Rugby removed from high school sports in NS

[CaptainCrunch]

Kind of sad to see

https://twitter.com/user/status/1124125504615747585

[Swayze11]

Wow that is very interesting. Football is WAY more dangerous.

[CaptainCrunch]

As is girls soccer.

[Erick Estrada]

My boys play soccer, lacrosse, and football. You would think a concussion and broken collarbone would come from football or lacrosse but nope they came from soccer.

[CaptainCrunch]

I expect that we're going to see an end to contact and collision sports in our schools over the next decade as the question of liability comes up.


We've had very few concussions in football over the last few years, but I don't know if that's just luck or how we teach safe contact.

[Locke]

I dont know.

I can say that I've got a lot of bad, lingering injuries from High School Rugby. Now, some of that is my coaches' faults and a good deal of that is my fault as well and the difference is just life and sports.

But if kids arent getting involved in Rugby in High School thats going to be a huge hit to the sport because getting involved when you're younger is unlikely as is getting involved when you're older.

Either way, this is the decision and what I hope it does is inspire Rugby Canada to get it together and sort out their program.

[Locke]

Originally Posted by CaptainCrunch

I expect that we're going to see an end to contact and collision sports in our schools over the next decade as the question of liability comes up.


We've had very few concussions in football over the last few years, but I don't know if that's just luck or how we teach safe contact.

This is something I've been an advocate for in soccer for years until the club I was with finally took action.

In soccer there are tackles but I noticed pretty quickly that nobody was teaching these kids how to slide tackle or how to be slide tackled, they were just figuring it out from what they saw on TV and yeah...thats how kids get hurt.

So I taught my players how to tackle and be tackled. We practiced it. It became almost unbelievably effective in both changing the games tactically as well as reducing injuries and you know what the ultimate result was?

A damned near parent mutiny that wasnt quelled until we could reason with them.

We arent 'beating them up in practice.' We're teaching them to do something instinctively and safely and instilling muscle-memory and reflexes that will save their asses when it counts.

[CaptainCrunch]

Nope what you're doing is good coaching and protecting your players. Sometimes though parents need to be sold on this concept.


Tackling in football and soccer and rugby is all about technique. In football its all about your recognition zone, how you breakdown how you use your feet, how you effectively wrap and finish with your head out of the tackle.


There are still too many coaches that talk about the concept of flying around and leaving a smoking hole in your opponent. First of all athletes will always make a person with bad tackling technique look well bad. Second of all, you suddenly see the involvement of the head in the tackle.


A lot of coaches that I've talked to are advocates of the Seattle technique, but to me its a bad technique because not only does it involve your head being in the tackle lane, but you have your head horizontal to the ground.


I'm an advocate of spending 10 or 15 minutes in working on tackling. But I will say, I'm not a advocate of hitting builds character BS drills. If one of my coaches sets up a pit drill, I stop it. If one of the coaches players does dangerous or excessive tackling or attempts to saw a player in half during a drill, I lose my mind a bit.


contact sports can be safe as long as the coaches aren't dangerous and as long as the parents, and I hate to say this, don't countermand the coaches and what they're trying to teach.


I will also say that there are too many old style coaches with old style ideas that are causing problems, that don't want to teach safe contact because it goes against their bs creedo around hitting to kill.



At the end of the day, right now, in most sports, we're losing the public relations battle, parents don't feel like the sport is safe, and we're doing very little to convince them other wise.


In 10 or 15 years we might not see football, or youth lacrosse, or youth rugby because we didn't do enough to make it safe.

[Maritime Q-Scout]

I haven't really been following this story, but apparently the player who was hurt was from my alma mater.

Sad to see.

Every rugby player I know is up in arms about the decision.

I don't know many players that have negative things to say about the sport, even the friend of mine who lost 2 years of law school because of a concussion that happened on the pitch.

I don't know enough to form an opinion on this, but my knee jerk reaction is that this is an overreaction where the solution isn't the best one but an easy one.

[Maritime Q-Scout]

As soon as I post this the story came on the news that the provincial government and Minister of Education have called for the reinstatement of rugby.

[Bagor]

The NSSAF said in the last five years there have been 149 cases of head injuries reported in high school rugby to the School Insurance Program — more than football, hockey and soccer combined.

But Natalie Randall Price, a certified athletic therapist and osteopath in Dartmouth, N.S., who has studied sports concussions, said those numbers are "absolutely inaccurate."

"It is statistically impossible that there was only one concussion in all of Nova Scotia high school hockey last year," said Randall Price, who has worked with dozens of teams in a variety of sports over the past 20 years, including with her stepson's high school rugby and football teams.

"The federation is in essence punishing an association that has been forthcoming and open and honest with reporting, and that's not the message that we want to be sending that if you're honest and you're forthcoming with reporting that your sport's going to be cancelled on you."

She told CBC's Maritime Noon she believes those involved in rugby are being punished for accurately reporting injuries — something lacking in other high school contact sports.

"We know that rugby, especially as a health-care professional, has been the leader in ensuring that we are reporting them, that we're getting safe treatment and care for the athletes, and we would love to see that being followed in other sports bodies the way that rugby has been leading the charge," she said.

Dr. Rob Green, the provincial medical director of Trauma Nova Scotia, said in a 12-year study on major trauma in pediatric sports, rugby injuries didn't even register enough to be reported.

"Our hypothesis was that actually hockey injuries were the most common," he said. "But we looked at everything from cycling, to hockey, to football, and did look at rugby. Cycling was by far the highest contributor of major trauma in the pediatric population and rugby was not, in fact. It's numbers were too low for me to even report."

The study looked at 107 children between the ages of three and 18 years old who suffered major traumatic injuries. Those included any that were life or limb-threatening, that required a child to be admitted to hospital, for a patient to be put on life support or if they died.

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/nova-...-ban-1.5121640

Appears to be a decision taken by a few based on an incomplete picture.

[Weitz]

Education Minister re-instated it.