Sports are one of the best activities for kids! They get them moving and build confidence along the way. But sports also come with real risks, from minor muscle strains to injuries that can sideline your child for weeks. Before you sign your kid up for a team, here are some things you should know about, and what you can do to keep them from affecting your little athlete.
Sprains and Strains From Overuse
Sprains happen when a ligament stretches or tears. Strains happen when a muscle or tendon does the same. Both are extremely common in youth sports, especially in activities that involve a lot of running or jumping.
The main driver? Too much too soon. Kids who ramp up training volume quickly without enough recovery are the ones who end up on the bench. A ligament or tendon that gets worked harder than it can recover from eventually reaches its limit.
Rotating activities instead of drilling the same sport year-round reduces the repetitive stress behind these injuries. If your child keeps mentioning the same pain after practice, have it checked before the injury gets worse.
Growth Plate Injuries
Kids aren’t just small adults when it comes to bones. Their skeletons are still developing, and growth plates, which are the areas of soft cartilage near the ends of long bones, are vulnerable in a way that adult bones aren’t.
Impact or twisting forces that an adult might shake off can fracture a growth plate in a child. These injuries show up most in the wrist, knee, and ankle. If your child falls and complains of pain near a joint that doesn’t ease up within a day or two, get an X-ray. A fracture through a growth plate that goes untreated can affect how the bone develops.
Concussions
A concussion is a brain injury caused by an impact that makes the brain move inside the skull. It doesn’t require a loss of consciousness to be serious. Headache, confusion, sensitivity to light, nausea, or feeling “foggy” after a hit to the head are all signs.
Contact sports like football, hockey, and soccer carry higher concussion risk, but any sport where a fall or collision is possible can produce one. The protocol after a suspected concussion is simple: your child sits out. Return-to-play guidelines exist for a reason, because a second concussion before the brain fully heals from the first is far more dangerous than the original injury.
Heat-Related Illness
Kids regulate body temperature less efficiently than adults, which makes them more susceptible to heat exhaustion and heat stroke during outdoor practices. Heat stroke is a medical emergency, with symptoms including confusion, no sweating despite high body temperature, and loss of consciousness.
Heat exhaustion is the warning sign before that. It presents as heavy sweating, weakness, pale skin, and nausea. The fix at that stage is getting your child out of the heat and hydrating immediately.
Before every outdoor practice in warm weather, your child should be hydrating throughout the day, not just during the activity. Coaches should build water breaks into practice regardless of whether kids say they’re thirsty.
Cracked and Broken Teeth
Unfortunately, cracked teeth aren’t all too rare in sports like basketball, soccer, and wrestling! There are different types of tooth cracks, and not all are serious, but some, like a split tooth or craze lines that deepen over time, can compromise the entire tooth structure and require significant dental work.
One of the best ways to prevent dental injuries is to have your child wear a custom-fitted mouth guard. These guards absorb and distribute impact force so that a hit to the face doesn’t travel directly into the teeth and jaw. A boil-and-bite guard from a drugstore offers some protection, but a custom guard made by a dentist fits more precisely and stays in place during play.
Eye Injuries
The eye is surprisingly unprotected during most sports, and a ball, finger, or elbow to the eye can cause anything from a scratched cornea to a detached retina. Racquet sports, basketball, and baseball carry some of the higher rates of eye injury in youth athletics.
Protective eyewear designed for sports is made from polycarbonate, which is impact-resistant. Standard glasses or sunglasses don’t provide the same level of protection and can actually make an injury worse if the frame breaks on impact. If your child wears prescription lenses, sport-specific prescription goggles are available and worth the investment.
Shin Splints
Shin splints refer to pain along the inner edge of the shinbone, usually caused by repetitive stress on the bone and the tissue surrounding it. Runners and soccer players deal with this the most, but any sport involving sustained running on hard surfaces can produce it.
The pain usually shows up during or after activity and fades with rest. The problem is that kids often push through it, which extends the recovery time. Cross-training, proper footwear with adequate cushioning, and not dramatically increasing mileage week over week are the three things that prevent shin splints from becoming a recurring issue.
Knee Injuries, Including ACL Tears
ACL tears used to be considered an adult sports injury. That’s no longer the case. Adolescent athletes, particularly girls in sports like soccer and basketball, tear their ACLs at high rates. The ACL is a ligament that stabilizes the knee, and it’s most vulnerable during cutting movements, sudden stops, and awkward landings.
ACL reconstruction surgery and the rehab that follows can sideline a young athlete for six months to a year. Neuromuscular training programs, which teach athletes how to land with proper knee alignment, have been shown to reduce ACL injury rates when incorporated into regular practice.
Shoulder Injuries in Throwing Sports
Baseball pitchers, quarterbacks, and swimmers are all at risk for overuse injuries in the shoulder, particularly rotator cuff problems and a condition called “Little Leaguer’s Shoulder,” which involves stress on the growth plate at the top of the humerus.
Pitch counts exist in youth baseball specifically because throwing is one of the higher-stress movements a young shoulder can perform. If your child pitches, verify that their league enforces pitch count limits and that coaches aren’t finding workarounds by moving kids between positions to reset the count.
Ankle Sprains
Ankle sprains are the single most common sports injury in youth athletics. They happen when the foot rolls inward and the ligaments on the outside of the ankle stretch beyond their range. Uneven terrain, inadequate footwear, and fatigue all increase the likelihood.
What makes ankle sprains worth taking seriously is that a sprain that doesn’t fully heal leaves the joint less stable, making another sprain more likely. Your child should complete a full course of rehab before returning to sport, even when the pain has subsided. The ligament needs time to rebuild tensile strength.
Keep Sports Fun Without Ignoring Injury Risk
You don’t need to treat every practice like an emergency room waiting area. You do need to take sports risks seriously enough to prepare for them. Proper gear gives your child valuable protection, while age-appropriate training reduces strain from movements their body isn’t ready to handle. Paying attention when pain starts also keeps a minor injury from getting pushed further.
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