MomsTEAM Promotes Youth Sports Safety at Boston Summit

Do you ever worry about your teenager’s safety during a sports practice or game? You aren’t being over protective. In fact, you aren’t the only one.

If you are in the Boston or Massachusetts area and have children or teenage athletes, you should know about the SmartTeams Play Safe™: Protecting the Health & Safety of the Whole Child In Youth Sports By Implementing Best Practices summit. The summit is being held at Harvard Medical School’s Joseph B. Martin Conference Center on Monday, September 15^th, 2014. The cost of the event is $45.

MomsTEAM Keeping Youth Athletes Safe

The sponsor of this event, MomsTEAM Institute (an expansion of MomsTEAM.com), is a Massachusetts non-profit with the mission of providing well-researched, trusted, and relevant information to youth sports parents, coaches, athletic trainers, and more.

The summit is set out to offer youth sports programs a list of actual, concrete steps that they can take to help keep their athletes safe. In addition to physical safety in sports, the SmartTeams Play Safe™ summit will also focus on emotional, psychological, and sexual safety for youth athletes in “today’s hyper-competitive, overspecialized, and over-commercialized youth sports environment” (Summit press release).

The summit will cover topics, including:

• Sport-related concussion best practices
• The evolving landscape of youth sports safety
• Injury prevention strategies in youth sports
• Reducing injury risk in youth football
• Cognitive rest and return to learn
• Gender influences on sport-related concussions and outcomes
• Preventing sudden death in young athletes
• Cost-effective youth sports injury prevention
• Overuse injuries, early specialization, and burnout
• Bullying, emotional and psychological injury prevention
• InSideOut Coaching: transforming the lives of young athletes
• Preventing sexual abuse of youth athletes
• Role of game officials in injury prevention
• The power of the permit in youth sports safety

Brooke de Lench, Executive Director of MomsTEAM Institute and producer of The Smartest Team documentary said,

The purpose of this event is to demonstrate to parents, coaches, administrators, and health care professionals that there are steps w can take now to make youth sports safer. For far too long, the national media has focused on reporting on how youth sports programs fall short in protecting the health and safety of youth athletes. I think the time has come to make a much more positive and pro-active approach to publicizing programs that put safety ahead of winning.

This event welcomes anyone who is interested and concerned about youth sports safety, such as parents, coaches, trainers, or doctors. Doors open at 8:00 am, and the summit goes from 9:00 am to 6:00 pm.

For more information about the conference, visit http://www.smartteamsplaysafe.com/

For more information about MomsTEAM, visit http://www.momsteam.com/