Hockey players who participate in body-checking leagues have a far higher injury rate than players who don’t, according to research from Calgary’s Paul Eliason and his colleagues.
Paul Eliason, a postdoctoral fellow in the Sport Injury Prevention Research Center in Calgary, has spent much of his career examining ways in which youth athletes can be better protected while playing contact sports. While most of his research involves the minor hockey community, Eliason hopes that athletes across all sports are able to play — free from injury — well into their adulthood.
Curious about body checking rules and regulations that have been implemented into the minor hockey system across Calgary, reporter Matt DeMille caught up with Eliason to discuss changes.
That shows that if you take body checking out, you’re gonna reduce injury and you’re going to reduce concussions and that was well established in the under-13 age group, and actually, I didn’t mention this, but it’s also been shown at non-elite levels play in the older age groups. The under-15 and under-18 age groups also have significantly reduced injury rates if you take it out at non-elite levels in those older age divisions. That’s great, but I think everybody can understand that if you take body checking out, you’re gonna prevent injuries and concussions. But, the belief in the hockey community was, “Well, okay, if you take body checking out now, are these players when they’re going into the next age group or when they’re a little bit older and then they’re first introduced to body checking, are their rates of injury and concussion going to be really high because they have no experience with body checking?” So, the belief in the community was that potentially introducing body checking earlier, giving that experience to body checking earlier would help prevent injuries and concussions later on. In our follow up work, we actually showed that that wasn’t true. That, at the under-15 and under-18 age groups, more body checking experience wasn’t protective, that it didn’t reduce injuries or concussions. So, it kind of goes against what the hockey community believed
