“Is rugby safe for kids?”
Rugby’s most outspoken and inf luential journal ist
IS RUGBY safe for children and young adults? It’s clearly the most important question of the era for rugby’s future. Not only for young men and women, and boys and girls, but for concerned parents and, in fact, for everyone involved in the sport.
We have all seen the recent mass of adverse publicity and warnings, and if we took those headlines at face value we might all run a mile. But I am not even going to make you wait for the answer. Is rugby safe for young people? The answer is yes, it is.
Clearly it is not chess, so it will never be injury-free. And in this column, we are going to visit some scary places, to delve inside brains and remind ourselves of the plight of some of our heroes in the professional game. And yet the answer will still be the same.
Mine is clearly not a cutting-edge medical opinion, but it still has something going for it. Both my sons played from around eight. I have already chalked up about 18 separate seasons coaching from tots to colts. I have read everything
