As part of our campaign, we conducted a survey to research how much the general public were aware of the dangers of concussion faced when playing contact sport. We felt as though this was important to understand as one reasons as to why concussion is such is a significant injury is that people are not aware of it. This means that they themselves may play on, or encourage others to do so. This is something that will only worsen the effect of the concussion.
Our survey found that 80% of people felt as though more should be done to raise awareness of the dangers of concussion in contact sport. We felt that this was an important question as this was the issue our campaign was aiming to raise awareness on.
We chose to mainly focus our questions on children because of the information we received from our expert Rachael Hearn. We discovered that children are most at risk of concussion as their brains are not yet fully developed. We also discovered that the longer you play contact sport the more likely you are to suffer from concussion related illnesses in later life, such as CTE. Therefore if you start playing full contact sport as a child, you are more at risk from CTE.
However, in our survey, we found that a high percentage of people, 45%, would still be happy for their child to be playing full contact rugby from the age of 9. At club level in England, tag rugby is played up until Under 8’s and then it is full contact from Under 9’s. In New Zealand, one of the biggest rugby playing nations in the world, there were more than 9,000 reported cases of concussion for Under 19’s. The situation is so bad in New Zealand that former players are being asked to donate their brains after death so that further study can be taken place.
We feel as though the high number of concussions suffered in youth rugby are indicative of players full contact too early and that there would not be 9,000 concussions in youth rugby in New Zealand had players started playing full contact later in their development.
In our survey, we also asked what age people would find it appropriate for children to start playing full contact rugby. There was no consensus other than that the majority of those asked felt as those 9 was too young to be playing full contact.
We feel as though 11 should be the earliest for children to be playing full contact. We feel as this is a logical age for children to start playing full contact as this is the age at which children will be starting secondary school. However, we do not feel as though children would be losing anything were they to start playing at 13, as 40% of our survey suggested that they should.
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