Blow by Blow: The Second Annual Donald Sanderson Memorial Symposium on Sport Concussion��is open to the public – athletes, coaches, parents,��researchers and anyone interested in the��physical and psychological impact head injuries can have on individuals and their families.

91��ɫ’s School of Kinesiology & Health Science will host the two-hour evening event, which will bring sports medicine and brain researchers together with athletes to discuss an injury that continues to impair the careers and health of both amateur and professional athletes − most recently, hockey champion Sidney Crosby.

The symposium is held in honour of Donald Sanderson, the 91��ɫ kinesiology student and promising hockey player who died Jan. 2, 2009 as a result of a head injury during a Whitby Dunlops game.��

�������� Right: Matt Dunigan

"Educating our student athletes about head injuries is critical,” says Cindy Hughes, manager of the Gorman/Shore Sport Injury Clinic in 91��ɫ’s School of Kinesiology & Health Science, who helped organize the symposium. “They need to understand the importance of reporting a possible concussion right away so they can receive the proper care."

, a game analyst with TSN since 1996, played football for 14 years on five Canadian teams and was inducted into the Canadian Football Hall of Fame in 2006. He retired from football in 1996 after suffering at least a dozen diagnosed concussions, and continues to struggle with the long-term effects of those concussions. He will speak about the post-concussive symptoms he has experienced since retirement and the effect of concussion on himself and his family, as well as the importance of reporting concussion and taking it seriously. A champion of research on sport concussion, Dunigan announced last spring that upon his death his brain will be donated to Toronto’s Krembil Neuroscience Centre.

Dahna Sanderson, who established the Donald Sanderson Memorial Trust Fund in memory of her son, will also speak during the symposium. A sports mom and fan for 20 years, she coached professional figure skating and is passionate about sports and sports safety.��

is a primary care sport medicine specialist, certified in family and sports medicine in Canada and the US. Currently practising in Burlington, he has been a junior hockey team physician for the past decade in Canada and the US. He is a research chair of the Hockey Neurotrauma and Concussion Initiative Research Committee and is primary investigator of the Hockey Concussion Education Project.��

Lauren Sergio is a professor in the School of Kinesiology & Health Science in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Health. A neuroscientist, she studies the effects of age, sex, neurological disease, head injury and experience (élite versus non-élite athletes) on the brain’s control of complex movement. She works with a wide range of adults, from NHL draft prospects to Alzheimer’s disease patients, using behavioural and brain imaging techniques.��

Left: Lauren Sergio

Roy McMurtry, 91��ɫ chancellor and former chair and chief executive officer of the Canadian Football League, will deliver opening remarks. Award-winning CBC sports reporter Teddy Katz will MC the event.��

The symposium takes place in the Price Family Cinema, Accolade East Building, from 7 to 9pm. Admission is free, but registration is required. To register and for more information on speakers, visit the symposium website.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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“It’s a dream come true,” says Virmani, the writer and star of the new Masala-flavoured hockey movie Breakaway, which gets its world premiere tonight [Sept. 10] at 9pm at the Elgin.��

Virmani plays Rajveer Singh, a Sikh-Canadian with a slight identity crisis who defies both his father’s traditional Indian rules and hockey norms by forming his own South Asian team. “It’s about our values as Canadians,” boasts Virmani, who not too long ago was an actor struggling for work.��

After graduating from 91��ɫ with a bachelor’s degree in business & society, Virmani took lessons at the Lee Strasberg Institute of Theatre and Film in New 91��ɫ City. Returning to Toronto, he found there weren’t too many roles waiting for him. “I was auditioning and reading for scripts and nothing was connecting to me.”��

That’s when he decided to create his own opportunity by pulling a Matt Damon (or a Ben Affleck, take your pick). Like the Good Will Hunting scribes, Virmani wrote his own role by conceiving his own movie. For inspiration, Virmani drew on his life – from his love of hockey to the generational, cultural and identity issues that trouble most young South Asian Canadians.

