St. Francis Medical Center will host a coaches clinic today to educate youth coaches about a wide variety of topics, including the dangers of head trauma and drugs.
One of the speakers is Chris Nowinski. He is a former professional wrestler and Harvard graduate who retired from the WWE after repeated concussions. He later wrote a book about head trauma and co-founded the Sports Legacy Institute to advance research into concussions.
“We’ve also partnered with the Boston University School of Medicine to work on researching this disease called Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy which is a degenerative brain disease that athletes get after too many blows to the head," Nowinski said. "And so we’re working there to find a treatment for it because there’s a lot of athletes that we can no longer prevent this damage, we can only hope to fix it.”
Nowinski will talk about head trauma and how coaches and parents can help prevent it.
Another speaker at the event will be former United States Drug Enforcement Administration agent Robert Stutman.
Stutman will talk about pharmaceutical drug abuse. He says LCD changed drug culture back in the 1960’s and crack defined drugs in the 1980’s. This decade’s culture-changing drug is prescription pills.
“I’ve worked with maybe a dozen high schools a year around the country and the only thing they want to talk about are their OC’s, their Oxy, etc. Prescription drug abuse has become the dominant problem in the United States," Stutman said.