Field safety has long been a research topic among the scientific and medical professions and there have been many research papers published in academic journals citing varying differences in surface types. Many of these studies use some type of injury surveillance reporting system to seek out and analyze trends in injuries in different playing surfaces. For example, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has collected injury data through their Injury Surveillance System (ISS) since 1982 (Kerr et al 2014). Te National Football league (NFL) has recorded and reported injuries using a similar system since 1980 (Hershman et al 2012). Tese types of injury recording systems are capable of capturing data on injury type, weather conditions, playing surface, athlete exposures (AE), and more. Tese reporting systems allow medical trainers and researchers to access and analyze vast sets of comprehensive data over extended periods of time.
Two papers that have been recently published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine focus on injury data analysis from the National Football League (NFL) and the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA). Previous research has revealed that football cleats interact differently on synthetic and natural turf, which may lead to a different risk of injury. Divots—when a cleat creates a hole in the field—signal that the grass has absorbed force from the cleat and released the cleat back again, rather than capturing the cleat and releasing the force through a player's foot, ankle or knee, which could cause injury. Since cleats can easily create divots on natural grass less force is placed on the lower body, which may help prevent injury.
Data for the NFL study came from the analysis of all 1,280 NFL regular season games and 213,935 distinct plays from 2012 through 2016, 555 of which were on synthetic turf and 725 on natural grass. All 32 NFL teams reported injuries through an electronic health record system, and each injury report gives full details of the injury and circumstance, such as the contact, impact, activity, time lost, game-day weather, and surface type and conditions. Te researchers then examined all cases of lower body injuries along two outcomes: any time loss, and greater than eight days of time loss. Tey also examined the rates of contact-related injuries and noncontact-related injuries, since noncontact injuries are more likely to be related to the playing surface.
In the NFL study, a total of 4,801 lower body injuries occurred from 2012 to 2016 affecting 2,032 players. Play on synthetic turf had a 16 percent higher rate of lower body injuries than on natural grass. Tis included contact and noncontact that resulted in any time loss. For noncontact injuries, synthetic turf injury rates were 27 percent higher than injury rates on natural grass. However, when examining noncontact knee, ankle and foot injuries, play on synthetic turf had a 56 percent higher rate of injuries resulting in any time loss and a 67 percent higher rate of injuries resulting in more than eight days of time loss. Te greatest difference in noncontact injury rates between synthetic and natural turf were to the ankle: synthetic turf resulted in a 68 percent higher rate of injuries resulting in any time loss and a 103 percent higher rate of injuries resulting in more than eight days of time loss.
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TPI Turf News November/December 2019
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