X-Men football team contributing to research on head impacts

ANTIGONISH, NS ­– When the StFX X-Men football team takes to the field this season, there is more going on than just game strategizing and executing plays - they are contributing to scientific research.

StFX head athletic therapist Tara Sutherland CAT(C) and fourth year Human Kinetics student and senior student therapist Dan Muise, along with co-advisor Dr. Sasho MacKenzie, Human Kinetics Associate Professor, have been working with the X-Men football team in the area of head impacts.

Sutherland is very involved in the research and treatment of concussions. Last winter she was one of eight individuals selected by the Canadian Athletic Therapy Association (CATA) to meet in Calgary for a workshop based around the final stage of CATA's Role Delineation Study. Furthermore, this past May she presented at CATA's national conference in Winnipeg, with her presentation focusing on the Antigonish Concussion Clinic that she and Dr. David Cudmore have established here in Antigonish. Her interest and expertise in concussions has sparked many students interest on this topic of concussions, including Dan Muise.

While searching for a topic for Muise's honours thesis, they came across an article about a student at the University of Western Ontario who partnered with a company called GForce Tracker based in Markham Ont. that dealt with measuring impacts to the head in football athletes. GForce Tracker is the only company that is Head Impact Telemetry (HIT) count certified by the Sports Legacy Institute in Boston.

After contacting company CTO Gerry Luliano with the hopes of obtaining some GForce trackers for use in a similar study at StFX, he was delighted to be of assistance to the study.

Sutherland comments, "They have been very generous in giving our study 50 GForce trackers, enough to place one in each of the helmets of the X-Men starting line-up. These GForce trackers are top of the line and on the cutting edge of research in the area of head impacts."

The device is the size of a domino and is placed inside the football helmet, wirelessly transmitting real-time data to a sideline computer. When an athlete receives an impact to the head, the sideline staff is immediately notified with various measurements of acceleration and location of the hit.

Most of the published research to date on the topic of head impacts has focused on football in the NCAA and high schools in the U.S.A., so with the help from GForce Tracker, this study at StFX will help in determining whether Canadian Interuniversity Sport (CIS) football has similar results found in studies south of the border. Furthermore, all previous research has been on in-season practices and games. Sutherland and Muise's study will also investigate head impacts that are associated with pre-season training camps where players undergo twice a day practices. 

The X-Men football team will be equipped with the GForce trackers for the entire 2014 season, making for an exciting and interesting fall on the football gridiron, in terms of how the plays impact both the scoreboard and science.

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