Safety

Soccer players across the country will be safer thanks to a national public awareness initiative focusing on safe soccer goals called Anchored for Safety started by the family of Zachary Tran, a six-year-old who was killed when an unanchored goal fell on him in 2003, who created the initiative to prevent tragedies like Zachary's from happening again. "If only we had known the dangers of unsafe goals, we would have been vigilant in keeping our kids away from them. We didn't know," stated Michelle Tran, Zachary's mother and initiative co-founder.

Many of the more than 477,500 youth soccer injuries serious enough to require treatment in hospitals, doctors' offices, clinics, ambulatory surgery centers and
hospital emergency rooms are preventable. Here are some prevention tips.

An youth athlete's natural flexibility varies by age. Those with poor muscle flexibility experience more soreness, tenderness and pain after exercise. The less flexible the muscle, the more easily it is injured.   Here are simple tests to test flexibility of major muscles and tendons prone to injury in soccer.

During a college lacrosse game, I stepped into a hole on a poorly maintained field, tearing my ACL and the menial meniscus cartilage in my right knee. My knee was so badly damaged it required two surgeries and months of casts and rehabilitation. I never played lacrosse again. If someone had taken a few moments to check the field before the game began, I probably would never have been injured.

Believe it or not, a soccer player's shoelaces can pose a risk of injury. Patrick Kelleher, President of the Adirondack Youth Soccer Association in upstate New York, once saw a soccer shoe come off a player's foot during a scramble for the ball. Because the laces were tied around the player's ankle, when he stepped on the shoe he suffered a career ending severed Achilles tendon. "Tying laces around ankles is a very dangerous practice," Kelleher says. Long laces should instead be wrapped under the center of the shoe between the toe and heel section of rubber cleats.