E-mails filed on Friday in federal court question the efforts of the National Collegiate Athletic Association and many colleges to protect players who have suffered concussions.
The filings were part of a motion to establish class-action status in a lawsuit challenging the association’s handling of head injuries. The NCAA dismissed the allegations, saying that player safety is among its chief concerns.
But the disclosures, some of which were first reported by The Washington Times, suggest that many colleges have put athletes back on the field in the same game that they were concussed.
“I personally have seen an athlete knocked unconscious and return in the same quarter in recent years,” Dean Crowell, an assistant athletic trainer at the University of Georgia, wrote in a 2009 e-mail to a group including David Klossner, the NCAA’s director of health and safety.
According to a 2010 NCAA survey on concussions, whose preliminary results were included in the court filings, nearly half of responding institutions said they had allowed athletes to return to play in the same game after a concussion diagnosis.
At the time, one closely watched set of medical guidelines suggested that athletes should not return to competition on the day they suffered a head injury. But that guidance left open a window for some adults or elite athletes to return under special circumstances.
Plaintiffs in the case, which was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois in 2011, include Adrian Arrington, a former football player at Eastern Illinois University. He says that he suffered multiple head injuries playing college sports and that the NCAA failed to protect him. It is unclear when a judge might rule on class-action status.
‘A Pretty Clear Standard of Care’
As football programs from the high-school level to the NFL were adopting a more conservative approach toward returning players to the field, NCAA leaders were struggling to explain why their model should be different.
In a February 2010 e-mail, Abe L. Frank, the association’s managing director of government relations, asked Mr. Klossner if there were concerns about whether federal recommendations for youth sports would go beyond requirements for colleges.
“Well since we don’t currently require anything all steps are higher than ours,” Mr. Klossner responded. “It seems the federal act is mandating baseline and post-concussive testing.”
A month later, Mr. Klossner wrote to three concussion experts, including Kevin M. Guskiewicz, chair of the department of exercise and sport science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Margot Putukian, director of athletic medicine at Princeton University.
“I have yet to find legitimate data to show same day return to play is a good thing,” Mr. Klossner said. “Most of the recent studies and positions/expert commentaries suggest resting is better.
“The fact that state laws, federal legislation, the NFHS [National Federation of State High School Associations], and NFL have all come out and said not return,” his message continued, “sets a pretty clear standard of care that carries over to our age population.”
The NCAA now urges colleges to keep concussed athletes out of action on the day they suffer a head injury. Many athletes stay out longer, depending on the severity of the concussion and their past history with head trauma. The e-mails and documents raised questions about what the association could do to penalize institutions or coaches that do not comply with its new guidelines.
“Has the NCAA thought/planned on how they will monitor compliance and remedy violations?” Jennifer M. Hootman, an epidemiologist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, wrote Mr. Klossner in April 2010.
She praised the association for its “clear and strong language” on concussion management. But she wondered if NCAA leaders had discussed strengthening the language requiring compliance by coaches.
Getting an Official ‘Off My Back’
That same year, the NCAA adopted guidelines that included asking colleges to have a concussion-management plan on file. Institutions were not required to submit those plans to the NCAA, the court documents showed, nor did the NCAA appear to follow up to confirm whether colleges had one.
In October 2010, Chris Strobel, a director of enforcement, described how NCAA institutions could receive a secondary violation for failing to have a concussion policy or disregarding it.
“But it would not be appropriate for enforcement to suspend or otherwise penalize a coach pursuant to the current legislation even if the student-athlete was required to participate after having been diagnosed with a concussion,” he wrote. (In an earlier e-mail, he suggested that coaches could be penalized with multiple-game suspensions for returning concussed athletes to play too early.)
E-mails also showed that members of the association’s playing-rules group were balking at potentially new concussion measures.
Ty Halpin, an associate director of the group, wrote to a colleague that he was busy “trying to get Dave Klossner off my back.”
“He’s been trying to force our rules committee to put in rules that are not good,” he said. “I think I’ve finally convinced him to calm down.”
And there was concern that the association was not paying enough attention to the challenges that concussed athletes faced in returning to the classroom.
“We still have a gap in best practices on how to address academic accommodations for student-athletes with concussion,” Mr. Klossner wrote to Dan Dutcher, an NCAA vice president, in February 2011.
According to results of the 2010 NCAA survey, fewer than half of respondents said that their institutions required a physician to see every athlete who had had a concussion. Two-thirds of NCAA colleges at the time were doing a baseline assessment for head injuries. Of those that didn’t, many cited cost as a major impediment.
Ahead of Friday’s court filing, the NCAA announced that it would make a $399,999 donation to study the long-term impact of concussions.
On Saturday it said it had taken steps to protect athletes from head injuries and denied wrongdoing in the case.
“Student-athlete safety is one of the NCAA’s foundational principles,” an NCAA spokeswoman told the Associated Press. “The NCAA has been at the forefront of safety issues throughout its existence.”
