Sports Health and Safety Research Group

We believe every child deserves the chance to thrive in youth sports.

Sport has the potential to support youth development — building healthy bodies and minds and creating supportive relationships and communities. However, injuries, abuse and other unhealthy stressors mean the promise of sport is not always realized. Our goal is to make sports safer and more positive for the millions of youth who play.

Explore Our Research

Pre-Game Huddles

Huddles are a brief, evidence-based approach to improve concussion safety. They only take 1-2 minutes, and involve coaches sharing a brief message about the importance of concussion reporting before each game. We conducted a randomized controlled trial of Huddles with youth in Washington state, examining the effect of Huddles on concussion reporting behavior. Our findings suggest engaging in Huddles significantly increases the the likelihood of athletes speaking up about a potentially concussive injury. We recently received an NIH grant in collaboration with US Soccer to expand this work to a national level. Learn more about Evaluating Huddles as a Novel Approach to Improving Concussion Safety.

GoHuddle

GoHuddle is a web-based, interactive concussion education platform aimed at increasing concussion safety–supportive communication by coaches. With funding from the Pac-12, we conducted an evaluation in a sample of college coaches and that found that GoHuddle increased the likelihood of coaches talking to athletes about reporting concussive symptoms and decreased the likelihood of them pressuring medical staff to return athletes to play.

InfoCabeza

Resources about concussion in the Spanish language are unfortunately scarce and those that exist are text-heavy. We partnered with parents and coaches to develop culturally-aligned and low health literacy accessible resources to help Spanish-speaking families recognize, report, and recover from sports-related concussions. Our goal is to provide information that supports conversations between families and youth about concussion prior to the sport season, to further improve concussion safety. Our next steps will be to test this with a broader sample of families and youth.

Publications

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Meet Our Team

Sara P D Chrisman, MD, MPH

Dr. Chrisman is a pediatrician, researcher, and Professor in the Division of Adolescent Medicine at Seattle Children’s Research Institute and the University of Washington. Her research is centered on the intersection between mental health and physical health, with a specific focus on interventions that support recovery post-injury. She has been a researcher for over a decade and has led multiple large research projects funded by the NICHD, NINDS, Pac-12, and the CDC. She also co-leads the Seattle Concussion Research Collaborative (SCRC) with her colleague Dr. Emily Kroshus. In addition, she serves as the Assistant Director for Community Outreach for the Sports Institute at UW Medicine, developing a program called “Mental Strength Training” to build resilience in youth athletes.

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Emily Kroshus-Havril, ScD, MPH

Emily Kroshus-Havril is a professor at the University of Washington School of Medicine in the Department of Pediatrics, and a principal investigator at Seattle Children’s Research Institute. Her research aims to help children and adolescents thrive by building their autonomy, strengthening positive connections and ensuring everyone has the opportunity to experience feelings of competence and growth. Much of her work is related to youth and collegiate sport, given the potential of sport to support positive development and to strengthen communities.

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