A North Georgia chiropractor's plain-language guide to recognizing concussion in young athletes, what to do right away, and why it's a medical matter.
If you spend your weekends on the sidelines of a Canton soccer field, a Cartersville football game, or a Rome travel-ball tournament like so many families I see, the word "concussion" probably sits somewhere in the back of your mind. I'm Dr. Daniel Turner, and I want to be honest with you from the very first sentence: this article is purely educational. I am not writing it to sell you anything, and I want to be especially clear that chiropractic care does not treat or cure a concussion. A suspected concussion is a medical matter, full stop.
What I can do as a clinician who works with young athletes every week is help you understand what a concussion is, what the warning signs look like, and exactly what to do in the moment — because the decisions made in the first few minutes after a head injury matter more than almost anything that comes later. My goal here is simple: to make you a more confident, better-informed parent who knows when to pull your child off the field and call a physician. None of this replaces a conversation with your own pediatrician or team physician; think of it as the background knowledge that helps you ask better questions and act faster when seconds count.
A concussion is a mild traumatic brain injury caused by a bump, blow, or jolt to the head — or even a hit to the body that causes the head and brain to move rapidly back and forth. That fast movement can cause the brain to bounce or twist inside the skull, creating chemical changes and sometimes stretching brain cells. The key thing for parents to understand is that this is an injury to the brain itself, not a bruise on the outside of the head. You cannot see it on the surface, and that's exactly why it is so easy to underestimate.
The word "mild" in "mild traumatic brain injury" trips a lot of parents up, and I understand why. It sounds reassuring, as though a concussion is a minor, self-limiting bump. But "mild" is a clinical category describing how the injury presents, not a promise about how serious it is or how long recovery will take. A concussion is still an injury to the brain, and it deserves to be taken seriously every single time. I would rather a family treat a possible concussion as real and have it turn out to be nothing than wave off a genuine brain injury because the child "seems okay."
I think the biggest myth I hear from parents and, frankly, from some coaches is that a child has to be knocked out for it to "count." That is not true. The vast majority of young athletes who sustain a concussion never lose consciousness at all. A child can stay on their feet, finish the play, and still have a real brain injury. This is also why a concussion is fundamentally different from the musculoskeletal sports injuries I help with in clinic — a sprained ankle or a strained muscle heals on a predictable timeline you can largely manage with conservative care, while a brain injury demands medical oversight.
It also helps to know that symptoms do not always show up the instant the hit happens. Some signs appear right away on the sideline, but others can take hours — occasionally a full day — to surface. A child who looked fine immediately after a collision can develop a headache, fogginess, or sleep changes that evening. That delayed onset is one more reason that "he walked it off, so he's fine" is not a safe conclusion. If your child took a real blow to the head or body, keep an eye on them through the rest of the day and overnight, and know the danger signs I describe below.
Children and teenagers are not small adults. Their brains are still developing, and guidance summarized by the CDC notes that young athletes may take longer to recover than older athletes. They are also less likely to report their own symptoms — sometimes because they don't recognize what they're feeling, and sometimes because they desperately don't want to come out of a game they care about. That puts the responsibility squarely on the adults watching. In the sports-heavy culture we have across Cherokee, Bartow, and Floyd counties, that means parents, coaches, and athletic trainers all need to be paying attention.
There's a competitive-culture piece here too that I'd be doing you a disservice to ignore. Many young athletes have absorbed the message that toughing it out is admirable, that coming off the field lets the team down, or that a scholarship or starting spot depends on never showing weakness. A twelve-year-old or a sixteen-year-old will quietly hide a headache for reasons that feel enormous to them. So part of protecting a developing brain is cultural: the adults around the team have to make it genuinely safe — even praiseworthy — to speak up. When a coach pulls a kid for a suspected concussion and treats it as the right call rather than a failure, every other player on that roster learns it's okay to be honest.
The signs of a concussion fall into a few buckets, and your child may show only one or two of them. Some appear right away, while others can take hours to surface. As a parent, you are watching for two things: what you can observe from the outside, and what your child tells you they feel.
Signs you might observe in your young athlete include:
Symptoms your child might report to you include headache or "pressure" in the head, nausea, balance problems or dizziness, double or blurry vision, sensitivity to light or noise, feeling foggy or sluggish, confusion, and trouble concentrating or remembering. Many kids will simply say they "just don't feel right." Take that seriously — vague is not the same as harmless.
