Do you remember my rant on girls lacrosse and lack of helmets?
Well apparently I was not the only one feeling like this, as E:60 ran a story about this ridiculous problem. In the report it is said that girls lacrosse has the highest concussion rate in all of high school sports.
Granted, there is the thought that introducing the helmet would make the game more physical and violent. Lets be clear here, sticks and balls constantly at head level alone can cause head injuries.
There are those that are actively trying to take helmets out of football, thinking that like rugby, the athletes wouldn’t use their heads as a weapon like they currently do. I haven’t seen the statistics, but I would be willing to bet that concussions are less frequent in rugby than in football. Football helmets have been changed over time to better protect, but have in the long run made things worse because they are using their heads more for blocking and tackling. If they went without helmets, most of them wouldn’t be using their heads as weapons (I use the word “most” loosely).
So as far as lacrosse is concerned, it isn’t a hitting game, even though there is contact, that is not the majority of the game like football. Helmets to protect them would certainly be good, and probably not give them a battering ram.
Which would return you to the injuries in the early part of the 20th century in which football was such a brutal game that President Teddy Roosevelt summoned the Ivy League school presidents to the White House in 1905 to “encourage” them to change the game because of the violence and the catastrophic injuries that were occurring at an alarming rate. The public wanted football banned because it was BRUTALLY violent. Taking helmets out of the game, or taking facemasks off the helmets both seem like good ideas on the surface but would basically be simply swapping one set of injuries for another. Which is not progress.