Air pollution is a stubborn problem in Utah where periods of poor air quality often overlap with outdoor sports seasons for thousands of high school students.
This intersection poses a dilemma for athletic trainers who have a duty to protect the health of young athletes. How do you decide when to cancel, relocate or reschedule outdoor practices or games on account of poor air quality? Uniform policies are in place for heat and lightning, but that is not the case for particulate matter, ozone, wildfire smoke and other kinds of air pollution common in Utah.
New interdisciplinary research from the University of Utah, based on in-depth interviews with high school athletic trainers, highlights the need for more uniform air quality policies and for equipping trainers with the resources needed to ensure the health and safety of student athletes.
The researchers, who are based in the U's colleges of Humanities, Engineering and Social & Behavioral Science, interviewed via Zoom 16 athletic trainers from across Utah, exploring how they engage with and respond to air quality concerns in relation to their professional roles and interactions with administrators.
"It is a small sample, but the goal was to understand some of the dynamics that athletic trainers face when making decisions around air quality for the wellbeing of their students," said co-author Sara Yeo, a professor of communication. "We found that some of them are able to and some of them are not necessarily able to, depending on where the decision-making power tends to lie."
A lack of consistent guidelines across school districts
Participating in outdoor sports is a healthy option for teens, but strenuous activity when the air is contaminated can negate those benefits. At least 100,000 Utah teens at 160 high schools participate in sports overseen by the Utah High School Activities Association, with many more competing in outdoor sports outside the association's purview, such as mountain biking and ultimate.
"There are no guidelines on air quality, so it's hard. I don't have anything to give the coaches that's a rule," one athletic trainer identified as Leonard told researchers. "If there was a rule [on handling bad air quality], my coaches would follow it, but without rules, it's hard to enforce regulations without set rules."
Utah's degraded air quality stems from elevated PM2.5 during winter inversions; ozone in the summer; smoke during the West's expanding wildfire seasons; and episodes of dust pollution during wind events. Exposure to these contaminants elevates the risk for numerous health concerns.
Yeo's study grew out of a larger research initiative led by her co-author Kerry Kelly, professor of chemical engineering, to measure certain air pollutants at Utah high schools' sports fields through a network of low-cost sensors. The goal of this project, which is funded by the National Science Foundation, is to place sensors at all Utah high schools to monitor concentrations of fine particulate, or PM2.5, and other pollutants.
A sprawling network of sensors at Utah schools
So far, Kelly's team has equipped more than 50 high schools with sensors in one of several projects they are conducting to measure contaminants-both indoors and outdoors-at Utah schools of all grade levels, including preschools and daycare centers.
These sensors are each connected to a cellular, ethernet or WiFi signal that transmits their measurements every two minutes to a cloud database. The monitoring networks' PM2.5 readings for each site are available in real time at AQ&U.
Although data collection is ongoing, the high school project, led by chemical engineering graduate student Tristalee Mangin, has already proved beneficial to student wellbeing, according to school officials.
All five of the Nebo School District's high schools are participating in this research, whose co-principal investigators include Lisa Walker, an athletic trainer at Springville High with 33 years' experience. Thanks to the program, she can regularly monitor trend lines and real-time levels of PM2.5 and PM10 at both her school and the schools where her teams compete. This allows Walker to make informed recommendations about whether competitions should be rescheduled and to make adjustments in practice times to avoid times of day when pollution levels tend to be highest.
Making tough calls on game day
"Parents for the most part aren't happy when there's a change, whether it's a change in practice or a change in a competition," Walker said. "They don't take it lightly because there's a lot involved in a change and I get it. But what's the end goal? If the end goal is the health and safety of the student athlete, then that change is what needs to be done."
Among athletic trainers the research team interviewed, many feared not having the support of school officials at those times when air quality made outdoor sports unhealthy.
"They really wanted some air quality guidelines with a little bit more teeth behind them so that they could rely on that instead of relying on their social capital with their school, athletic directors or coaches to help make difficult decisions around sporting events, especially when it comes to cancellation," Yeo said.
Because so much logistics goes into staging competition between schools, canceling events can be a tough call.
"The main takeaway is that if there were air quality policies for sporting events in high schools that had more ways of being enforced, it would make that easier," Yeo said. "It would confer some power onto the trainers where they can rely on these guidelines as opposed to the social capital that they hope to have built up."
The study, titled "Understanding High School Athletic Trainers' Perspectives and Decision-Making Related to Air Quality Concerns in Utah," was published May 14 in the Journal of Athletic Training Education and Practice. First author Sergio Armendariz was a graduate student in sociology at the time of the research. Funding came from the National Science Foundation.
Banner photo: High school athletes compete at the Utah state cross country championships in Salt Lake City's Sugar House Park. Photo courtesy of Canyons School District.
