So I started playing footy in 2018. It was for the Onka Valley Paringa Football Club in
the Adelaide Hills. First game was against Murray Bridge. We got absolutely flogged,
but it was the best game ever. I found my passion for footy.
When Tiah was 13 years old, she made a switch from basketball to footy.
Just the aggression of it. I was a very aggressive basketballer,
so going into that footy aspect where it is a real contact sport and yeah, just loved it.
At just 15 She made her debut for Sturt in the South Australian state League. Now,
not even three years later, her footy career is done.
I was just going up for the ball like taking a mark and as I was going up, I got hit in
the back and then came down and as I was going down, someone else was coming up and her knee
went straight into my eye. The next day, I could hardly get out of bed, could hardly see daylight.
Everything was just a lot... even just talking I struggled because everything was too loud.
For months after that, it was still constant headaches, constant dizziness, confusion,
you'd wake up every day and not know if you're gonna get really bad symptoms.
If I'm gonna be able to stay at school, if I'm gonna be able to go back to work.
After a series of head knocks and concussions
doctors encouraged Tiah to step away from the game.
From that I looked at it in my own life and I looked at it is
it worth going back and playing footy and I made the decision that I'm not going to
Dangerfield looks like he’s out cold Ohhh, McNamara and Randal thump into each other
Aussie rules football is tough. For every high
flying mark or goals from the boundary there are as many bumps and collisions.
In 2021, the second most common injury in the AFL were concussions.
So broadly speaking, a concussion is a mild form of traumatic brain
injury that's caused by biomechanical forces going to the brain tissue.
Concussions are caused by knocks to our head or body that cause our brain to shake or twist
inside our skull. These hits can damage the cells in our brain and affect how it functions. Some of
the common symptoms are confusion, dizziness, irritability, nausea, or even blacking out.
In terms of the recovery, the majority of people they estimate about 80% of adults would be better
or symptom free in about two weeks. With children and adolescents it can be four weeks, it tends to
be a little bit longer just because the brains got a bit more happening as it's developing.
Michael Henry is a PhD student at UniSA doing research into
concussions. He says while most people recover from concussions,
multiple knocks to the head over the course of a sporting career can cause problems later in life.
So something called CTE has been quite commonly talked about in the news.
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy or CTE is a degenerative brain condition. It's linked with
repeated blows to the head over a long timeframe, and can cause symptoms like memory loss,
personality changes, aggressive mood swings, severe depression and suicidal thoughts.
Now importantly, it's not something that we can diagnose definitively,
or with any great certainty while people are alive. The diagnosis only comes after someone
has died and scientists have the opportunity to do certain tests and imaging on their brain.
Back in 2020 former Richmond Tigers player Shane Tuck took his own life.
After his death, his brain was donated to the Australian Sports brain bank in Sydney.
Shane's brain was the worst I'd seen in terms of pure CTE and that came as a real shock.
CTE has also been found in the brains of other former AFL players,
as well as hundreds of American football players in the United States.
At this stage, we don't have a good basis of scientific basis for treatments. A big part that I
think a lot of the focus is going on now is about preventing it or trying to prevent it in the first
place and certainly, management of concussions has evolved rapidly in the last 5-10 years.
Within the last decade, the AFL has rapidly changed their approach to
concussions as scientists learn more about its long-term effects. In 2013,
they introduced a mandatory 20 minute concussion assessment for any head knock and since 2021
concussed players are required to sit out for a minimum of 12 days and progress through an
11-step return to play program. This stringent protocol hasn't always been the case though.
Oh look, the 80s and 90s the AFL was blood and guts. The worst
thing you could do in the 80s and 90s in the AFL would be to shirk a contest,
not stand under a ball and have some 16 stone monster crunch you. It was Circus Maximus,
which is where the Roman emperors watched the gladiators kill each other.
Greg Griffin is a lawyer in Adelaide, and he says the concussion protocols
the AFL have brought in are a case of too little too late.
They knew in the 80s, everybody knew in the 80s that concussion
was an issue. In 1986. Dr. Bob Cantu out of Massachusetts wrote the seminal
paper on the return to play protocols for injured players, for concussed players.
This paper outlines protocols players should undergo after a concussion before they return
to play, and Mr. Griffin says it's something the AFL should have known about and put into practice.
And I've got a team of six people here and Victoria, that go through hundreds
of games from the 80s 90s and the 2000s, and horrible concussions are just...they're
just not treated. I mean, the players aren't taken off, they're not properly medically examined.
It's why Mr. Griffin, as well as another law firm in Melbourne,
Margalit lawyers have filed class action lawsuits in the Victorian Supreme Court
We're seeking substantial compensation from the AFL.
A class action lawsuit is where a group of people pursue legal action from events that arose from
essentially the same set of circumstances. So rather than the courts dealing with 200 separate
cases on the same thing, a group can combine it all into one class action suit. In this case,
its former AFL and AFLW players who are combining to sue the AFL.
The lawyers argue that the AFL had a duty of care to protect its players
from the long-term health effects of concussion and head knocks and
should have enforced protocols that meant concussed players were adequately protected.
Now they're seeking millions of dollars of compensation to pay for things like medical
bills and the ongoing effects that Mr. Griffin says hundreds of former players are suffering.
I regularly get players calling me telling me you know that they're they’re, they're
really struggling. The AFL have to really stand up and be accountable because there's
a lot of broken people out there from playing the game they love.
We contacted the AFL for an interview about their concussion protocols,
and they sent us back a statement saying:
Earlier this month, the AFL also announced they will put $25 million towards a long-term brain
health study and provide more financial support for past players. Michael says
the research into concussion and the best practice for recovery is always evolving.
One of the really big things that we've found in the last sort of 10 years is that exercise, small
amounts of exercise, is really beneficial for recovery. A lot of the chemicals that the body
releases with exercise, actually promote recovery in the brain and promote good brain development.
If you get a knock, you have to be honest about how you're feeling you can't lie because you
want to continue playing because that could be detrimental to the rest of your life.