One of the challenges you have when you address the issue of baseline testing is that you have to realize that the bulk of our players are youth players, and that means their baselines change at least once a year and possibly twice a year. You're going to have to put them in a testing paradigm that goes over and over to get a baseline, and that is a huge number. It will add substantially to the cost of sport, and yet many of the practitioners out there don't rely on baseline testing because it just isn't available and people have learned to work without it.
That being said, when we wrote our guidelines—because our guidelines were to be inclusive across Canada Soccer—we did include the following line, and I think it's fair to point out, because we're dealing with two things:
Professional and National players typically have access to an enhanced level of medical care, which means that their concussion and their return to play can be managed in a more closely monitored way.
That's a euphemistic way of saying that there really is a baseline that we have to get to everyone, and some of our very high-risk players need to be monitored more closely. It has come up for us that many of our national team players come to us from professional clubs, and those professional clubs have baseline testing as part of their paradigm, and therefore, when we take the players for our use, we have to adhere to their paradigms as well. From a youth perspective, really, I'm not sure that it's necessary—and I understand where Parachute Canada was coming from—so we don't have anything in our paradigm about doing baseline testing on youth and recreational players.
