On January 24, 2016 the International Olympic Committee announced new guidelines for transgender athletes’ eligibility to compete in the Olympics.  While hailed by one trans athlete as bringing the IOC "into the modern world," the applause for the IOC may be premature.

Although the IOC abandoned its much-criticised chromosome-based ‘sex test’ before the Sydney 2000 Olympics, the general practice of ‘gender policing’ of women in elite sport has continued ever since, although the last six months have seen some important developments addressing the complex questions of athletes’ sexualities and gender.

On December 21, 2015, MomsTeam Institute of Youth Sports Safety held a special advance screening of Sony Pictures's new movie, Concussion, starring Will Smith, at the Loews - Boston Common theatre.

Joining me at the screening and a post-screening reception at the Ritz-Carlton were concussion experts and advocates from around the nation, Jeanne Marie Laskas, author of the 2009 GQ article on which the movie is based and the critically-acclaimed book, Concussion (pictured to my right below), and a large contingent of former NFL players (including Joey LaRoque (l) and Caleb Hanie (r)). 

While geared to sports medicine professionals, the 2014 position statement from the American Medical Society for Sports Medicine (DiFiori JP, et al.) provides helpful guidance to sports parents on the causes, risk factors, diagnosis, and treatment of burnout in youth athletes.

Response to chronic stress

Burnout is considered a response by a young athlete to chronic stress in which he or she ceases to participate in a previously enjoyable activity, withdrawing from the sport because they perceive it is not possible to meet the physical and psychological demands of the sport. 

Burnout is considered by experts to be part of a spectrum of conditions that includes overreaching and overtraining syndrome.

Overreaching may either be functional or nonfunctional:

The extra time high school pitchers living in warm-weather climates spend in baseball activities puts them at greater risk of injuries to their pitching shoulders than their cold-weather peers, find two recent studies. 

In the first, researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota and the Kerlan-Jobe Orthopedic Clinic in Los Angeles collected data on a random sample of 100 uninjured male high school baseball pitchers between 14 and 18 years of age who had pitched competitively for at least the past 3 consecutive years with no current injuries or complaints of pain.  Fifty pitchers were recruited from the cold-weather group (Minnesota) and the warm-weather group (California, Arizona).