We're reducing the risk of sport-related injuries

MAP for Coaches

With over 45 million school sports and organized community-based youth (defined as age 6 to 17 years) programs in the United States, the potential for youth sports injuries is enormous. Of greatest burden are musculoskeletal injuries, i.e., muscle, joint (e.g., tendons and ligaments) and bone injuries, particularly in team sports such as youth football, basketball, soccer and volleyball. Coaches have a crucial role to play in ensuring the safety of their players.

The MAP for Coaches is a novel eLearning tool freely available to youth sport coaches in the United States and around the world. Our goal is to increase coaches' knowledge regarding musculoskeletal injury prevention and empower them to implement current and best injury prevention practices towards reducing injuries and enhancing performance in youth sport athletes.

We are looking for youth sports coaches (from parent coaches to high school/club coaches) to help improve this online training course! Please follow the link below to complete the course and study surveys if you coach youth football, soccer, basketball or volleyball.

SPIN Project

Pickleball is the fastest growing sport in the United States, but there remains limited data to inform injury prevention among players! The Surveillance in Pickleball players to reduce INjury burden (SPIN) Project is a series of studies that aims to fill the limited data gap. It will provide a more accurate account of injury burden and risk factors and establish pragmatic injury prevention strategies across levels of play.

Phase 1

Completed! Study findings currently under review in peer-reviewed journals. Watch this space for infographics of summary of findings.

Phase 2

The Development and Evaluation of a Pickleball-Specific Warm-Up and Recovery Routine to Reduce Injuries among Players. This study phase is a follow-up to the SPIN National Survey (Phase 1). The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effectiveness of the PickleSet Program, a new injury prevention/recovery program in pickleball players over several weeks. In this phase, we will compare injury and pain trends before and after the introduction of the evidence-informed PickleSet interventions that we have developed for pickleball players.

NEISS Project

A large population of the US participates in sports, exercise, or recreational activity throughout the week. However, there is not much information available regarding the incidence, prevalence, and risk factors of related injuries in varying activities. This study aims to describe the epidemiology of injuries related to sports, exercise, and recreational activity among adults aged 20 to 85+ years old that present to the US emergency department from 2013-2022. We are using the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System (NEISS) to perform a retrospective analysis on 20+ year olds presenting to the US emergency departments with sports, exercise, or recreational activity related injuries.

RICHLoad

RICHLoad, meaning Reducing Injuries in Competitive atHletes through integrated load management, is a multi-year project that aims to establish best practices for soccer, basketball and running athletes to manage (monitor, evaluate and intervene) their athletic workload in consideration with other important broad variables related to recovery and capacity. The RICHLoad algorithm is evidence-informed and available to all athletes globally free of charge. Download the app and use it regularly to help us improve the app's functionality and effectiveness.