SportsTurf provides current, practical and technical content on issues relevant to sports turf managers, including facilities managers. Most readers are athletic field managers from the professional level through parks and recreation, universities.
Issue link: https://read.dmtmag.com/i/40933
FieldScience | Tom Serensits Are injuries on synthetic turf still a sore subject? I T IS RELEASED EVERY FRIDAY during the NFL season. It can have a bigger influence on a game than a coach's game plan. It is one of the first topics discussed by announcers before a game even begins. It is…the injury report. While injuries in the NFL steal the headlines, sport-related injuries are often an unavoidable fact of life for athletes at all levels. In addition to the physical pain and loss of playing time, according to the US Consumer Prod- ucts Safety Commission, sport-related injuries to children alone cost the pub- lic more than $49 billion per year. Certainly some injuries are inherent to sport, but others may be influenced by a number of fac- tors, including the playing surface. Many of us can remember back to the days of "cookie-cutter" stadiums and the hard, abrasive synthetic turf that went with them. It was not uncommon to hear athletes complain about the toll those surfaces took on their bodies and research reports confirmed higher in- jury rates on first-generation (non-infilled) synthetic turf than on natural turf. But, as synthetic turf has evolved to produce a surface that more closely resembles natural turf, has injury risk also changed? The perception of many is that it has not. For example, in the 2010 NFL Players Playing Surface Opinion Survey, 82% of players felt that synthetic turf was more likely to contribute to injury than grass. But is perception reality? ANSWERS With an increasing number of injury-tracking re- search studies being published, we are finally able to begin answering that question. But, before we get into the results of these studies, it is important to keep one thing in mind. Any time comparisons are made be- tween synthetic and natural turf, the condition of the playing surfaces are not typically reported. As you can imagine, lumping all natural turf fields into one group can be problematic as field conditions can greatly vary. The same can be said for synthetic turf. So, it important to not just look at the results of one study and draw conclusions, but consider these studies collectively be- cause many factors, both those measured and those not measured, can affect results and conclusions of any one Injury tracking studies are consid- ered to be the most direct method to study injury risk, but they also suffer from inherent limitations. It can be difficult to isolate the cause of the injury and the conditions at the time of injury. >> BIOMECHANICS TESTING in progress at Penn State's Sports Surface Research Center. study alone. Latching onto one particular finding or one particular study may not tell the whole story. The majority of research studies comparing injury rate on infilled synthetic turf and grass have examined soccer injuries in Europe. A wide demographic of soccer players have been analyzed in these studies, ranging from youths to professionals. In addition to injuries oc- curring in games, several studies also tracked injuries during practices and training. The overall conclusions of the nine published studies tracking soccer injuries is 24 SportsTurf | September 2011 www.sportsturfonline.com By