that was my last high school sport. I still can’t run distance or do any high-impact cardio. I can’t squat all the way down on my left side and there are certain yoga poses like pigeon that I have to modify. I also can’t sit criss-cross-applesauce for longer than a few minutes, and don’t have full range of motion in that knee.”
When asked if she regretted her decision, Ladd thought that at the time, it was the only decision to make.
“I don’t harbor any regrets because I was so young, it made sense to me at the time and I've learned from it.”
Ladd also expressed that she might have been under a stronger microscope had she been one of the stars instead of just an average performer.
It’s a growing concern that that there is less attention distributed throughout all of youth sports. The ankle of a star Division I athlete may be monitored all week, but the bench warmer with a cracked rib may be swept under the rug.
On a smaller scale, SUNY Oswego has taken a cautious approach and has even received criticism for it. When star senior and member of the illustrious 100 point club Alex Botten was sidelined with an injury in 2016, he missed a crucial stretch of time where he would miss one of the three home games Oswego lost.
Athletes have an enormous amount of pressure and responsibility put on them at such a young age. The idea that they are to be trusted with decisions about their body and measure them against their long term health is easy to understand in theory, but in practice can be incredibly difficult to implement.
Policing one’s body and actions can be a balancing act, one that will make hindsight all the more painful when the adrenaline has faded and the pain pours forth. There may never be a perfect way to spot an injury, but the biggest problem appears to be culturally within a locker room.
By building a culture around support rather than shame of the injured, inclusivity instead of an elite tier of players garnering all the focus of the coaches, and a proactive approach to the treatment of the body are all values that must be instilled in children going forward if we are to avoid a generation of increasingly hurt athletes.
