Rancho Mirage and the greater Coachella Valley take sports seriously. Tennis and pickleball leagues, youth soccer and football, cycling on the loop, golf, and high school athletics fill Friday nights. And with all of that activity comes a quieter, less-talked-about statistic: a lot of the athletes playing those sports are carrying a head injury that nobody ever really treated.
A Bigger Problem Than the ER Numbers Suggest
Most of what we know about concussions comes from emergency room visits, and even those numbers are sobering. 7 in 10 emergency department visits for sports- and recreation-related traumatic brain injuries are for kids age 17 and under. And contact sports account for nearly half of them, according to the CDC.
But ER visits are only the tip of it. A pilot study published in 2025 by CDC researchers, using new national survey methods instead of hospital records alone, found the true rate of concussions and TBIs is 17 to 30 times higher than previous estimates. That means roughly 1 in 10 children and 1 in 8 adults sustain a concussion or brain injury every year. And the overwhelming majority of them never show up in an ER.
In other words: the people who “walked it off” and never got checked out are not the exception. They’re most of the picture.
It’s Not Just Contact Sports, and It’s Not Just the Boys
Football, wrestling, and hockey get most of the attention, and for good reason. Tackling alone causes almost two-thirds of football concussions, and takedowns account for well over half of wrestling concussions. But the CDC’s data also shows something less expected: in sports with identical rules for both sexes, like soccer and basketball, girls are diagnosed with concussions at a higher rate than boys. Girls’ soccer, in particular, consistently ranks among the highest-risk sports for head injury, right behind football.
The takeaway isn’t that any one sport is uniquely dangerous. It’s that head injuries in youth and amateur sports are far more common, and far more evenly distributed, than the headlines about pro football would suggest.
Why “Cleared to Play” Doesn’t Always Mean Recovered
Return-to-play protocols exist for a good reason, and they matter. They catch the injuries that need immediate attention and keep athletes from going back onto the field too soon. But they’re built to answer one question: is it safe to play again? They’re not designed to catch the subtler things that can take weeks or months to surface, long after an athlete has already been cleared. These include trouble concentrating in class, a shorter fuse, restless sleep, headaches that show up under stress.
Repeated hits over the course of a season, or a multi-year athletic career, can also accumulate in ways a single scan or a single sideline test was never built to catch. That’s often why a former athlete can look entirely fine on paper years later and still be dealing with the same fog, irritability, or headaches they had right after the original injury. It’s just quieter, and easier to write off as “just how I am now.”
A Note on Timing
If you or your athlete has taken a recent hit to the head and is showing any red-flag symptoms — loss of consciousness, repeated vomiting, slurred speech, seizures, worsening confusion, or new weakness or numbness — that’s an emergency room visit, not a blog post. Get evaluated first. What follows is about the after-effects that can remain once that acute injury has already been medically treated.
What the After-Effects Can Look Like
Once the initial injury has healed — or at least, once it’s supposed to have healed — the after-effects of a TBI or concussion can include:
- Persistent headaches or migraines
- Trouble concentrating or thinking clearly
- Memory problems
- Mood changes — irritability, anxiety, or depression
- Sleep disruption
- Dizziness or sensitivity to light and noise
- A general sense of not being quite “back”
None of these show up reliably on standard imaging. That’s part of what makes them so easy to dismiss — by coaches, by doctors working from a normal scan, and often by the athletes themselves.
Where MeRT Fits Into the Picture
This is the point where MeRT® becomes relevant — not as emergency care, and not as a substitute for return-to-play protocols or a physician’s clearance, but as a next step for athletes and former athletes whose after-effects never fully resolved.
MeRT (Magnetic e-Resonance Therapy) starts with a qEEG brain map to see how an individual injury actually shows up in that person’s brainwave patterns, then builds a treatment protocol around those specific patterns rather than a generic template.
Retired NFL center Nick Hardwick is among the athletes who’ve gone through MeRT treatment for a TBI. You can read more about his story and the full picture of how MeRT works for sports-related TBI on our Traumatic Brain Injury and Concussion Treatment page.
If This Sounds Familiar
If you, your kid, or someone you coach had a head injury months or years ago, got checked out, got cleared, and still isn’t quite themselves, that’s worth a conversation. It doesn’t cost anything to call and talk it through with our New Patient Coordinator.
Schedule Your Free Consultation →
Sources
CDC HEADS UP, Sports & Recreation-Related TBI Data (cdc.gov/heads-up/data). Daugherty, J. et al., pilot national concussion surveillance survey findings, summarized via Concussion Alliance, June 2025.