Home > Our Work > Heads Up: Concussion in High School Sports

Challenge: More than 300,000 people sustain sports-and recreation head injuries every year in U.S., and most of them are classified as concussions. Coaches, athletic directors and trainers, however, do not always know how to prevent concussion or how to manage it properly when it occurs. On behalf of CDC’s National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, AED set out to provide high school coaches with tools that will help them to educate athletes, parents, and school officials about sports-related concussions and ways to prevent them, and to take appropriate action when injury occurs.

Solution: AED conducted an assessment of what types of information gaps existed about concussions on the athletic field. This included a literature review of existing scientific information, telephone focus groups with male and female coaches representing diverse sports and geographic locations, and a meeting of experts to discuss unmet needs. We developed and pretested a wide array of materials with coaches and athletes, including a video and DVD featuring a former high school football player who sustained permanent injury due to concussions; fact sheets in English and Spanish for athletes and their parents; eye-catching locker-room posters; and for coaches, an informational guide, wallet card, resource CD-ROM, and a clipboard sticker. The full kit was pilot tested with coaches across the country using computer-assisted telephone technology.

Results: We launched the tool kit with a national radio tour featuring the U.S. Surgeon General (in English) and the director of the CDC National Center for Injury Prevention and Control (in Spanish); as well as a matte article, press release, fact sheet, promotional brochures, and Web tools such as banners and buttons. To further disseminate the message, AED established a partnership network of sports, coaching, media, health-related and corporate organizations, including a key collaboration with Scholastic’s Coach and Athletic Director Magazine.

Most important, feedback from coaches has been extremely positive. Prior to receiving the Heads Up tool kit, over one-third of the coaches interviewed did not have access to materials about preventing and managing concussion, and one-fifth of the coaches reported that their athletic department did not have a plan for dealing with concussions. Most of these coaches (96 percent) thought they could use tool kit materials to develop such a plan and many planned to use the kit’s resources in the future.

> Download the Heads Up: Concussion project fact sheet (115 KB, PDF)

To learn more about these and other CHC programs, contact us.