It's worth grouping these symptoms the way clinicians often do, because it helps you describe what you're seeing when you call your child's doctor. There are physical symptoms (headache, nausea, dizziness, vision trouble, sensitivity to light or sound), thinking or memory symptoms (feeling foggy, slowed down, or having trouble concentrating and remembering), emotional symptoms (irritability, sadness, more emotional or nervous than usual), and sleep-related changes (sleeping more or less than usual, or trouble falling asleep). If you can tell the physician "she's complaining of a headache and light bothers her, and she seems unusually irritable and foggy since the game," that's far more useful than "something seems off" — though "something seems off" is itself a reason to act.
Some symptoms are danger signs that can indicate a more serious brain injury and require emergency care immediately. Call 911 or go to the nearest ER if your child has one pupil larger than the other, drowsiness or an inability to wake up, a headache that gets worse and does not go away, slurred speech, weakness, numbness, or decreased coordination, repeated vomiting or nausea, convulsions or seizures, unusual behavior, increasing confusion or agitation, or loses consciousness. These are not symptoms to "watch overnight" — they are reasons to seek emergency evaluation without delay.
This same emergency-first instinct applies to the other injuries we see in young athletes, and I want to be just as direct about those. A suspected fracture, an inability to bear weight on a leg, an obvious deformity of a joint or limb, severe swelling, or sudden numbness, tingling, or weakness all warrant prompt medical attention before anyone considers any kind of conservative or rehabilitative care. The rule of thumb I give parents is simple: if you're looking at something that could be a broken bone, a serious head injury, or a nerve problem, the first stop is an emergency department or your physician — not a chiropractor's office, and not a wait-and-see at home. Conservative musculoskeletal care has its place, but only after the serious possibilities have been ruled out by the appropriate medical provider.
The single most important action you can take is also the simplest: remove your child from play immediately and do not let them return the same day. There's a phrase the CDC uses that I want every parent in North Georgia to memorize — "When in doubt, sit them out." You do not need to be certain. You do not need a diagnosis on the sideline. If a concussion is even possible, the child is done for the day.
From there, the path is medical. Here is the sequence I want you to follow:
A practical note on those first hours: write things down. Jot the time of the injury, what you saw happen, and which symptoms appeared and when. Memory gets fuzzy under stress, and a simple timeline is genuinely helpful to the physician who evaluates your child. Bring the name of the sport and the mechanism of injury — a head-to-head collision, a fall, an elbow to the temple — because how the injury happened informs how a provider thinks about it. And don't be shy about going to the emergency department if you're seeing any of the red-flag signs above; no one in an ER is going to fault a parent for taking a possible brain injury seriously.
I cannot stress this enough: the timeline for returning to sport is decided by a physician, not by how your child says they feel. Kids heal in their own time, and a young athlete who reports "I'm fine" the next morning may still be days or weeks away from being safe. A proper return-to-play protocol is a graded series of steps — light activity, then sport-specific activity, then non-contact training, and so on — where the child must pass each stage symptom-free before advancing. If symptoms return at any step, they drop back. This is the standard the CDC outlines, and it exists to protect kids from returning too soon, which is when the worst outcomes happen.
There's a school-side piece to recovery that parents sometimes overlook, often called "return to learn." A concussed brain can struggle with the very things school demands — reading, screens, concentration, noisy hallways, testing. Many children need temporary accommodations, such as a lighter workload, rest breaks, more time on assignments, or reduced screen time, before they're ready to return fully to academics, and certainly before they return to contact sport. Your physician, working with the school, can help map this out. The general principle is that the brain needs to handle the cognitive load of a normal school day comfortably before a child progresses through the physical return-to-play stages. Rushing either track tends to prolong the whole recovery.
One thing I want to flag plainly, because it is the reason these protocols exist: a young athlete who returns to contact sport while still recovering from a concussion is at risk of a second injury before the first has healed, and that situation can be far more serious than the original concussion. That risk is precisely why "he says he feels fine" is not the standard, why same-day return is off the table, and why the green light has to come from a medical provider following a structured protocol. The caution is not about being fragile; it's about giving a developing brain the protection it has genuinely earned.
Here is where I'm going to be completely straight with you, because pediatric safety matters more than any business consideration. Chiropractic care does not treat, manage, or cure a concussion. A concussion is a brain injury and belongs in the hands of a physician. If anyone — in any profession — tells you they can "treat" your child's concussion outside of medical care, I would walk the other way. That is not a responsible message, and it is not one you'll ever hear from me.
So why mention chiropractic at all? Because the same forces that cause a concussion — that rapid whipping of the head — frequently strain the muscles and joints of the neck. After a physician has evaluated your child, diagnosed and managed the concussion, and specifically cleared them, there can be a role for conservative, non-surgical care of associated neck pain or musculoskeletal strain. That is a completely separate issue from the brain injury, and it only enters the picture after medical clearance and in coordination with your child's doctor. The brain injury itself is never something I would claim to address.
