Before the headlines arrived, Brandi Chastain had some explaining to do. She needed to tell her 9-year-old son Jaden why she decided to donate her brain to the Concussion Legacy Foundation in Waltham.
His response: “That’s weird, Mom.”
By the time Chastain retired from soccer at the age of 42, she’d been kicking and heading balls for 35 years, dating back to childhood adventures on the pitch. On her way to winning two World Cups and two Olympic gold medals, Chastain suffered concussions.
Today, she wonders if her occasional disorientation and memory loss are the result of athletic injuries she sustained leaping for balls — connecting with some, missing others and always falling hard to the ground.
In interviews this past week about her donation, Chastain said she believes the g
By allowing researchers to someday study her brain, Chastain will help expand medical knowledge about chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE, a degenerative brain disease that can only be diagnosed post-mortem. She becomes the 780th athlete to make the pledge to the foundation; women account for only a fifth of the total.
As Chastain says she assured her son, the donation won’t be made until she’s done with her brain, a long time from now. But even today, Chastain’s pledge builds awareness about the dangers of concussion and the need to improve safety practices in youth sports.
She isn’t the first female soccer star to make this promise. Former national team member Cindy Parlow Cone got there first by pledging her brain to the foundation eight years ago while Chastain was still playing. Parlow Cone’s career had been cut short by concussions. She was famous for going after headers around the goal.
Chastain is better known, especially for her game-winning goal in the 1999 World Cup.
Today, these former players are shooting for another goal: closing the gap on knowledge about the consequences of concussion.
That gap exists in part because it is only relatively recently, due in part to federal Title IX rules, that the numbers of women playing collegiate and professional sports has grown. But most former female players at risk of CTE are not old enough to have developed symptoms. That’s not the case with men, since they’ve been battering their bodies — and heads — on the football field for decades.
Awareness is growing there too. Eight Ivy League football coaches concerned about brain trauma and other injuries took the extraordinary step last month of barring full-contact hitting during practices in the regular season.
There’s no doubt that a traditional element of soccer — the header — is hurting players as early as middle and high school soccer, regardless of gender. Collisions with the ball and other players account for 30 percent of the concussions players receive in this age group, research shows. Female players suffer twice as many concussions as male players in high school and college, for reasons not fully understood.
In her current work as a coach in California, Chastain argues that heading should be prohibited in youth soccer. Other members of the 1999 women’s Olympic team have joined her in this, lining up with the Safer Soccer campaign started in 2014 by the Waltham foundation and the Santa Clara University Institute of Sports Law and Ethics.
That group is right to put ethics on the table. While the fraction of talented athletes who go on to play for international glory must make their own decisions about risks, it is morally wrong for coaches to compel young players to do things that could result in lasting impairment for an activity they engage in only while young.
On this matter, Chastain lends a powerful voice. This great American champion is telling young players not to project themselves head first after a ball, even if it means losing the game.
That’s really using your noggin.