Braintree Athletic Brains Tested for Safety
Gearing up to protect students during the winter sports season, high school officials tested hundreds of athletes to set a baseline in case they experience a head injury.
Two dozen Braintree High School students sat in a darkened library, staring at squiggly lines on individual computer screens. Silence overtook the usual jokes and a shuffle for chairs, and now the students – all athletes – had settled into the plodding seriousness of cognitive testing. Some 800 students in Braintree will sit in the same room this year, entering similar data as part of a push to overhaul the town's and the state's concussion procedures. The test, taken so far only at the start of the winter season, is called the ImPACT Program, or Immediate Post-Concussion Assessment and Cognitive Testing. It measures memory, reaction time and processing speed, providing a baseline for injury recovery and what athletic director Michael …
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