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 itations. It can be difficult to isolate the cause of the injury and the conditions at the time of injury. For example, what type of shoes was the athlete wearing? What were the weather condi- tions at the time of the injury? Did the athlete aggravate a pre- vious injury? Other methods to predict injury have been developed to eliminate some of these questions. But, not sur- prisingly, these methods also have their advantages and disad- vantages. Mechanical traction testing is probably the most common method to measure the potential for lower extremity injury. At Penn State, we use Pennfoot to measure traction on both syn- thetic and natural turf. Several other universities have also de- veloped similar devices. These machines can be outfitted with any type of shoe and can generate large volumes of traction data. What they cannot do is determine if a field is "safe" or "unsafe". While there is evidence that excessive levels of rota- tional traction lead to a higher risk of knee and ankle injuries, we do not know at what level injury becomes significantly more likely to occur. Consequently, it is difficult to draw con- clusions related to injury risk based solely on traction data. Data obtained with these devices does allow us to make com- parisons from surface to surface and from one shoe to another. For example, data that we have generated shows higher levels of traction on non-infilled synthetic turf than on infilled syn- thetic turf and grass, which correlates well with the injury tracking studies, which showed higher injury rates on the ear- lier, non-infilled generation of synthetic turf. The use of human subjects (both alive and cadavers) can also provide information related to injury risk. Sensors have been placed on different parts of the body and forces have been measured with sophisticated computer and camera systems. While comparing playing surfaces with these methods is still in its infancy, research studies using human subjects offer valuable insight into the stresses felt by actual athletes. However, just as with mechanical testing, it can be difficult to correlate this type of data to actual injuries. So, is the perception of an increased injury risk on infilled synthetic turf reality? The results of the published scientific re- search papers show little evidence of increased injury risk on infilled synthetic turf. Of course, each injury occurrence is unique, making it difficult to make broad conclusions that apply to all circumstances. But, based on the data from the published studies, there is little difference in overall injury rate between playing on infilled synthetic turf and grass. Additional research will hopefully provide further insight into different in- jury patterns on these surfaces as well as appropriate injury pre- vention techniques such as shoe selection. As part of our Sportsturf Scoop video series, we have a video focusing on injury risk available on our website at http://crop soil.psu.edu/ssrc/sportsturf-scoop. Links and summaries for each of the injury studies are also available on our website. ■ Thomas Serensits is manager of Penn State's Sports Surface Re- search Center, University Park, PA. www.stma.org SportsTurf 27