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Contact sport

Sport involving physical contact between players or their environment

  • 7 min read
  • 3 chapters

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Contact sports are categorised by the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) into three main categories: contact, limited-contact and noncontact. In attempting to define relative risk for competitors in sports the AAP have further defined contact sports as containing some element of intentional collision between players. They define such collision sports as being where: "athletes purposely hit or collide with each other or with inanimate objects (including the ground) with great force", while in limited-contact sports such impacts are often "infrequent and inadvertent". While contact sports are considered the most high risk for injury, in some sports being a major feature (such as boxing or other martial arts), limited-contact and non-contact sports are not without risk as injury or contact may come about as a result of a fall or collision with the playing area, or a piece of sporting equipment, such as being struck by a hockey stick or football or even a piece of protective wear worn by a teammate or opposition player.

Some definitions of contact sports, particularly martial arts, have the concept of full contact, semi-contact and non-contact (or other definitions) for both training and competitive sparring. Some categories of contact may or may not be combined with other methods of scoring, but full contact is generally considered to include the potential for victory by knockout or submission depending on the form of combat. An example of this is full contact karate and taekwondo where competitors are allowed to attempt to knock out an opponent through strikes to the head or otherwise bringing the opponent to the floor. Full contact rules differentiate from other forms of the same sports that may otherwise restrict blows to the head and the use of elbows or knees. Such full contact sports may be defined as combat sports and require a of change equipment, alter or omit rules, and are generally differentiated from contact sports by their explicit intent of defeating an opponent in physical combat.

Some contact sports have limited-contact or non-contact variations (such as flag football for American football) which attempt to replace tackling and other forms of contact with alternative methods of interacting with an opponent, such as removing a flag from a belt worn by the opponent or outlawing specific actions entirely such as in walking football.

Nomenclature

Current medical terminology in the United States uses the term contact sport and collision sport to refer to sports like rugby, American football, professional wrestling, ice hockey, lacrosse and roller derby. The term limited-contact sport is used to refer to sports such as soccer, baseball and handball, and the term noncontact sport to sports like badminton, running and swimming.

The American Academy of Pediatrics policy statement was revised in 2008 to include the following definition:

In collision sports (e.g. boxing, ice hockey, American football, lacrosse, and rodeo), athletes purposely hit or collide with each other or with inanimate objects (including the ground) with great force. In contact sports (e.g. basketball), athletes routinely make contact with each other or with inanimate objects but usually with less force than in collision sports. In limited-contact sports (e.g. softball and squash), contact with other athletes or with inanimate objects is infrequent or inadvertent.

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