Elite Equipment

An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. I have seen so many teeth knocked out of ball players mouths in games and practices. It amazes me how many ball players wear boxers.

The properly equipped basketball player always wears a mouth guard, compression shorts, an athletic supporter, and ankle braces.

* Did you know?

•More than five million teeth are knocked out each year through sports injury, accident or play.

•Athletes are 60 times more likely to suffer damage to the mouth when not wearing a mouthguard.

•Mouthguard use prevents approximately 200,000 oral-facial injuries each year.

•The cost to repair a knocked out tooth and follow-up care can be thousands of dollars-many times greater than a mouthguard.

Males are traumatized twice as often as females with the maxillary central incisors being the most commonly injured tooth.

A mouthguard may prevent serious injuries such as concussions and jaw fractures by helping to avoid situations where the lower jaw gets jammed into the upper jaw.In basketball, a player’s risk is twice that of a football player of an injury and yet only 7% of the baseball or even softball players wear mouth guards. Basketball players who do not wear mouthguards have a seven fold increase in chances of orofacial injury.

* Compression shorts keep the thigh muscles warm during rest periods and provide protection against muscle sprains and strains when activity is renewed. The athletic supporter keeps the player’s scrotum up close to the body and prevents testicular torsion. If a supporter is not worn, and testicular torsion occurs; the player only has 4 hours to have surgery before the testicular tissues die.

* Injured Ankles should be taped or lace-up ankle braces must be worn for each practice or game. Taping or using ankle braces prevents extreme pronation of the foot. Well-designed sports medicine studies have shown that the lace-up braces work as well as ankle taping. The braces are relatively inexpensive.