Today, I have a story appearing in both the Charlotte Observer and The News & Observer offering tips for parents of student athletes as the busy falls sports season gets underway. The story focuses primarily on the emotional issues that often arise. Below is a look at the physical side of high school athletics, with information and tips on injuries and injury prevention.

If you have a high school athlete, there’s a 1 in 5 chance he or she will suffer a physical injury.

In the 2009-2010 school year, the latest year for which stats are available, 1.35 million of the nation’s 7 million high school athletes got injured, according to the Center for Injury Research & Policy at the Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus, Ohio. To be a certified injury, the incident had to require medical attention (doctor, athletic trainer, emergency personnel) and result in the athlete missing at least one lost day of practice or a game.

Some highlights from that study:

Injuries by sport

Injuries per 1,000 players.

Football:  3.81 injuries
Girls soccer: 2.0
Wrestling (boys): 1.98
Boys soccer: 1.75
Girls basketball: 1.58
Boys basketball: 1.45
Girls volleyball: 0.99
Softball (girls): 1.12
Baseball (boys): 0.82

Mostly commonly injured body part

Reflects percent of total injuries.

Ankle: 17.5
Head/face: 17.2
Knee: 15.7
Hand/wrist: 10.3
Hip/thigh/upper leg: 9.2
Shoulder: 8.4
Trunk: 5.8
Lower leg: 4.7
Foot: 4.1
Arm/elbow: 4.0
Neck: 1.9
Other: 1.0

Bench time

Number of days (practices and games) missed due to injury.

1-2 days: 14.7 percent
3-6 days: 27.3 percent
7-9 days: 16.1 percent
10-21 days: 16.9 percent
22 or more days: 25.0 percent

Injuries by class

Percentages of injuries by year in school, broken down by male and female athletes.

Freshman: 20.8 percent | 27.9 percent
Sophomore: 23.5 percent | 26.7 percent
Junior: 25.8 percent | 24.1 percent
Senior: 29.9 percent | 21.3 percent

Check out the entire report here. For comparison sake, check out this study of the 2005-06 school year by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

* * *

Hydration

Hydration is a particularly important issue for so-called “fall” sports — practice for some of which began over a month ago, in the dead of summer. If your student athlete is fatigued, irritable, unproductive and is suffering headaches and muscle cramps, he or she might be dehydrated.

Here’s a good overview of dehydration that ran in the New York Times last year: “In Summer’s Heat, Watch What You Drink.”

For a succinct take on recognizing dehydration and getting rehydrated, here’s what the Mayo Clinic has to say.

Playing hurt

“If you get hurt,” advises the National Institutes of Health, “stop playing. Continuing to play or exercise can cause more harm.”

Schools and coaches have gotten better about sidelining injured players until they’re ready to return. Still, there’s often subtle suggestion that an athlete “gut it out” that puts injured players on the field before they’re ready.

For most non-serious injuries, follow the RICE (Rest, Ice, Compression and Elevation) approach to recovery. That will help relieve pain, reduce swelling and speed healing.

For more on sports injuries, check out the Sports Injuries section of MedlinePlus, a service of the NIH and U.S. National Library of Medicine.

Cheerleading

60 percent of cheerleading injuries are the result of stunts, according to a study by the Center for Injury Research and Policy of The Research Institute at Nationwide Children’s Hospital. By stunts, they mean: cradles, elevators, extensions, pyramids, single-based stunts, single-leg stunts, stunt-cradle combinations, transitions and miscellaneous-partner-and-group stunts.

The most common injuries were strains and sprains (53 percent). Injuries occurred most frequently during practice (83 percent). The top five body parts injured were the ankle (16 percent), knee (9 percent), neck (9 percent), lower back (7 percent) and head (7 percent).

Photo: The famous “my-achin’-everything” photo of NFL quarterback Y.A. Tittle after a loss in 1964, his last season. In addition to his bloodied face, Tittle was thought to have a concussion and possible broken ribs.

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In my youth — this would cover my first half century — I rarely stretched or warmed up. I’d show up for a bike ride with a minute to spare, hop on the bike and be off. I’d stand around kibitzing before a run while others stretched, then go from 0 to an 8-minute pace. Pickup basketball, tennis, whatever: Who had time to stretch? A young body and luck helped me pull it off.

Today, at 54, I stretch a lot. I have to.

I converted to stretching when I realized two things: It could, as I’d heard over the years, reduce my chances of getting injured. And investing as little as five minutes before a workout and 10 minutes after did improve my performance. On the latter count, stretching has proved invaluable in waking/warming/loosening up joints and muscles that become increasingly slow to come to life as the years pass. Stretching, as I discovered Saturday morning, also is invaluable in the recovery process. Let’s see, back’s stiff: a little downward-facing dog and warrior pose (classic yoga stretches) should clear that up. Calf and quad stretches helped counteract all the quick starts after fly balls. Shoulder stretches allowed me to simply move my arms after a day of believing I could still throw a runner out at the plate from right field. Twenty minutes or so of stretching and I wasn’t good as new, but I was able to function for the rest of the day.

