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Are Steroids in Professional Sports Impacting HS Athletes? 1/15/13
Are Steroids in Professional Sports Impacting HS Athletes?
CBS7 Sports Reporter
It seems like steroids have completely dominated the sports world for the last couple of weeks -- actually, more like the last few years.
Strong evidence supports Armstrong experimented with blood doping, a practice of boosting the number of red blood cells in the bloodstream in order to enhance athletic performance.
So this got us thinking: is this a problem amongst our local athletes?
"We're not really superly concerned about the high school students," said Trapper O'Connell, Medical Center Hospital's sports medicine program manager. "We want to make them aware of that obviously, that it does have a lot of consequences. Obviously, all the athletes high school, college professional are always looking for an edge over the opponent."
Sometimes, looking for that extra boost or leg up can mean unknowingly breaking the rules.
"Thinking that they can do within reason is going to be experimenting," O'Connell said. "That's the big thing that we try to discourage the kids, especially the high school kids from doing is experimenting with these things."
To make sure play is fair, the University Interscholastic League does have a random drug testing policy. The selection of schools and athletes is totally random, and it's the UIL's goal to test 10s of thousands of athletes for anabolic steroids.
But how big of an issue is steroids in our high schoolers right here in the Permian Basin?
"Um, it hasn't, really it hasn't surfaced as a problem," O'Connell said. "But again: I don't think it's a huge amount but it definitely is out there no doubt about it."
For more information on the UIL's steroid policy, you can go to the UIL Web site at www.uiltexas.org/health/steroid-information.