Concussion program expands to middle school athletes

Thanks to a ground-breaking appropriation by the state, the Hawaii Concussion Awareness Management Program (HCAMP) has expanded its outreach to include middle school athletes for the first time, officials said.

HCAMP has served high school athletes for six years with education and baseline testing, but with a $450,000 grant for 2016-17 from the legislature, the concussion awareness and management program will add students ages 11-13 statewide.

“We have the funding to do neurocognitive testing in the high schools, but the main thing we want to get out to all the youth leagues is the need to educate their constituents, the parents, coaches, athletes and administrators,” said Ross Oshiro of the University of Hawaii Kinesiology & Leisure Science Department and The Queen’s Center for Sports Medicine.

“We’re the first state that actually attached funding to do cognitive testing on our student-athletes,” Oshiro said.

“This legislation puts our state in the forefront of protecting our student-athletes for sport-related head trauma,” said Chris Chun, executive director of the Hawaii High School Athletic Association, which is partnered with UH on the project that provides baseline testing for thousands of high school athletes each year. “A lot of states do baseline testing, but they don’t pay for it,” Chun said.

Under Act 262, signed by Gov. David Ige this month, HCAMP’s concussion education program is charged with jointly developing a concussion monitoring and educational program for school athletics and youth sports activities covering athletes from ages 11 to 18.

Oshiro said research indicates an average of approximately 1,000 high school athletes a year suffer concussions here.

With education, Oshiro said, “We can identify concussions earlier, we can treat them earlier and we can get them on the road to recovery so they don’t repeat.”