Teach your child to avoid head contact with the boards or other players. Serious head and neck injuries can occur from this kind of contact. Above all, keep ice hockey fun. Putting too much focus on winning can make your child push too hard and risk injury. More than 500,000 amateur athletes in the U.S. play ice hockey, a game that carries significant risk of injury for players of all ages.
Ice hockey is the second leading cause of winter sports injury among children.
Lower extremity injuries account for about one-third of the injuries in ice hockey. Cases of paralysis and death resulting from head and spinal cord injuries have been reported, but these catastrophic injuries are rare. Body checking is the most commonly reported cause of injury and is associated with the more severe injuries. Many of the players injured by body checking collide with goal posts and the boards. Contact between opponents, usually in the form of body checking, is associated with 46 percent of all minor injuries and 75 percent of major injuries.