Why we're tracking injuries in Irish amateur rugby players

Analysi s: by tracking how, where and when injuries happen, we can reduce the risk of injury for Irish school and amateur rugby players

Injuries in sport can impact negatively on performance since athletes and players can miss valuable training sessions because of an injury. Sporting organisations seek to understand the injury incidence and profile of their players so that they can address any risk of injury through appropriate interventions and strategies. To this end the IRFU began a collaboration with the University of Limerick in 2016 to develop an electronic injury surveillance system for the amateur adults and school game in Ireland. Prior to this it was unknown what the real risk of injury was within both of these cohorts.

The research team in UL is made of PhD students and academics from various disciplines such as strength and conditioning, biomechanics, statistics and physiotherapy. The aim of this long-term project, which is in place until at least 2030, is to enhance the health and welfare of Irish amateur rugby players. This is an innovative project which stemmed from the IRFU and is the first project globally to investigate injury trends in the senior women's amateur game. Currently there are 27 amateur clubs (excess of 1,000 players) and 15 schools (excess of 400 players) engaged in the Irish Rugby Injury Surveillance (IRIS) project.

The system developed to log injuries is an online system. In each club or school there is a medically trained injury recorder who each week logs any injuries that have been sustained by the players. They input valuable information related to the injury, such as the body location of the injury, injury type, and how the injury occurred. This allows the project team to understand