Aimee Burns, 16, practices with her soccer team at Dripping Springs High School. Because of the four concussions she's suffered since she was 13, she is required to wear a specially padded headband, or as she refers to it, "my headgear." Photo by Oscar Ricardo Silva.

By Joe Holloway
For Reporting Texas

DRIPPING SPRINGS — Aimee Burns had a headache all day long.

While the rest of the Dripping Springs High School varsity girls’ soccer team ate subs at the new sandwich shop here, Burns went to the grocery store next door for some Excedrin. She took the medicine and got some California rolls, which she brought over to eat with her fellow Lady Tigers before they traveled to a playoff game in New Braunfels, an hour away.

“They usually come on when I’m kind of stressed,” Burns, a 16-year-old midfielder, said about the headaches. “Like this week, I’ve had a lot of headaches, but last week I didn’t have hardly any. They just come when they come.”

It might seem as if Burns is suffering from migraines, but her headaches come largely from concussions she’s sustained over the past few years.

Concussions are typically associated with football, understandably so given the recent attention to the plight of former professional players. New Texas laws also address growing concerns over concussions, most notably that school programs will soon be required to recondition helmets more than a decade old.

But the Texas regulations go beyond football, and now districts must also appoint concussion assessment teams composed of a physician, athletic trainer and physician’s assistant to decide whether athletes in any sport can return to the field.

A study published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine showed that football accounted for more than half of all concussions sustained by high school athletes at 25 public high schools over the course of 11 years.

What the study also showed, and what is largely lost amid the high-profile football cases, is that women are twice as likely to get a concussion as their male counterparts in similar contact sports. After football, women’s soccer had the highest rate of concussions of any of the 12 sports in the study. The Texas regulations on concussions, known as Natasha’s law, were named after a female soccer player.

The authors of the study concluded that the high rate for females might reflect better education about detection of concussions. Jason Shurley, director of the athletic training program at Concordia University in Northwest Austin, said women also might be more willing to report head injuries.

“In male sports, I think there’s a lot more pressure to minimize injuries,” he said. “Specifically, in violent sports like football and hockey, there’s the normalization of injuries. The girls could be more likely to report and less likely to minimize it.”

He acknowledged that females might be more prone to concussions than previously believed. Burns sustained her first concussion when she was 12, after falling off a pogo stick. Her first soccer-related concussion happened shortly after that. Most of them, she said, have come from headers.

“Usually I head it, and then I kind of black out almost for a couple seconds, and then I start getting a massive headache,” she said. “I know right away.”

Photo by Oscar Ricardo Silva.

Burns said she’s typically out for two weeks after getting a concussion, and her doctor tells her not to do “pretty much anything other than walk.” Now, after two major concussions and more small ones than she can remember, Burns wears a padded headband when she takes the field. Since she started wearing the headband, she has been concussion-free.

Still, Burns said she’s more reluctant to confidently head the ball than she used to be, not a good prospect for someone hoping to play college soccer.

The Dripping Springs head soccer coach, Brian Ormonde, said that if Burns is more timid about going after balls, he hasn’t noticed.

“Not Aimee,” he said before piling his team back into the yellow school bus and heading to the game. “She’s definitely one of the tough ones out there.”

Even if it doesn’t show, Burns knows that the concussions have affected her game.

“I’m timid at times because I’ve had so many concussions,” she said. “I’m like scared almost. Ever since I’ve gotten my concussions, I’ve been more like, ‘Oh, I don’t know if I want to head this ball or not.’”