Dear President,

I am writing to you to talk to you about a real problem in American sports. I am talking about concussions in all the sports that kids and teenagers participate in.

Concussions are a type of head injury that can cause serious problems to one's brain if not treated properly. I'm not going to get deep into explaining what a concussion is because you probably already know what it is. I am going to get into how we can help prevent this awful injury. First of all there are about 3.8 million concussions occurring every year that equal to about 10,410 concussions per day. Most of these concussions happen in recreational sports such as football, hockey, and cheerleading. In a study conducted in 2012, scientists looked at the amount of ER visits that had to deal with concussions. Football had the highest rate of (40 per 10,000 athletes), which means for every 10,000 athletes tested for concussions, 40 of them actually had one. We can try to stop concussions from happening but that would pretty much mean that we would had to make the sports we love, such as football, non-aggressive or what some people would call “taking the fun out of the game.” We can't stop concussions from happening, but we can help prevent them. We can prevent concussions by using or creating laws that allow players to do their contact sport but have precautions doing so by adding rules that make the sports more safe but still fun.

What I really wanted to say was just that we need to take our athletes into consideration so that we can help keep them safe and healthy for their future.

~Mario