Black Ferns, New Zealand Rugby Lead the Way in Women's Brain Health
With concussion in Women’s World Rugby under a spotlight, the World Champion Black Ferns have partnered with Prevent to outfit all athletes with the Prevent iMG for the upcoming International Autumn Series. Each athlete on the Black Ferns has received a personally customized iMG which will measure key metrics related to head acceleration in training and matches.
This partnership builds off of a tremendous amount of work completed by the
University of Otago, World Rugby, & New Zealand Rugby at the community level in New Zealand to measure head impacts in over 700 youth athletes throughout 2021. Expanding this work to the elite level allows for further opportunities and expansion of a head impact database which already contains 50,000 confirmed head impacts, while giving the Black Ferns the ability to optimize player welfare and performance by using the iMG data.
Black Ferns captain Led Elder commented that the adoption of the Prevent iMG’s will “improve the knowledge around female rugby players” and “We’re also proud to be playing a role in improving the game and making it safer for everyone, from young girls and boys to professional teams”.
