March, 2009

I am the father of a 12-year-old boy who played in a competitive, contact hockey league. Over a period of a few years he suffered a series of concussions and neck and back injuries due to hard hits from other players in his division. There is a distressing question that remains with me…”What are the long-term effects of head trauma to my child as he grows and develops, and once the injury has occurred, how do I accurately assess my son’s progress as it relates to his history of head trauma?

I discovered this passage in the Canadian Medical Association Journal, in the July 2003 article, Bodychecking and concussions in ice hockey: Should our youth pay the price?
“The younger developing brain is at an even higher risk of injury. Repeated concussions may lead to permanent learning disabilities and other neurological and psychiatric problems. Pre-adolescent youth with a traumatic brain injury may never fully develop the social and cognitive skills characteristic of adults and may be more violent than those without such an injury.”

I recently talked with the Chairman of the London Hockey Concussion Summit, Dr. P. Echlin, who spoke of concussion and brain trauma resulting from "learned intentional violence". Those three words, I find, are very charged with a great range of meaning. He also added that it is important for individuals at the grass roots to take a stand in order for real social change to occur.

On an emotional level, how is a child affected by being the victim of serious and unprovoked hits from other children? And how does it affect the perpetrator of such hits? Intimidation is a known strategy in contact hockey, but one might have a different perspective and viewpoint if this is taken out of the hockey context and put into a school or other social scenario…

It is very unsettling that I can’t turn back the clock. If only I had listened to my gut, the first time I was witness to a vicious shot given by one player to another. Would we consider things differently, if we could look closely at the faces of our children behind those cages, to actually see their expressions depicting the extent of what it is they are up against- or going after- every time they leave the bench and head out on the ice?

My son isn’t a young warrior, going out to do battle against other 12 year olds. He is a talented athlete, gifted in many sports and who simply enjoys playing hockey at a high level.

I am certain my child would not have chosen to be the recipient of continued punishing body checks and headshots if he had been offered a viable alternative, which could have provided him high caliber hockey without intentional contact.

Without any real alternative, we have bought into this arena of aggression, by choosing to involve our children in this type of activity. I have also wondered about the degree to which we are living vicariously through our children. To what extent are our hockey-loving kids pawns in our own aggressive behaviour? One only needs to look around the stands to see how expressive and animated (to put it mildly!) some individuals and groups of adults can act.

Having done some soul searching of my own, I have decided that my best plan of action is to remove my child from this type of hockey, and join with the many others who have similar experiences or who want to avoid this story.

I am now doing whatever I can to lessen the possibility of further head trauma to children. This singular reason was enough for us to create the Toronto Non-Contact Hockey League.

Neil Clifford

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