Demand on players leading to injury, new study reveals

The constant demands on young GAA players is contributing to high instances of hip, groin and thigh injuries, according to a recent study.

Athlone Institute of Technology lecturer Siobhan O’Connor, who was involved in the research, says that there is not enough communication between coaches to reduce risk factors.

“We found working with adolescent players, that 30% of our participants played hurling and football equally, so they didn’t have a dominant sport as such,” O’Connor said. “I have assessed players who have played two or three matches in one day and you ask them, ‘Can you think of the last time you didn’t train? When was the last time you had a break?’ And they can’t even remember that.

“So it is quite worrying. You don’t see it with every player but, especially if they are good, the demands placed on them by their clubs, their schools or their counties can be very problematic. And there’s not enough communication. If you have a 16-year-old they go and play under-16, then they’re asked to go train with the minors and they’re going to want to do that.

“It’s very difficult for an adolescent to approach a coach and say, ‘No, I’m tired.’ There needs to be greater communication between coaches, players and parents so that people understand the demands being placed on them.”

O’Connor stressed the need to examine the playing season for young players.

“I think there needs to be someone looking at the playing season. When does their playing season start and when does it end? You can’t really fully see a time when it stops, they’re constantly in demand. There needs to be some sort of a handover between clubs. The question realistically though is whether you can really do that in an amateur game.”

The one-year study involving over 600 players also found that there are greater instances of injuries at the end of training sessions, with non-contact injuries the most prevalent and sprinting the most common mechanism of injury. Almost 65% of injuries among the collegiate players who took part occurred in the fourth quarter of matches.

O’Connor, who spoke at a major sports conference in Dublin, also said understanding risk factors is crucial to minimising injuries.

“We found particularly with collegiate injuries that in the last 15 minutes fatigue is a massive factor. Training programmes should focus on reducing fatigue.

“You hear the story of sessions where you get all the lads together at the end of training and start doing sprints. That’s definitely not the ideal method. So it’s about teaching coaches about the risk factors for these types of injuries.”

“The big focus should be prevention. Screening is a fantastic method. It’s time-consuming and costly but it works. Something like poor squatting technique is a big risk factor, contributing to injury in the lower body. That information needs to get out to the coaches and the players themselves. It’s not largely done in Ireland but it is in other countries.”