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Wednesday, February 05, 2003The study, carried out through the University of North Carolina's Injury Prevention Research Center, involved analyzing injury information from three years' worth of insurance claims submitted to Little League, 4,233 accidents between 1997 and 1999. "We found that 45 percent of all the injuries were related to impacts from balls, which is a really high share for any group of injuries in a sport," Marshall said. Facial injuries accounted for about 4 percent of all the claims. The study also looked at what safety equipment each of the nation's roughly 5,000 local Little League organizations were using in each of those years, based on annual surveys conducted by Little League Baseball Inc. This allowed the researchers to compare injury rates for leagues that were using softer balls or the face guards in each year with those that didn't use the gear. "We found that 73 percent of the leagues used safety balls of some sort in at least one age division, most often for youngsters playing tee-ball, and about 34 percent used face guards in at least one division," Marshall said. "Unfortunately, use of the safety equipment trails off in the older youth divisions, but that's where most of the injuries happen, not tee-ball," the researcher said. Safety balls can range from tennis balls or light rubber balls to so-called reduced-impact balls, which are made like regular baseballs but with a rubber core center rather than traditional cork and yarn. "We found there was a 23 percent reduction in ball injuries from using any type of safety ball, but a 29 percent reduction in leagues that were using the reduced-impact ball," Marshall said. posted by Sydney on 2/05/2003 08:26:00 AM 0 comments 0 Comments: |
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