Sport & recreation: injury facts

The figures

Who is most affected

Sport and recreation brain injury is mostly a children's problem in the emergency department. CDC reports that about 7 out of 10 emergency department visits for sport- and recreation-related brain injuries and concussions are among children ages 17 and under, and that in that age group boys have about twice the rate of visits that girls do.

That last figure is not the whole story about sex. CDC also reports that girls have a higher chance of a sports-related concussion than boys in sports that use the same rules, such as soccer and basketball — and that girls are more likely to report severe and long-lasting symptoms, while a healthcare provider is less likely to be present when their concussion happens.

Where and how it happens

Contact is the mechanism. CDC reports that contact sports — football, basketball and soccer among them — are associated with 45% of all emergency department visits for sport- and recreation-related brain injuries among children 17 and under, and that in high school sport more than 2 out of 3 concussions result from collisions between athletes.

The specific action varies by sport, and that is what makes rule changes possible. CDC attributes 63% of concussions in high school football to tackling, 59% of concussions in high school wrestling to takedowns, and 51% of concussions among girls playing high school basketball to colliding with another athlete. Bicycling and playground activities also account for high numbers of visits among children.

What is known and what is not

There is no worldwide figure for sport and recreation injury in the sources behind this site, and there is no complete United States count of concussions either. CDC's numbers here describe emergency department visits and high school sport, and CDC says plainly that its brain injury estimates leave out concussions treated only in an emergency department, in primary care or in urgent care, and all the ones that go untreated.

For scale on brain injury as a whole — from every cause, not only sport — CDC recorded approximately 214,110 brain-injury hospitalizations in 2020 and 68,663 brain-injury deaths in 2023 in the United States. Those totals are dominated by falls and road crashes among older adults, not by sport, and should never be presented as a sport figure.

CDC is building a National Concussion Surveillance System precisely because nobody yet knows how many Americans get a concussion each year. Until it reports, the honest answer to "how common is concussion?" is that the recorded numbers are a floor.

The trend

No source in our register gives a trend for sport and recreation concussion that we have read and can quote. Rule changes, return-to-play laws and better recognition all move the recorded numbers, and they can move them in opposite directions at once: a sport that gets safer and a public that gets better at spotting concussion will produce more recorded cases, not fewer.

That is a reason to watch mechanisms — what causes the concussions in a given sport — rather than the raw count, which is the way CDC presents its own data on this page.

What prevents it

• Choosing a sports programme that enforces safety rules and avoids drills and plays that raise the risk of head impacts. That is CDC's wording, and it puts the responsibility on the programme rather than the child.
• Rule changes aimed at the specific action that causes the concussions in that sport — tackling in football, takedowns in wrestling, heading in soccer, body checking in ice hockey. CDC's data is organised by mechanism for exactly this reason.
• Helmets and appropriate headgear for bikes, motorcycles, snowmobiles, scooters, all-terrain vehicles, contact sport, in-line skates and skateboards, baseball and softball, horse riding, skiing and snowboarding. CDC lists each of these by name.
• Coaches, officials and parents who know the signs of concussion, which is the whole purpose of CDC's HEADS UP campaign: to help people recognise, respond to and reduce the risk of concussion and other serious brain injury.
• Taking an athlete out of play and keeping them out until a health professional clears them to return — the step CDC's HEADS UP materials for coaches, parents and athletes exist to support.
• Athletic trainers and health professionals present at play, not only at competitions. CDC notes that providers are less likely to be present when girls sustain a sports-related concussion than when boys do.
• Soft surfaces under playground equipment — hardwood mulch or sand — which CDC lists among the ways to make children's play areas safer.
• Collecting the data. CDC's National Concussion Surveillance System exists because prevention that cannot be measured cannot be checked.

How to read these numbers

• Every figure on this page is from the United States. There is no worldwide sport and recreation injury source in our register, and no figure here should be read as a world number.
• Emergency department visits are not the same as concussions. Most concussions never reach an emergency department, so a visit count measures both injury and the decision to seek care.
• The brain injury totals from all causes cover a different year for hospital admissions than for deaths — hospital data from 2020, death data from 2023 — because the two come from different national systems with different lags. Do not read them as one year.
• The sport-specific percentages come from published studies of high school athletes that CDC cites, not from a national count. They describe how concussions happen in those sports; they do not tell you how many there are.

The observances that campaign on this

Sources cited on this page

1. US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — Data on Sports and Recreation Activities (HEADS UP) — www.cdc.gov, read 29 September 2026.
2. US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — TBI Data — www.cdc.gov, read 29 September 2026.