The Council
A safer future for
athletes of
every age.
Championing safer play for athletes of every age, in every sport. That sentence is the whole charter. Everything the Council builds is judged against one question: would it change what the adults on the field actually do in the first ten minutes?
How it is put together
Standards · credentialing · Pensacola, Florida
Sets the standards
The Council maintains plain-language safety protocols for the situations that actually put athletes in hospitals — head impact, cardiac collapse, heat illness, overuse, and unsafe conditions of play. Each is reviewed by a Medical Advisory Board before it is taught, and each is written to be followed by the adult who is already on the field.
Credentials the adults on site
A protocol protects nobody until the coach, trainer and athletic director have been trained and examined on it. Player Safety Council credit sits alongside NCAA, NATA and NFHS credit on the certification its education arm delivers, and every credential carries a validation code a school can check.
Makes safety impossible to ignore
Standards do nothing while they sit in a binder. The Council runs national public campaigns that put safety in front of entire athletic communities on the same afternoon — parents, athletes, boosters and administrators together, not just the training staff.
Every sport.
Every hazard.
The Council was founded around a heat emergency, and heat remains the area where its published protocol is most detailed. But the charter was never one hazard: an athlete lost to a cardiac arrest nobody was equipped for, or a second concussion in the same afternoon, is the same failure of preparation.
Read the full safety agenda →- 01
Head and brain injury
Helmets, headgear and concussion
- 02
Sudden cardiac arrest
AEDs, CPR and the first response
- 03
Exertional heat illness
The cooling standard, published in full
- 04
Workload and overuse
Growing bodies and year-round seasons
- 05
Conditions of play
Lightning, air quality, fields and gear
- 06
Emergency preparedness
The Emergency Action Plan, rehearsed
Four positions
we will not
soften.
- 01
Every sport, every age, every level
Youth leagues to collegiate programs, contact and non-contact, the sports with television contracts and the ones without. An eleven-year-old in a rec league and a scholarship athlete face different risks, and both are entitled to adults who prepared for them.
- 02
Prevention is a protocol, not a poster
Awareness campaigns end at awareness. The Council publishes sequences with thresholds, assignments and numbers in them, because that is the only form of advice a frightened adult can actually follow.
- 03
The adults on site decide the outcome
In nearly every emergency in sport, the minutes that matter pass before a medical professional arrives. That is why the Council credentials coaches, volunteers and administrators rather than writing exclusively for physicians.
- 04
Medically reviewed, then taught plainly
A Medical Advisory Board reviews the content. It is then rewritten so a volunteer assistant coach can follow it in the dark, in the rain, with a crowd watching and nobody else stepping forward.
Written for whoever is standing there
Schools and districts
Certify every coach on staff and build an Emergency Action Plan for each venue.
State associations
Adopt the standards at scale, with licensing and a staff dashboard.
Club and youth leagues
Volunteer-friendly training for programs with no athletic trainer on site.
Parents and athletes
Plain-language resources for knowing what your program should already have in place.
Why the Council exists
The Council exists in Eric's memory. Ice Athletes keeps a Memory Wall for the athletes lost to heat since — each one a case where the protocol on this site, applied in the first minutes, would have changed the afternoon.
The Council grew out of Ice Athletes INC in Pensacola, Florida, when it became clear that a course on its own could not reach far enough. Standards needed a body to hold them, credit needed an issuer, and athlete safety needed a voice that spoke about every sport and every risk rather than one season's headline.
Organization record