Are you hurt or injured?

Recently there has been a spike in the amount of injuries in all the major professional sports. If you include other forms of professional sporting activities like the Olympics, X-Games and the WNBA, the number of injuries to players is starting to get out of hand.

In some sports like hockey and football you expect injuries. They are physical sports at their core and fans shouldn’t be surprised if a player separates a shoulder or breaks an ankle. When you are having these same injuries in basketball and baseball though, you have to stop and think what is going on. It is not just the minor breaks and sprains anymore though. All sports are dealing with the biggest problem, concussions.

The professional sports leagues have tried to curb the injuries, by introducing rules to protect players (ie no head shots in football, no touch icing in hockey) or mandatory equipment (ie helmets in hockey), but none of these measures seem to be working. Every night in the highlight reels, we as fans get goals, dunks, last second buzzer beaters and injuries. Whether it is something as innocent as Mark Texiera of the Yankees running down the first base line and popping his hamstring, or the more serious like DeSean Jackson of the Philadelphia Eagles getting hit by Dunta Robinson of the Atlanta Falcons which resulted in both players getting concussions.

The leagues are trying to react, but the games are happening still and players are being carted off every night…what can the leagues do? Here are my top 3 suggestions to limit injuries.

1 – make the playing surface bigger: Every sport could use this. By making the playing area bigger you are spreading out the players more, therefore making it more unlikely that you could land a shot like Dunta Robinson because he would have had to chase Jackson down. They wouldn’t have been in the same square meter.

2 – less players on the field: If you don’t want to make the playing surface bigger (taking seats out costs owner $$) than lessen the number of players on the field. Again, this limits the people that can be in the same area and collide violently.

3 – remove equipment: In the “good ‘ol days” hockey goalies played without masks, football helmets were made of leather, baseball players never wore batting helmets. Maybe we don’t hear about some of the serious injuries that happened in those times, but if we made the players feel less like Superman and more like Superman after getting doused with kryptonite, maybe they wouldn’t be so reckless with their bodies.

Watching sports is at its best when we get to see the best players play. This isn’t happening right now because of some serious injuries. The leagues need to find a solution to some of these problems quickly.

Do you have solutions…leave your comments below.