Fortunately, getting the movie made wasn’t too difficult for Virmani, who practically grew up in the film industry. Not only is his father, Ajay Virmani, a producer on Deepa Mehta’s Bollywood/Hollywood and Water, but Bollywood superstar Akshay Kumar is a close family friend. “Akshay is like my older brother,” Virmani says. “He is somebody that I have grown up with.”��

With his father, Kumar and even comedian Russell Peters (another family friend) all on board as producers, Virmani had no trouble populating his movie with actors like Rob Lowe and Camilla Belle (whom the writer conveniently cast as his romantic interest) and musicians like Drake and Ludacris. That’s some major company for Virmani’s first stroll down the red carpet.����

And if Breakaway does well, it certainly won’t be his last.����

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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The federation is making the change – which affects players between the ages of 6 and 21 – in an effort to create a safer environment for new players to develop skills. The rule change affects house league and select players in most of the province, though Ottawa and Thunder Bay aren't governed by the OHF.

91��ɫ health professor Alison Macpherson, who was among the first researchers to call for bodychecking to be disallowed in recreational hockey, called it a great first step. "I know some parents keep their kids out of hockey, especially out of competitive hockey, because they worry about the injuries that might ensue when kids are allowed to bodycheck," she said Thursday.

Until now parents who wanted their child to play non-contact hockey didn’t have many options, said Macpherson. “There is pretty good scientific evidence that bodychecking, especially under the bantam level (age 13-14), leads to injury in youth ice hockey,” she said.

A study published last year found kids who were bodychecked were about 2.45 times more likely to suffer an injury than kids who didn’t play with body contact and 1.7 times more likely to suffer a concussion, she said. “Kids are more likely to play if they think they’re not going to get hurt,” said Macpherson. “Which is great because we have an obesity epidemic.”

Posted by Elizabeth Monier-Williams, research communications officer, with files courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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91��ɫ Professors Chris Ardern, , Paul Ritvo and Lauren Sergio will work on site��for one to��two days a week with hospital clinicians to foster research collaborations and knowledge exchange, and engage in joint knowledge mobilization efforts.

The partnership will realize important benefits to the research communities at both institutions and for the general public, says 91��ɫ Professor (right), associate vice-president research, science & technology, who led the effort to develop the partnership with Southlake Regional Health Centre.

"The embedded 91��ɫ researchers are senior scientists who will explore and cultivate research collaborations between 91��ɫ and Southlake researchers and clinicians," says Siu. "They will act as 'matchmakers' and brokers and will bring��91��ɫ's��research expertise and knowledge to Southlake to��facilitate collaboration.

"The partnership will broaden the research capacity for both 91��ɫ researchers and the Southlake clinicians," says Siu. "91��ɫ does not have a Faculty of Medicine��or��a teaching hospital. As a result,��University researchers do not��have the patient access��they would like to have. By working with Southlake,��the University is enhancing a collaboration that would benefit both parties."

The embedded��University scientists��bring to Southlake Regional Health Centre��their recognized expertise in biomedical and health research. Southlake is the only community-based hospital in Ontario to offer six regional tertiary programs, including child and adolescent mental health, maternal and child,��cardiac and cancer care.

"We anticipate this to be an outstanding opportunity for both Southlake and 91��ɫ," says , director of research at Southlake.

"Serving some 1.5 million people through our regional programs and providing tertiary level care in many areas, the depth and breadth of programs and services, and the unexplored opportunities for reasearch collaboration between Southlake and 91��ɫ are endless," says Clifford.

"Southlake is interested in strengthening its research in terms of breadth and depth and in fact, Southlake is developing a research institute with a plan to��become a teaching hospital with an official affiliation with a Canadian university," says Siu.

91��ɫ is��a preferred candidate for this kind of partnership with Southlake, says Siu,��because the two institutions have shared goals and visions, and a willingness to work together.

The partnership offers exceptional training and educational opportunities for graduate and undergraduate��students working in the research teams, says Siu.

