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2008 UPA Grant Project

Revision of the Sports Medicine Section of the UPA Coaching Manual

UPA Grant Award: $50

Project Summary
As formal UPA coaching training will be required over the next few years, the training offered in sports medicine should serve as a useful and relevant resource.  I propose to revise the sports medicine section of the UPA Coach’s Manual.  The revision would expand the section and cover management and prevention of common injuries encountered in Ultimate.  I hope to use the research data results from Dr. Leslie Yen’s sports medicine project last year to identify the most relevant topics.  I plan to reference the articles from my column in Ultimate News, Injury Timeout.  I will also consult the most popular sports medicine text for coaches from all sports.  The text is Sport First Aid: A Coach's Guide to Preventing and Responding to Injuries by Melinda Flegel.  It is used by the American Sports Education Program (ASEP) in their Sports First Aid course.  ASEP has trained over a million coaches in past thirty years.

If coaches were able to quickly manage only the five most common medical problems, they could certainly decrease suffering of their players and reduce playing time lost.  They could also better understand the implications of various injuries for training and return to play.  At minimum I would cover ankle sprains, muscle strains, acute knee injuries, acute shoulder injuries, and shin splints, topics I have already covered in Ultimate News articles.  Other potential topics include: first aid kits, concussions, heel pain, asthma attack, sports nutrition, and finger sprains and dislocations. 

I also plan to revise the training portion of the manual to match the preventative medicine portion of the sports medicine section.  This will help unite the two sections integral to preventing and rehabilitating sports injuries properly.

If possible, I would also like to produce a small complimentary handbook similar to the rules handbook that could be easily carried and referenced.  The information contained in the handbook would be the same as in the coaching manual section; however, it would be reformatted in an easy to read manner for a small handbook.

For feedback, I plan to show revisions to coaches at various levels of coaching and experience to elicit feedback throughout the process.  I plan to submit various formats of sports medicine topics to be reviewed at this year’s clinics in order to learn which formats are most useful to coaches.  This would allow the creation of a sports medicine section with maximal user-friendliness.  Ideally this project would be completed within a year.