Practicing Safety in Youth Sports

Coached with knowledge and care, played with joy and passion, youth sports can put kids on the track to a lifetime of achievement, confidence and physical fitness.

Each week thousands of Ventura County young people exercise their minds and self-esteem as well as their bodies on the area’s many gridirons, diamonds, courts and fields.

Nearly all are better off for the experience. But occasionally, something goes wrong.

Donte Nunnery, 16, a once-promising Rio Mesa High School athlete, is slowly fighting his way back toward normal after collapsing during a basketball game a year ago. It was later determined that he suffered a heart attack, then stopped breathing and fell into a coma. A coach and a nurse who climbed out of the stands administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation until paramedics arrived, but his brain was damaged.

In October, Buena High football player Jeff Larson, 17, was partially paralyzed by a stroke that hit him eight days after he received an apparently minor injury during a game.

In July, Westlake High baseball player Ryan Cope, 17, was hospitalized after being hit in the head by a pitch. And last spring, two high school athletes died in separate track and field accidents elsewhere in Southern California.

To help coaches and other sports supervisors do all they can to avoid such incidents and to respond quickly and effectively should they occur, the Ventura County chapter of the American Red Cross is offering a sports safety training course.

The course, co-developed by the U.S. Olympic Committee, will be held Wednesday and Dec. 26 in Ventura and Dec. 27 in Simi Valley. It will train students in how to prevent and treat muscle, bone and joint injuries and how to administer CPR in extreme cases.

To register for the Ventura sessions, call 339-2234. To register in Simi Valley, call 582-8630.

Serious injuries in youth sports are rare. We encourage anyone who works with young athletes to grab this opportunity to make them even more so.