Fresh off their exciting home win against Baldwin and first victory of the season, Spring Hill High School looks ahead to a tough conference match up at home against a 3-1 DeSoto on Friday night.
While the coaches are focused on perfecting this week’s game plan, Spring Hill’s certified athletic trainer, Stacy Van Dam, has another tool in her arsenal designed to keep players on the field and in the best position to be ready to take on the competition.
Part of the McCarthy Auto Group and PrepsKC student athlete health and safety initiative, Spring Hill is one of five area schools that was provided Riddell’s InSite Impact Response System for use this football season to better monitor player’s head impact exposure.
Midway through the year Van Dam said the system is in place and working fine.
“I haven't had much feedback yet (regarding use of the InSite system),” Van Dam said. “But, we have only had a few alerts and with those it hasn't been a concussion yet.”
She’s also received no complaints from the players who have a player unit or 5-zone sensor pad embedded in between the liner and padding in each helmet. The player unit communicates with a sideline monitor that will receive alerts if a player receives an impact that is beyond a research-based threshold for their position and skill level (e.g., quarterback, high school). Van Dam maintains a database through the Riddell InSite player management software that can keep track of the team’s alert history, which allows for analysis of impact exposure trends.
Riddell recommends that each team deploy their own player assessment protocol in the case of an alert. Despite receiving few alerts thus far, which is a good thing, Van Dam reiterates the value of a tool like this.
“Since not all high school football players like to report things it can give me notice to go check on them and then keep an eye on them better,” Van Dam said. “Also, since I am the only athletic trainer at my site it helps if I am busy with something else I can have someone else pull the player off and wait for evaluation by me.”
Up to 150 players can be tied to one alert monitor, which allows for large single teams or multiple teams (e.g., freshman, JV an Varsity) to utilize one alert monitor.
We’ll continue to share more in the coming weeks about Spring Hill and the other four schools participating in the Riddell InSite program: Basehor-Linwood, Lee’s Summit, Sumner Academy and Wyandotte High School.