I want to underline the sequence because it matters: medical evaluation first, diagnosis and management of the concussion by a physician, explicit clearance, and only then a conversation about whether there's a neck or musculoskeletal component worth addressing conservatively — and even that conversation happens in coordination with the physician who is overseeing the concussion. I see my role as one member of a team that the physician quarterbacks, not as a substitute for medical care. If your child's doctor and I disagree about timing or appropriateness, the doctor's judgment about the brain injury wins, every time.
This is the same conservative, evidence-based philosophy I bring to all the sports injuries I see in young athletes. My role with a concussion is to be a responsible community resource — to help you recognize it, to send you to the right place, and to coordinate with your pediatrician or team physician if and when there's an appropriate musculoskeletal piece to manage down the road.
There is no way to make youth sports completely concussion-proof, and I'd be skeptical of any product that promised otherwise — helmets and mouthguards reduce many injuries but cannot fully prevent concussions. That said, the general safety habits that protect young athletes from injury are worth building into your family's routine. Guidance from orthopedic specialists emphasizes well-fitted, sport-appropriate protective equipment, proper conditioning and warm-up, learning and enforcing the rules of the game, and adequate rest and recovery.
It's worth saying a bit more about each of those, because they're the levers families and teams actually control. Equipment matters most when it fits and is maintained — a helmet that's the wrong size or worn loose does far less than one fitted properly, so it's worth checking the fit at the start of every season as kids grow. Conditioning and a real warm-up prepare the body for contact and reduce fatigue, and a tired athlete late in a game is a more vulnerable athlete. Knowing and enforcing the rules — particularly rules designed to limit dangerous contact — keeps the game within safer bounds. And adequate rest, including recovery between practices and games and genuine sleep, supports everything else. None of these guarantees safety, but together they meaningfully lower risk.
Just as important is the culture around your child's team. Ask whether coaches are trained to recognize concussion. Ask whether there's an athletic trainer present. And talk to your child directly — let them know that reporting a hit or a "weird" feeling is the brave, smart thing to do, not a sign of weakness. Kids who feel safe speaking up get pulled from play sooner, and getting pulled sooner is what protects their developing brain.
If you've found this guide because you're sorting out a sports injury for your child, I'm glad you're here, and I hope it's clarified the difference between a concussion — which is a medical matter — and the musculoskeletal injuries I help with. If you'd like to understand how we work with young athletes and families across Canton, Cartersville, and Rome, our new patient information walks through what to expect. But please hear me one more time: if a concussion is on the table, your first call is to a physician, not to my office.
Being a sports parent in North Georgia means cheering hard and worrying a little. Knowing the signs of a concussion and trusting your instinct to pull your child from play is one of the most protective things you can do. When in doubt, sit them out, see a physician, and let a proper medical protocol guide the road back. That's not being overcautious — that's being a great parent.
No. Most young athletes who sustain a concussion never lose consciousness. A child can stay on their feet and even finish a play and still have a real brain injury. That is why you watch for the full range of signs and symptoms — confusion, headache, dizziness, balance problems, or simply 'not feeling right' — rather than waiting for someone to be knocked out.
No. I want to be completely clear: chiropractic care does not treat, manage, or cure a concussion. A concussion is a brain injury and belongs in the hands of a physician. The only related role is conservative care of associated neck or musculoskeletal strain, and only after a doctor has evaluated, diagnosed, and specifically cleared your child, in coordination with their physician.
That decision is made by a physician, not by how your child says they feel. Recovery follows a gradual, step-by-step return-to-play protocol where the child must pass each stage symptom-free before advancing, dropping back if symptoms return. Your child should not return to play until a health care provider says it is safe, because returning too soon is when the most serious outcomes occur.
Go to the ER or call 911 if your child has one pupil larger than the other, cannot be woken up or is very drowsy, has a worsening headache, slurred speech, weakness, numbness or poor coordination, repeated vomiting, seizures, increasing confusion or agitation, or loses consciousness. These are danger signs of a potentially serious brain injury and need emergency care right away.
No equipment makes sports concussion-proof, but you can reduce overall injury risk with well-fitted protective gear, proper conditioning and warm-up, knowing and enforcing the rules, and adequate rest. Just as important is encouraging your child to report any hit or 'weird' feeling, and asking whether coaches are concussion-trained and whether an athletic trainer is present.
This article is for general education and is not a substitute for an individual evaluation. External links are provided for reference and do not imply endorsement.
