Thank you. The purpose of this presentation is to bring you up to date about the American Orthopedic Society of Sports Medicine STOP Program. And as you all probably know, that's an acronym for Sports Trauma and Overuse Prevention. Children have become more and more vulnerable in a $15 billion youth sports industry. Youth sports injuries have reached epidemic proportions, in our statistics, a 7 to 10 increase since year 2000. What about this phenomenon? Well, there are more than 30 million kids participating in organized sports each year. That's probably a conservative number. Young athletes are specializing in sports and positions at an earlier age, with more than 3.5 million children under the age of 14 treated annually for overuse sports injuries. Immature bones, insufficient rest after injury, poor training and condition contribute to these overuse injuries. By the way, overuse injuries account for half of all sports injuries in middle school and high school, according to Safe Kids USA. Youth sports, as you know, are now occurring in epidemic proportions that I just showed you. And youth are particularly at risk due to improper technique, that's still number one, ill-fitting equipment, training errors, and then the big one is coached parental pressure. And then failure of early injury recognition and shift to single sports specialization and the inherent musculoskeletal imbalance that these young kids have. And believe it or not, these problems are magnified because the younger the athlete, the more vulnerable they are to injury. The goal of youth sports is achieving balance and excellence and a healthy lifestyle. And this is most important, while embracing the value of play for fun. That doesn't happen anymore in most cases. By the way, the STOP Program has been a national initiative for prevention of injuries in youth sports since year 2010. That's been an AOSSM initiative and you can look that up on www.stopsportsinjuries.org and you can remember that our motto is keep our kids out of the operating room and on the playing field. What about the STOP Program? Well it focuses on injury reduction and highlighting how playing safe and without overuse can increase a youth athlete's career, improve teamwork, increase fitness, reduce obesity, and create a lifelong love of exercise and healthy activity. In regards to prevention of youth sports injuries in the STOP Program, the AOSSM and the National Council of Youth Sports, NCYS, have recently collaborated in regards to the STOP Program. This is real important because this is what's going on today with the STOP. This relationship is as follows, AOSSM will still own and supervise the STOP Program. NCYS will manage and hopefully grow the program. The STOP Program, as you well know, is under the leadership now of the AOSSM and NCYS and this program will continue to develop as a comprehensive public outreach program focusing on the importance of sports safety, specifically as it relates to overuse and trauma injuries. Why NCYS? Well if you look at NCYS's mission and understand it, you'll understand why we're involved with the NCYS. So under the leadership of NCYS's Wayne Moss and the Sports Medicine Society's Greg Dummer, our main mission is to take AOSSM's STOP Program to a new level. NCYS has a unique position and influences all youth sports to accomplish this goal. NCYS members comprise the who's who in youth sports industry. Its membership serves more than 60 million boys and girls registered in organized youth sports programs. As the largest known youth serving organization in America, NCYS advocates for prevention and enhances the youth sports experience. The main thing about NCYS's mission is to create a new culture of safety in youth sports. Changing the culture is the most impossible thing to do in our society, but it's a big goal with this particular project. A culture of safety within youth sports will increase public understanding of the magnitude of youth sports injury problems. It will increase collaborative efforts in establishing safety measures. It has an organizational adoption of recommended guidelines. It will increase the use of continuous assessment tools. And hopefully it will help increase a higher number of trained coaches and administrators. And it will also hopefully enhance parental engagement in education. To create a new culture of safety in sports, we have to improve the health and outcomes of these young kids. We need to decrease school and work absences, improve organized health, increase financial stability for the youth organizations, lead to higher participation and retention rates. The big thing is to try to enhance injury surveillance, analysis and data reporting. Believe it or not, we don't have any kind of surveillance in high school youth sports at this point. Also the culture of safety plan will curate and develop recommended guidelines for athlete safety. We'll have a feedback and public comment from coaches and parents, mainly to ensure transparency and inclusivity in development of guidelines. And also we'll have a grassroots education campaign to promote safety. Then we have assessment. We'll have a tool developed to assess safety practices of youth sports organization across the board. For example, just so you know, in youth baseball there are 25 different youth organizations in the United States. That's just in youth baseball. And then we'll have a resource center to provide an updated online platform. So the culture of safety pillars in the NCYS, there are three pillars and safety can be defined by these three pillars. Number one is injury prevention. Number two is physical abuse prevention. And then the one that may be the most important is social and economic wellness. The mental health of these young kids. This targeted approach includes administrators, coaches, parents, athletes, and all of us. The goals moving forward with the NCYS will provide sports medicine media content for parents and coaches for sports specific resources, injury specific resources, general resources. And then we'll have another video that will hopefully get parents to actually join the movement of and become a collaborator in the STOP program itself. We'll also address and focus on sports tips, which we've had now for years. This just shows you some of the different sports tips that we will produce for patient education. And number one would be how to prevent and spot overuse injuries in kids. Then you can go down through all the rest of these, including the female athlete triad, sports nutrition, exercise for bone health, conditioning tips, and youth training. Additional goals moving forward with NCYS are to develop additional resources such as creating a youth injury database and to continue collaborative education and research with organizations such as the NATA, the sports section of the APTA, and others. Hopefully some of you, if you're not a collaborative partner of the STOP program, you can certainly go to the website and become a collaborative partner yourself or with your own clinic. So in conclusion, as you can see, the current state of youth sports safety in the United States requires urgent attention and concerned efforts to protect the well-being of young athletes. The alarming rates of injuries and the lack of standardized safety measures necessitate the establishment of consistent and congruent safety standards across all levels of youth sports. So the NCYS has a big job now in developing a culture of safety, and we offer through that program a comprehensive solution. So in conclusion, the time is right for all of us to get involved, to do our part to support the STOP program. And again, I remind you that our youth sports motto is to keep our kids out of the operating room and on the playing field. Thank you all very much.

American Orthopedic Society of Sports Medicine

STOP Program

sports injuries

youth sports

overuse injuries