Accommodating NCAA's Guidelines on Prevention of Catastrophic Death and Injury via Technology

The NCAA has ramped up regulations and guidelines for collegiate sports performance. Many recommendations can become administrative burdens on sports performance and sports medicine staff. TeamBuildr has already begun formatting its platform to accommodate for these regulations and helps sports performance programs comply in a streamlined way.

The NCAA has released its document in July of 2019 , Interassociation recommendations: Preventing catastrophic injury and death in collegiate athletes, in which they address “unified standards of care” in order to help prevent catastrophic injuries and deaths in collegiate athletes. These recommendations emerged and were developed from the 2016 NCAA Safety in College Football Summit where they were ultimately approved according to the Uniform Standard of Care procedures. The Uniform Standard of Care policy is a “procedural pathway that guides and facilitates communication the Committee on Competitive Safeguards and Medical Aspects of Sports (CSMAS) and the [NCAA] Board of Governors on issues of student-athlete health and safety.”

The document recommendations provide an Association-wide solution to mitigate catastrophic injury and death in collegiate athletes. The effective date of the document was August 1, 2019, meaning that this is the “starting line” for school adoption of the recommendations, which includes beginning the process of “determining alignment strategies with strength and conditioning professionals.” As stated by the NCAA Board of Governors, these recommendations apply to all athletics personnel, athletics health care administrators (AHCs), and anyone who has a role to play in the prevention of catastrophic injury and death in student-athletes, including coaches and their staff. The AHCs will have a special responsibility in that they will be the ones to ensure that the recommendations are broadly distributed among members of the athletic department.

Some of the outlined recommendations, such as developing a reporting structure for strength and conditioning professionals, can be immediately actionable at the institutional level. This White Paper aims to define specific best practices specifically to the strength and conditioning department that can be implemented with the use of the strength and conditioning software TeamBuildr.

To add further context as it applies to strength and conditioning departments, attorney Reed Wainwright interprets the letter to mean:

Strength and Conditioning professionals should be proactive in implementing the Recommendations of this document. Foremost, the health and safety of the student-athlete should never be at risk as a result of the implementation of any strength and conditioning program. The strength and conditioning coach’s failure to follow the Recommendations would be considered negligent if a catastrophic injury and/or death occurred during the implementation of the strength and conditioning program.