As part of FLN’s ongoing reporting on the FHSAA’s controversial decision to mandate helmets for Girls Lacrosse starting next season we have obtained emails discussing the issue among members of the FHSAA Board of Directors and various others and for this article would like to focus on one email in particular. On April 24th this year Russel Wambles received from Danielle Perrotti (who is listed on LinkedIn as a Teacher and Athletic Trainer in the Orange County School District and is employed at Dr. Phillips) an email summarizing concussions by high schools.  The following details were accumulated on the email:   High School                            Football                    Girls Lacrosse                    Boys Lacrosse   Apopka did not report Boone                                             11                                         1                                              1 Colonial                                          5                                          0                                             2 Cypress Creek                              6                                          0                                           N/A Dr. Phillips                                    1                                           4                                             0 East River                                      5                                           1                                             1 Edgewater                                     2                                           6                                             1 Evans, Freedom and Jones did not report anything Lake Nona                                   N/A                                       2                                             0 Oak Ridge                                       2                                         N/A                                       N/A Ocoee                                               2                                          0                                              1 Olympia did not report (they were a Final Four school) University                                      4                                          0                                              0 Wekiva did not report West Orange                                 10                                         0                                              1 Winter Park                                   20                                         7                                              1   These statistics are the foundation for why the FHSAA went the way they did.  But did they panic? 17 of the 21 reported concussions came from THREE of the ELEVEN schools they collated the data from.  The remaining EIGHT schools only combined for 4 concussions total.  Is that really a proper distribution for making such a decision? Is it not fair to ask, while looking at these statistics, whether Winter Park might want to skip this upcoming football season? An open question for these schools . . . would you be willing to also provide Girls Soccer concussion totals? From previous research it has been made clear that Mr. Wambles’ main issue was that Girls Lacrosse concussion rates were higher than Football at a number of schools.  I’ll leave it to the reader to ascertain whether the football concussion range of distribution is reasonable.  But my rusty high school math skills do make me wonder about that type of Bell Curve distribution. These statistics did not support that conclusion. We need to ask the obvious question; were these statistics shared with the Board of Directors or were verbal assurances made?