Contact Sports

Politics apparently is not the only summer sport on Capitol Hill leaving hot-tempered competitors at odds with one another. Congressional softball games and their post-game analyses can turn into near-contact sports, too. Earlier this summer, the office team representing U.S. Rep. Curt Weldon, called "Weldon's Flamethrowers," played a team made up of staff members from Roll Call, the independent newspaper that covers Congress. Weldon's team won, 17-11. Then last week, the newspaper named Weldon, a Delaware County Republican, to its list of 20 members of Congress whose jobs were most in jeopardy.

Public schools have the right to sponsor girls' sports teams, but in contact sports, boys have no right to make those teams coed. Under Title IX, the federal civil rights law that applies to public education, girls have won the right to equal athletic opportunity with boys, who historically enjoyed a privileged status in public school sports. Now, high school boys mock the goal of "equal opportunity" when they use their advantages of size and strength to take over such girls sports as field hockey.

Millions of athletes a year suffer head trauma, and there is growing evidence that repeat concussions - especially without time for rest and healing - may lead to permanent neurological damage. The problem is that concussions are not always obvious to coaches, and highly competitive players sometimes deny symptoms to get back in the game. So there is a crying need for rapid screening administered on the sidelines. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine suggest that one already exists.

From Bucks, ire over Chesco property issue As a business owner, I am astounded at the political events unfolding in Coatesville concerning the city's attempt to condemn 42 acres of Dick Saha's property. As a longtime resident of Bucks County, I cannot fathom that a municipality could condemn farmland outside its legal boundaries for the self-serving purpose of creating revenues. Reid Kanaley's Sept. 24 article, "Board adds referenda against golf course to ballot," states that this has been a battle since 1999.

Ignorance, and ignorance alone, banned [Magic] Johnson from basketball. The game he loved, and elevated, was stolen from him for grotesquely insufficient reasons. In the fall of 1991, when Johnson announced that he was HIV-positive, every medical expert under the sun testified that the chances of Johnson infecting an NBA player with the AIDS virus were infinitesimal. You've got more chance of being hit by a comet, killed in an earthquake or struck by lightning. Out of hundreds of thousands of AIDS cases up to that time, not one had come from contact sports.

Delran junior Carli Lloyd was looking forward to traveling to Egypt and showing her talents against its national soccer team and Morocco's. However, a broken collarbone suffered Saturday will keep Lloyd from playing, although she will still make the trip. Lloyd, The Inquirer's South Jersey girls' soccer player of the year, will go to Egypt with her amateur women's team, the New Brunswick Power. The team features mostly college players. Lloyd and Burlington Township junior Venice Williams are the only South Jersey players on the team who still have high school eligibility.

The Montgomery County Health Department yesterday distributed antibiotics to 11 more children in a local day-care center, while their 4-year-old classmate remains hospitalized with bacterial meningitis. The boy, whose name is being withheld by authorities for privacy reasons, was upgraded from serious to fair condition yesterday and was expected to be transferred out of the intensive-care unit at St. Christopher's Hospital for Children, officials there said. Health Department officials said the boy most likely contracted meningococcemia, a rare and potentially fatal form of bacterial meningitis that infects the blood and commonly strikes the young.

At 83, Mr. Hockey is still in demand and on the move. Gordie Howe is about to embark on another series of fund-raisers to support dementia research. It's a personal cause. The disease killed his wife, Colleen, in 2009 and is beginning to affect him. "He's a little bit worse than last year, but pretty close to about the same," son Marty said. "He just loses a little bit more, grasping for words. "The worst part of this disease is there's nothing you can do about it. " While the long-term effects of concussions have been very much in the news lately, the family is hesitant to link the Hall of Famer's condition to chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE)

Something was clearly wrong when Brianna Stephens remained on her back, holding her right knee, which had buckled minutes before on the grass at Strath Haven on Monday night. But no one could do anything about it. A Villa Joseph Marie player bent over and tended to her teammate, offering words of encouragement. Jems coach Rich Finneyfrock stood over Stephens, a freshman, and watched. The officials looked around. The Strath Haven coaches came out to the field, but they didn't have any answers.

As doctors who treat and study traumatic brain injury in children and youths, we know firsthand that these injuries can prevent children from reaching their full potential. Our research shows childhood concussion is most common between the ages of 11 and 15 years. Therefore, we applaud the suggestion that youth sports curtail excessive contact ("The hits keep coming," Nov. 10). We propose that youth sports programs focus on honing agility, eye-hand coordination, and general conditioning - the skills that should be developed in the 6- to 14-year-old age range to become competitive in high school and college - and delay deliberate hitting in contact/collision sports until later in adolescence.