Article Text
Abstract
Background Injury prevention, or the lack thereof, is influenced by a variety of elements in any team context. With the rising number of injuries in women’s football and the scarcity of human resources in Sub-Saharan Africa, it’s critical to investigate how standardized injury prevention measures may be implemented.
Objective The goal of the study was to assess injury prevention knowledge, beliefs, and practices among women’s football teams in the University Sports South Africa (USSA) Football League in South Africa’s Gauteng Province.
Design This research design is a cross-sectional survey of injury prevention knowledge, beliefs, and practices.
Setting Women’s football teams in the USSA Football league in South Africa’s Gauteng Province.
Patients (or Participants) All women’s teams in the USSA Football League in Gauteng and their support staff (mostly head coaches, assistant coaches, team managers, and occasional medical personnel) were asked to participate.
Interventions (or Assessment of Risk Factors) Not Applicable
Main Outcome Measurements Perceived knowledge, beliefs, and practices.
Results Out of 107 participants, 35.5% (n=38) reported they perceived that they had adequate knowledge about injury prevention. It was also shown that 75.7% (n=81) of the participants were engaged in football injury prevention programmes (IPP)s at the time of the research, with the following injury prevention practices being relevant: warm-ups (95.1%), stretching (90.1%), cool-downs (80.2%) and jogging (81.4%). Only 24.9% of the respondents indicated that they had heard about the FIFA 11+ IPP, while the majority (83.2%) stated that they would be willing to adopt it if they were to gain access to detailed information on the programme.
Conclusions The majority of their football teammates thought their knowledge was insufficient. Most players and coaches believe that IPPs are important, which is an important first step towards developing and implementing injury prevention awareness programmes.