In addition, the opportunity presented by the collaboration between the��two institutions��is consistent with the goal of integrating teaching and research with the world outside the University that was articulated in��91��ɫ's recent .

More about the 91��ɫ-Southlake embedded researchers

Chris Ardern (left) is a professor in the School of Kinesiology��& Health Science in 91��ɫ's Faculty of Health.��His current research��interests include the epidemiology of physical activity, obesity and cardiometabolic risk. His most recent work has focused on the use of risk algorithms, behavioural profiling and trajectory modelling approaches to identify high-risk subgroups for the development of the metabolic syndrome and cardiovascular disease mortality.��Arden is currently investigating the role of geospatial analysis to improve the surveillance of cardiovascular disease in 91��ɫ Region, and is a co-investigator on the Pre-diabetes Detection��& Physical Activity Intervention and Delivery (PRE-PAID) program, a six-month trial of culturally-preferred physical activity.��Ardern will be embedded in Southlake's chronic disease portfolio.

In her research, (right) works on a family of proteins known as nucleoside transporters. These transporters play significant roles in a number of clinical settings because they transport drugs used in cancer and are targets of drugs used in some cardiac care settings. Despite their clinical relevance, Coe, who is a��professor of biology in 91��ɫ's Faculty of Science & Engineering, says researchers��know very little about how these transporters work and how they differ in terms of their distribution, activity and regulation in individual patients.��Using a molecular diagnostics approach, Coe and her team will work with Southlake clinicians from both the cardiac care and oncology��portfolios to investigate the transporter profiles in individual patients and correlate these profiles with drug treatments and outcomes. The ultimate goal of this work is to contribute to the efforts to develop more personalized approaches to the treatment of disease.

Paul Ritvo (left) is a behavioural scientist who will serve as the research adviser, physical and mental health liaison and special projects scientist. A professor in 91��ɫ’s Faculty of Health, Ritvo’s research interests focus on electronic health interventions that employ cell phones, smartphones and online programs to change health behaviours in diabetics, HIV-positive individuals and individuals with mental health difficulties. Ritvo will work with Southlake clinicians to extend current intervention studies that use Blackberry smartphones and innovative software applications to help patients reduce health risks by way of healthy exercise, diet and improved medication adherence.

Lauren Sergio (right) is a neuroscientist working in 91��ɫ's Sherman Health Science Research Centre. Her��current research projects examine the effects of age, sex, neurological disease and past head injuries (of athletes versus non-athletes) on the brain's control of complex movement. In her role with Southlake Regional Health Centre, Sergio will be an embedded researcher in the chronic disease, emergency medicine and surgical portfolios.��She works with a wide range of adult populations, including professional hockey players and Alzheimer's disease patients. Her findings have implications for neurological disease diagnosis and rehabilitation and for understanding the fundamental brain mechanisms for movement control. She is using cognitive-motor integration research to test if new instrumentation developed in her laboratory can differentiate between��types of dementia. She is also��researching the long-term effects of concussion in young athletes. Sergio is a member of the .

The embedded researcher program at Southlake Regional Health Centre is an example of the collaboration between the Faculty of Science & Engineering and the Faculty of Health at 91��ɫ and is part of an ongoing commitment by the Faculties' deans to work together.

For more information on 91��ɫ's��partnerships with��regional��hospitals, see YFile,��April 17, 2009 and ��April 21, 2009.

By Jenny Pitt-Clark, YFile editor.

Republished courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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The era of sports specialization at a young age is upon us, despite alarm bells sounded by medical professionals who say we are putting young athletes at risk of burnout and overuse injuries at ever younger ages. Their young bodies rebel.

. . .

The irony in the sports specialization trend, according to Joe Baker, a professor in 91��ɫ’s School of Kinesiology & Health Science in the Faculty of Health, is that there’s simply no evidence to suggest specialization at a young age improves an athlete’s chance of success, wrote the Vancouver Sun Oct. 16. In fact, the evidence is that the majority of successful athletes come from what he calls a “sampling background,” meaning they have played a variety of sports.

