Natasha Helmick goes up for a header during a soccer match in Dallas and gets speared in the left temple by an opponent. The 14-year-old, a talented center midfielder playing in the choice Lake Highlands Girls Classic League, crumples to the ground.
Michael McElroy
David Goldstein of Miami spoke to the Florida legislators about devastating health problems that developed after he suffered multiple concussions. Despite his testimony, Florida killed a concussion bill for youth athletes.
Mark Graham
Five years ago, former soccer player Natasha Helmick once played a game half-blind after sustaining a concussion. Today, her mother Micky says that it takes her daughter three times as long to complete mental tasks.
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She can't see anything out of her left eye. Her coach asks if she's OK. Natasha lies and says she's good to go, and the coach puts her back into the lineup. She plays the remainder of the game, even though one eye sees darkness while floaters dance in front of the other.
Natasha plays again later that day, without full eyesight. Her vision eventually will return, but five years and four concussions later, she's unable to recall much of her childhood.
Speaking to Natasha, who was forced to give up an athletic scholarship to Texas State University–San Marcos, you wouldn't know that she is a brain-damaged 19-year-old. "But academically," says her mother, Micky Helmick, "everything is three times harder."
Around the time Natasha suffered her first concussion, 13-year-old Zackery Lystedt's life changed forever. In 2006, the football player known to friends as "Ray Ray" after his idol, rampaging Baltimore Ravens linebacker Ray Lewis, was playing defense for his middle school in Maple Valley, Wash., east of Kent.
In the second quarter of a game, Zack fell backward after an unremarkable tackle and hit the back of his head. The injury escaped the notice of his father in the stands. "I thought he had gotten the wind knocked out of him," says Zack's father, Victor.
Zack played every down for the rest of the game, even forcing and recovering a fumble and sprinting for a 32-yard return. But when his dad met him after the game, Zack started stumbling and muttering, "My head hurts really bad."
He collapsed onto the field. His left eye suddenly "blew out" and turned an inky black, the result of blood swelling in his skull. Then he convulsed into dozens of strokes. Says Victor, who witnessed the spectacle, helpless and confused, "My boy was dying on a football field."
Across the country, people have awakened to the sometimes irreversible damage of concussions, especially in high-impact professional sports. With much of the attention focused on the National Football League and National Hockey League, Village Voice Media—following a months-long, nationwide investigation into the consequences of concussions on youth athletes, who are bigger and more aggressive than in past generations, and often play year-round—has found the following:
• The effect of a concussion on a kid can be much more devastating than on an adult. Doctors say that until a person is in his early to mid-20s, his or her brain is not fully developed and can't take the same level of trauma as can an adult brain.
• Postmortem analysis, the only surefire way to measure a concussion's devastating effects, shows that repeated blows to the head may be linked to Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ALS, and a number of other fatal diseases.
• An athlete who doesn't exhibit outward signs of a concussion (headaches, dizziness, vomiting, temporary amnesia) can nevertheless experience changes in brain activity similar to those in a player who has been clinically diagnosed.
• Thus far in 2011, 20 state governments and the District of Columbia have signed concussion legislation that prohibits an athlete from returning to play until cleared by a licensed physician. To date, 28 states (as well as the city of Chicago) have concussion laws in place. This figure does not include Florida, whose legislators struck down a proposed bill that could have helped protect youth athletes.
• The ImPACT test, widely regarded as the go-to neurological exam to measure concussive blows, doesn't always accurately gauge a player's readiness to return to action. And you can cheat on it too.
Meanwhile, as attorneys debate how the new concussion laws will play out, kids like Natasha Helmick, whose memory struggles sometimes resemble those of a person three times her age, and Zackery Lystedt, who is only now beginning to walk under his own power five years later, continue to battle a condition that puts parents who want the best for their kids in a difficult spot: push them to be standouts in sports—which are often the key to a better future—or hold back on account of all the harm that can be done?
For Ali Champness, it was a freak ball, kicked into her face by her own goalkeeper in practice, that turned her life upside down. The 14-year-old freshman, who'd already made junior varsity at Garces Memorial, a Catholic high school in Bakersfield, Calif., told her parents the sting went away after a little while.
Two days later, though, on the way to a game, Ali complained of a headache and dizziness, according to her mother, Kim Champness.
During that game, the ball was kicked in the air and "brushed across the front of [Ali's] face," says Kim. "It was not a hard hit at all, but right after that, she started stuttering." Ali saw a doctor, who discovered a number of much more serious problems.
