Yonkers charter school sees fewer sports injuries, thanks to risk screenings
Injury rates among student-athletes at a Yonkers charter school have dropped since orthopedic health care workers started offering risk assessment screenings.
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Injury rates among student-athletes at a Yonkers charter school have dropped since orthopedic health care workers started offering risk assessment screenings.
Benny Dawson says it's his job to keep athletes safe as the manager of Athlete Health at the Hospital for Special Surgery.
He and his colleagues visited the Charter School of Educational Excellence on Wednesday to conduct their Move Better Labratory.
"Our Move Better Labratory is a collection of machines that we use here to run students and athletes through a injury prevention screening," Dawson says.
His colleague, Jimmy Russomano, says the screening uses advanced technology to assess a student-athlete's risk for sports injury before the season picks up.
"Now, we can have someone do an exercise like a squat in front of us and we can actually put angles to the joints and figure out is there an asymmetry from the right side to the left side of their body. Is there something wrong with the way they're absorbing forces," Russomano says.
Some of the most common injuries that the health care workers see in the student-athletes are ankle sprains and ACL tears.
However, the school's athletic director, Michael Desimone, says injuries have decreased since this partnership began.
"Specifically, ankle injuries and ACL injuries. But across the board, making sure that our stakeholders are educated from our players to our coaches to our parents because that triangle is really important," Desimone says.
Student basketball player Raymond Jones is expected to score his 1,000th point this season and says the partnership is also helping him stay in the game.
"Without this, without checking on us, checking our injuries, checking on our health - we would just be playing up and down, wearing our body out," Jones says.