Baker said he’s talked to elite coaches around the world who have told him that athletes who don’t have exposure to a variety of sports and unstructured play lack fundamentals.

“They are good at performing motor skills associated with their sport, but they can’t creatively experience or creatively demonstrate something novel.”

Indeed, research suggests that playing a sport in an unstructured way improves one’s chances of excelling at it later on. A German study comparing soccer players who were involved exclusively in structured training to those involved in unstructured play found the latter group to be more creative on the field.

“If you look at hockey players and the types of training they do when they are really young, they play a lot of structured hockey. But if you look at the bulk of their time, it’s road hockey, it’s pond hockey, it’s pickup scrimmage games with the neighbourhood kids,” Baker said.

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, a collection of over 50 poems, will launch Tuesday, October 19, at 7:30 pm, at The Boat, 158 Augusta Ave. in Toronto’s Kensington Market. It is also the 10th anniversary launch party for Mansfield Press. All royalties from the sale of��Uppal's book will go to help support athletes through , which helped fund about 80 per cent of the athletes at the Games.

The book contains haikus and other poems about the Olympic athletes and their beloved sports – whether curling, skeleton, skiing or hockey –��and includes some poems Uppal wrote when she took in the Arctic Games, in between the Olympics and the Paralympics. It’s being hailed as a mingling of physical and verbal acrobatics and a dazzling competition of risky play, inventive movements and daring heights.

Left: Priscila Uppal embracing the Olympic torch as the Canadian Athletes Now Fund poet-in-residence. Photo by Chistopher Doda

“So much about poetry is having surprising language and using it in unique ways,” says (BA Hons. ’97, PhD ’04).�� Watching Olympic athletes compete and marvelling over the strange terms attached to each sport – what Uppal calls athletic language full of metaphors and symbols –��gave her plenty of inspiration.

She��says the poems are accessible and amusing, and were also fun to write. Winter Sport: Poems would be of interest to sports lovers, Olympics lovers, poetry lovers, and��English and physical education teachers, as well as young reluctant readers, she says. CBC Radio featured many of her poems over the course of the Games after fans called in requesting more, as did CAN Fund and the athletes themselves.

"While some people were skeptical about elite athletes responding to poetry," Uppal admits, "the Olympians ended up being one of my most welcoming audiences ever. Every day they asked for more copies of poems and looked forward to the performances. The summer Olympians have encouraged me to take up my post in 2012 in London to write the companion volume, Summer Sport: Poems."

Right: Priscila Uppal dons her own team shirt while watching speedskating at the Vancouver 2010 Olympic Games. Photo by Chistopher Doda

Gil Adamson, author of The Outlander and Ashland, says “From one of Canada’s most dynamic poets come sports poems that are playful, funny, and full of trick moves. Uppal’s wordplay is as muscular as the athletes she celebrates.”

In addition to Uppal’s new book, the evening will launch Imagining Toronto by Amy Lavender Harris, a 91��ɫ geography faculty member in the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies; Goodbye, Ukulele by Leigh Nash (BA Hons. ’04), a former student of Uppal’s; At the Gates of the Theme Park by Peter Norman; and Stray Dog Embassy by Natasha Nuhanovic.

Left: Priscila Uppal has a Canadian moment. Photo by Chistopher Doda

Uppal's books include which , (which was shortlisted for the $50,000 Griffin Poetry Prize), and , and of the novels and . She is the editor of and�� and the author of .

For more information or to order the book, visit the or websites.

To read a few of Uppal’s sports poems, visit the website.

Republished courtesy of YFile – 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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Right: Alyn McCauley

Many of McCauley’s concussions occurred when he was a junior player, before he played a single NHL game, including one that sidelined him for about half of the 1998-1999 season as an up-and-coming hockey star – he won the Canadian Hockey League player of the year award in 1996-1997. He went on to play with the Toronto Maple Leafs, the San Jose Sharks and the Los Angeles Kings, but concussion issues continued to plague him and affect his contributions on the ice.

