Dr. Hainline’s Battle To Make College Sports Safer

At any given point, the NCAA oversees 420,000 student-athletes from 1,000 member institutions, competing in 23 different sports. It is estimated that, during a single athletic calendar year, there will be 5,880 injuries sustained through either practice or game play. Yet, up until 2013, the NCAA didn’t have a single medical officer dedicated to tracking or reducing these incidents.

Now two years into his tenure, Dr. Brian Hainline has had time to analyze the data and develop his own game plans for dealing with what’s hurting student-athletes.

The Man For The Job

For more than 20 year, Dr. Hainline has been involved with sports medicine. A neurologist by trade, he shifted focus to sports neurology from neuro-oncology, and co-founded the Executive Committee of the American Academy of Neurology Sports Neurology Section. He’s been incredibly involved in developing safety standards for tennis, serving as the Chief Medical Officer of the US Open Tennis Championships for 16 years.



Prior to being named the Chief Medical Officer for the NCAA, he served in the same capacity for the US Tennis Association. But what might be most telling about his appointment and expected role in college athletics is the title of his most prominent peer-reviewed paper; Drugs and the Athlete.

Finding Common Ground On Doping

In a recent interview with the Wall Street Journal, Dr. Hainline made what may be one of the biggest understatements of his career. “The NCAA’s doping policy is outdated, and there needs to be more consistency among schools.” By “more consistency” he most likely meant, “any consistency.”

To date, the NCAA has no uniform standards for drug testing policies and enforcement. Even among major conferences, the decisions are left mostly up to the schools to determine what to enforce, including what constitutes an adequate punishment.

It’s a byproduct of the old ways of playing the game, where decisions are made internally, and not always with the player’s long-term health in mind. Now, with a push from Hainline, the Power 5 are beginning to reevaluate standardizing drug policies, at least on a conference level. While resolutions are still a work in progress, the doctor at least has the support of powerful people this time, including the SEC’s incoming commissioner, Greg Sankey.

Leading With The Head

“Concussion is the elephant in the room,” Dr. Hainline said in a separate interview with WSJ.com, and he should know. Not only has the neurologist seen the uptick in concussion diagnoses and recognition, but he’s been bombarded for the last two years with think-pieces and investigations like Frontline’s “League of Denial” on PBS.

Despite the fact that more than half of all sports related injuries involve the lower extremities, concussions are the most prevalent kind of injury in college athletics with the power to inflict long term damage. This is why Dr. Hainline is not only making a push to introduce baseline concussion protocols like those the NFL recently put in place, but he is also supporting a wide range of research initiatives by the NCAA, including a partnership with the Department of Defense, that are aimed at reducing head injuries across college athletics.

Collecting Data And Not Much More

If all of these initiatives and policies seem like common sense, like something that should have been in place decades ago, you aren’t alone. What may be most shocking it that, until recently, the NCAA didn’t even have standard reporting practices for major injuries or fatalities.

In every other industry, this is not only standard, it is the law. But the NCAA hasn’t until recently looked at college athletics as an industry. Now, all catastrophic injuries or deaths involving student athletes are required to be submitted to the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research. Of all the initiatives mentioned here, this is the only one that has actually been pushed into legislation by the NCAA, and sadly, the only one I expect them to get right.

I have every faith that Dr. Hainline is making an earnest effort to make the game safer, but as long as decision making power is yielded to individual institutions, progress will be stalled. Schools inherently have their own best interest at heart, and even when the NCAA makes an effort to do something right, a single university can undo that apparent progress nearly overnight.

Did we mention that the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research is at UNC?