As Harriton’s football team prepares for next season, there’s a question begging for an answer, a question that has been prevalent ever since scientists and doctors first began to discover. Does our culture make it more difficult for medical staff to diagnose and therefore treat concussions?

First, how devastating can untreated concussions be on the brain?

Here at Harriton our staff is certainly excellent when it comes to helping student athletes recover from their injuries, but what happens when a possible concussion is never reported, and just how many unreported concussions happen at Harriton every football season?

I initially asked Harriton athletic trainer, Jamie Goldberg, several questions related to what happens to a person when they get a concussion that isn’t treated promptly. She described post-concussion syndrome, or PCS.

Ms. Goldberg responded, “A set of symptoms that may continue weeks, months or years after a concussion.  This is caused from structural changes to the brain or disruption of the neurotransmitters in the brain resulting from the impact that caused the concussion.”

Symptoms range from headache, to difficulty concentrating, to emotional and behavioral issues such as irritability. There’s also second-impact syndrome, SIS, which is “a condition in which a second concussion occurs before a first concussion has properly healed, causing rapid and severe brain swelling.”

SIS is quite alarming in three ways. First, the second blow can come months later, so long as the person hasn’t properly recovered from the initial one. A player may think nothing of a minor blow to the head when it happens, and that person may only experience a minor concussion.

But if it isn’t treated, another blow can produce a catastrophic injury seemingly out of nowhere.

Secondly, the subsequent blow can occur minutes later. This of course means that if a player suffers a concussion during a game and stays in the game, another blow could result in SIS.

Third and finally, SIS is often fatal, and even those who survive are almost always severely disabled.

Ms. Goldberg added, “While your brain in still healing, you are much more likely to have another concussion.”

It all sounds pretty terrible, but there is a positive note to all of this: the Harriton staff is always on the case to make sure none of that happens to any player. If any head injury was even suspected, a player wouldn’t be allowed back in the game.

It is reasonable to wonder, however, where the influence of the athletic staff ends and the influence of sports culture takes over. The answer to our question might lie in the locker room rather than in the filing cabinet.

In short, how many unreported concussions occur each year? In other words, does the culture and pressure on an athlete to “take one for the team” create situations that prevents an athlete from reporting a possible concussion?

Senior Jake Smolenski doesn’t think there are many unreported concussions, but that a certain number of them are inevitable.

“Almost every practice contains contact, and head to head collisions are unavoidable, no matter the education and emphasis on form,” he says.

“The part that muddles the reporting of the concussions is the definition. Small hits to the head, which may cause pain for an hour or two can be called concussions in some cases, but are never reported or discussed.  Most of the time, players will wait for a few days to see if the symptoms subside before reporting, and that can lead to unreported cases.”

Smolenski also remarked, “if there is pressure to remain in the game, it comes from the player themselves. In the last game of this season, I suffered a blow to the head in the middle of the third quarter, and definitely felt it. I stayed in the game until the middle of the fourth quarter and took several more hits to the head, before I took one to the chin and lost my sense of balance and was taken out of the game. I actually think that the pressure from teammates and others has shifted to report the injury and go off of the field.”

His overall tone was that there hasn’t been a serious problem, as least as long as he’s played for Harriton.

Sophomore Nate Nagvajara essentially agrees.

“Once people figured out how serious concussions really were, that whole culture of coaches pressuring players into staying in the game couldn’t really continue.”

He thought modern science and medical technology probably had something to do with the cultural shift.

“We don’t really have a problem anymore, at least not here.” He was fairly sure that if a player did try to hide an injury, other players would either pressure him to report it or simply report it for him.

“I can’t say it’s ever come up…but I think it would happen.”

Sophomore, Nick Merriam, agrees that concussion reporting is largely under control, but he’s not so sure about other players pressuring an injured player to report a possible concussion.

“While there are certainly more safeguards, and more encouragement from staff to report concussions, I don’t hear players saying, ‘come on, report this.’ We do a good job here, but it will be very hard to change the actual mindset that drives us to stay in the game.”

Harriton staff members are doing everything they can to increase the reporting of concussions. Every player I talked to mentioned that. It is also safe to say that we have a very positive football culture. But they all agreed that a few unreported concussions do happen.