Factors Influencing Coaches’ Decisions about Concussion on the Sidelines of Youth Sports
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Objective Identify coach reported factors influencing decisions about potential concussion in youth sports. Background Youth concussion in sport is an established public health concern. Coaches are the primary stakeholders deciding about removal from play for suspected concussion on the sidelines of competition and practice in most youth sports organizations. Estimates indicate over 2 million adults coach youth sports. Legislation across the U.S. and guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and the Concussion in Sport Group recommend players with suspected concussion be removed from play and not return prior to medical clearance and a graduated return to play protocol be followed. Design/Methods Qualitative semi-structured 1:1 interviews with coaches of youth community or school sponsored athletic programs in Illinois. Interview data was analyzed according to a constructivist grounded theory methodology employing constant comparative methods with an inductive approach to theme emergence. Results Sixteen coaches of recreational, competitive and scholastic athletic teams participated. Coaches were primarily white (94%) males (81%) with an average age of 47. Ten were volunteer coaches. Analytic themes related to decision making include: 1) personal experience drives decisions more than concussion training, 2) coaches fear the legal liability of missing a concussive event on the field, and 3) discomfort with the ambiguity of making decisions on the field. Coach perceived factors for improving comfort with decision making were: 1) availability of checklists or tools for use on the sidelines, 2) improve shared decision making with all stakeholders, and 3) access to medical professionals on the sidelines. Conclusions There is a possible misalignment between coaches’ actual practices on the field and best practice guidelines. Coaches report behaviors on the sidelines that are distinct from practice guidelines and public health initiatives related to removal from play and return to play when events on the field present the potential for concussion.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.017 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".