PULLMAN – The threat of concussions is enough for some parents to pull their child out of high school sports, especially football. Now, parents of football players at Pullman High School feel more confident than ever in their child’s safety thanks to a new program in conjunction with Pullman Regional Hospital.
This season, the Pullman High School football team and girl’s soccer team are using technology called Athlete Intelligence, which tracks hard hits to the head during a match or practice. Using this data, head coaches and trainers at Pullman High can treat their athletes for injuries more effectively, and prevent these incidents from happening again in the future.
“We can’t see every hit, so that’s why this technology really works well,” Jasmine Kalili, the Pullman High School Athletic Trainer said. “Because if someone were to start displaying concussion symptoms, or complaining of headaches or any of those symptoms, we’re able to actually go back and see all the hits that normal people can’t see.”
Kalili attends every football game and keeps an eye out for hits that look harder than usual. Then, using information she can download to her tablet, she can see where on the head the hit happened, how strong it was, and how many potentially dangerous hits each player has had during the course of a game.
“So every week, we get a list of people who have the most amount of top of the head impacts,” Kalili said. “We can go back to our head coaches and say, ‘hey, this player is showing that he or she is leading with the top of their head consistently.’ And that coach will go back to that player and help them to really change their mechanics so they’re not putting themselves at risk of getting an injury that’s going to harm their future.”
The Pullman High School teams are only set to use this technology throughout the course of the season, but Kalili said she hopes the school can afford to get them again next year for more research and more injury prevention.
This report is a collaborative effort of a Murrow College of Communication journalism class. Students were asked to report on individual attitudes towards the 2024 election. This story is the result of more than 30 on-campus interviews and hours of collaboration and research.
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