Dr. Richard Hinton, assistant team physician for the Baltimore Ravens, agrees with local coaches that age should be the focus in youth football. “I am not a big advocate of classing children for youth football based on weight regulations. I think there’s more harm than good there. The original intent was to decrease injury rates, and the few studies done looking at injury rates have not found significantly lower injuries in leagues playing with weight classes. … What you are trying to get to is maturity, not size,” said Hinton, who is also medical director of MedStar Sports Health and works at Union Memorial Hospital in Baltimore. Older, slimmer children have an advantage in muscle, speed, strength and mentation over “fat, heavy, chubby kids who may have not made a weight limit, but [are] relatively immature,” Hinton said. “The equation on the football field is the same as in any physics lab: Force equals mass times acceleration,” Hinton said. In other words, the slimmer kids add speed faster, negating the advantage their opponents get from being heavier. “Many of these kids were being disqualified on the basis of their weight: They’re obese. They may be heavier, but they don’t have the muscle mass to increase to a high rate of speed. A much worse situation, in terms of injury, is having mature kids, a 14-year-old, skeletally mature kid who has seen testosterone, is adding muscle mass but happens to be a small kid, a mature 14-year-old who weighs 150 pounds, and you put him on the same field as 12-year-olds of the same weight but not as mature. Much worse risk of injury.” Youth football leagues nationwide are gradually acknowledging this reality and adjusting policies, Hinton said. “I think in general, most of the national youth football organizations are moving away from weight classes. I don’t think there’s any good [medical] literature to suggest that [grouping by weight] decreases injury risk. I think it can lead to other unhealthy issues with weight-cutting and with younger, heavier kids playing with older, more mature kids just because they happen to be the same weight,” Hinton said.
Posted on: Wed, 05 Mar 2014 02:57:54 +0000
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