While most prevalent in boy's collision sports, high school concussions happen to both genders in many different sports

Andrew E. Lincoln and colleagues researched high school concussions for an eleven year time period from 1997 to 2008. They observed 2651 total concussions: a incident rate of 0.24 per 1000 athletic exposures. Concussions occurred in all twelve sports that were observed. There were significant differences in the overall concussion rates between genders. Boys accounted for 74.9% of concussions, while only having 53.4% of athletic exposures. This led to their incident rate of 0.34 per 1000 athletic exposures compared to the girls' 0.13 rate. However, much of this difference is due to the boys' collision sports of football and lacrosse, which were the top two concussion sports. When looking at similar sports between girls and boys, such as soccer, basketball, and baseball/softball, the concussion rates were higher for girls in every instance. Lacrosse does not apply to this comparison because boy's lacrosse has rules that allow for many more collisions than girl's lacrosse. The allocation of concussions between the sports observed is split much more evenly between the girls' sports. Four sports (soccer, cheerleading, basketball, lacrosse) had at least 17% of the concussions for girls, whereas only two boys' sports (football, lacrosse) had over 6% of the concussions.