The Blow by Blow: Sport Concussion Management symposium will run tomorrow from 6:30 to 8:30pm in the Tribute Communities Recital Hall, in the Accolade East Building on 91��ɫ's Keele campus.

The symposium is in memory of (left), a former 91��ɫ student who died from an injury sustained from a concussion during a hockey game last year. Donald fell during a fight, hit his head and went into a coma until he died a few weeks later. The Donald Sanderson Memorial Trust Fund has donated funds toward the symposium and the School of Kinesiology & Health Science’s annual student awards to help share important knowledge about concussion management. Dahna Sanderson, Donald’s mother, will deliver the opening remarks at the symposium.

Among the speakers is Professor Jason Mihalik (right)��of the Department of Exercise & Sport Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, whose primary interest involves the study of sport-related neurotraumatic injuries, with a particular emphasis on youth head and neck injury biomechanics. Mihalik will talk about recognizing and managing trauma. He serves on the Board of Directors of the Canadian Athletic Therapists Association and is a member of the National Athletic Trainers’ Association. He also serves on the editorial board for Athletic Training��& Sports Health Care and is the research director for the J. Pat Evans Research Foundation.

Alison MacPherson (left)��of 91��ɫ’s School of Kinesiology & Health Science, who has a long-standing interest in childhood injury research, will discuss the epidemiology of sports-related concussions – incidence, risk factors and prevention. In Ontario, over 6,000 youth and children were seen in emergency departments for a sport-related concussion between 2002 and 2005. Concussions were most common among 14-, 15- and 16-year-olds playing hockey, followed by bicycling, skiing/snowboarding and football.

MacPherson has been involved with research related to childhood injuries in general, and bicycle-related and sport-related injuries specifically. She is the co-principal investigator of the -funded study on child and youth injury prevention. She was the first recipient of the Faculty of Health Early Career Research Award and has served as a reviewer and author for the World Health Organization report on child injury prevention. She is also a member of the ’s Board of Directors and ’s Scientific Advisory Committee.

Also speaking at the symposium is Dr. Paul Piccininni (right), a sports medicine staff member at 91��ɫ and team dentist for the Mississauga St. Michaels Majors of the Ontario Hockey League. He��will give an update on mouthguards. He has worked at the last nine Summer and Winter Olympic Games, including Vancouver 2010, and has coordinated medical services for world championships, including��basketball and ice hockey. He is a member of the International Ice Hockey Federation Medical Committee and the International Olympic Committee Medical Commission (Games Group), president of the International Society for Dentistry, Sport & Trauma, and is a Fellow of the Academy for Sports Dentistry.

The symposium costs $20 per person and is free for youth under 17 and all 91��ɫ students with ID. The location is fully accessible. Light refreshments will be served. Parking is free to registered participants in the Student Services Parking Garage.

To register online, click . For registration information, contact Rumina Habib, registration and convocation assistant in the Division of Continuing Education, Faculty of Liberal Arts & Professional Studies, at ext. 44617 or dce@yorku.ca.

For additional information about the event, contact Cindy Hughes, head athletic therapist/manager of the Sport Injury Clinic at the School of Kinesiology & Health Science,��at ext. 77232 or chughes@yorku.ca.

The conference was covered in the Toronto Star's section Aug. 31.

Republished courtesy of YFile– 91��ɫ’s daily e-bulletin.

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The report is published in the June 9 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association. Alison Macpherson, an epidemiologist in 91��ɫ’s School of Kinesiology & Health Science in the , called the research, “the best study on bodychecking and injury that I’ve seen.”

The debate over bodychecking centres on just when these moves should be introduced to young players, Macpherson said. Other studies have found that the peewee level is not a good time to introduce bodychecking, because of wide disparities in the size of the players, she said. “Body checking should not be part of the game for peewee players,” said Macpherson, who also has a son who plays hockey. “Bodychecking should not be introduced until children are 16,” she contends, because “concussions can be very bad for children.”

The complete .

Macpherson is also a member of the LaMarsh Centre for Research on Violence and Conflict Resolution.

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