Taking time to stretch is especially important as spring approaches, Daylight Savings Time knocks (it starts this Sunday, March 13), the days warm and your urge to emerge from winter hibernation kicks in. As I found Saturday, the stretches that helped me recover from playing softball with my daughter were different from the ones that help me prepare and wind down from a run or a ride. Knowing the right stretches for your activity of choice makes them all-the-more effective.

Here’s a look at activities you may be engaging in as the days warm, and Web sites where you can find appropriate stretches:

Basic stretching A jack-of-all-pursuits? The Mayo Clinic offers 10 basic stretches to cover a range of activities.

Cycling It’s not just the pedaling, it’s the time in the saddle and the toll it takes on your neck, your shoulders, your back. Deal with it here.

Gardening Laugh if you will at the prospect of warming up to weed — then spend the first 70-degree day of spring in the yard and see if you’re still in such a jolly mood the next morning. These 12 exercises from “Stretching,” by Bob and Jean Anderson should help your chances for working in the yard Saturday AND Sunday.

Golf Talk about a sport that can mess up an unprepared body quick! The Mayo Clinic offers a variety of stretches to prepare your body for the potentially torq-turous backlash of a 300-yard drive.

Paddling A good paddle stroke may be about technique over power, but it can still take its toll. Minimize the impact while maximizing your time on the water with these stretches from The Stretching Institute.

Softball This routine includes 20 stretches and takes 11 minutes, a reasonable investment in return for making it to work the next morning.

Swimming Even if you aren’t swimming competitively, it’s good to be limber before hitting the water.

Tennis The Stretching Institute offers three  exercises to “ improve your performance and do away with tennis injuries for good.

Walking Starting a walking program? This pamphlet of appropriate stretches from the American Heart Association should help.

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A study from San Diego State University has found that kids who play softball, baseball or soccer still don’t get their daily recommended allotment of exercise. The government says kids should get at least an hour of good, hard exercise a day; kids in these sports only get about 45 minutes, on average. Of the softball players studied only 2 percent — mostly pitchers and catchers (the only players involved in every play), I’m guessing — got in their 60 minutes.

Why aren’t organized sports cutting it?

Too much standing around waiting to do drills, for one. Channeling back to my days as a Titan in the Young American Football League, it drove us nuts all the standing around and waiting our turn at shoulder pad-smacking fun. Certainly, drills to hone skills are important. But do the drills once or twice, then practice them in a scrimmage. They’re kids: They came to play.

While this next finding is hardly revealing, it’s worth repeating. According to a study published in the American Journal of Sports Medicine, kids 6 to 11 get twice as much exercise as kids 12 to 15. Kids 16 to 19 are even less active. The reason? The 6- to 11-year-olds are in grade school, and while gym class has been relegated to once a week, elementary kids still have recess to get their yee-haws out. Once they get to middle school and high school, they’re chained to a desk.

Organized sports are great. They encourage activity and they’re fun, or should be. But they may not be enough. Especially for middle and high schoolers.

For more on the studies, go here.

And that hour a day is important because … People who exercise a lot when they’re young have a better chance of avoiding the dread middle-age spread. That according to a study of 3,554 men and women aged 18 to 30. The study followed the group over 20 years and found that the men who stayed more active — meaning they met the minimum 150 minutes a week of moderate to vigorous exercise prescribed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services — ended up gaining 5.7 pounds less than their couch-embracing counterparts, while the active women gained 13.4 fewer pounds. Much of that benefit was seen in the all-important mid-section, where the men’s waistbands expanded 1.2 inches less, the women’s 1.5 inches less.

Staying active at a younger age may be more important for women, who tend to gain weight during menopause. “My comment,” Dr. Suzanne Steinbaum, director of women and heart disease at Lenox Hill Hospital in the Big Apple told the online NIH news service MedlinePlus, “is to train for menopause like you’d train for a marathon. If you start exercising before menopause hits and do that for 20 years, you don’t have to gain weight.

“Health,” she adds, “isn’t about flipping a switch. It’s about maintaining a lifestyle.”

For more on the study, go here.

Another reason young women should be active … That lack of a middle-age pooch could spare them the agony of osteoporosis later on, according to a study presented at the Radiological Society of North America’s annual meeting. This study analyzed 50 premenopausal women with a mean BMI of 30 (anyone with a BMI of 30 or greater is obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control). The women underwent an MR spectroscopy exam to evaluate the bone marrow fat of the fourth vertebra. The bone mineral density of that vertebra was then determined via quantitative computed tomography. Finding: the women with more visceral fat — fat located deep under muscle tissue in the abdominal cavity — also exhibited decreased bone density.

“Our results show that having a lot of belly fat is more detrimental to bone health than having more superficial fat, or fat around the hips,” said Dr. Miriam A. Bredella, a radiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital and assistant professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School in Boston.

For more on the study, go here.

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