It’s Super Bowl season and throwing the pig skin around in between tailgating on Sunday is just what the doctor ordered.
However, away from the glitz and glamor, amateur football teams across America compete in games less well attended than the Super Bowl, but still well attended enough to warrant sporting event insurance.
Mark Di Perno, President of Sports Insurance cautioned brokers to insure properly and sleep well at night - if a player gets injured and finds out they aren’t covered for health insurance, they can sue for negligence, he said.
“Any broker who just sells a piece of paper, they can also end up named in a suit themselves because ‘why did you sell this to me? It’s not the right coverage!’” Mark Di Perno said, recreating a possible scenario between a broker and a client.
“‘Well it’s the coverage you wanted!’ It doesn’t matter. You’re an insurance professional and you should be advising your client on how to do it properly.”
Di Perno added that avoiding that lawsuit is “a couple of hundred dollars” and if the injured player isn’t covered it won’t be because the clients “were cheap.”
“With the majority of brokers, the issue is you’ve got to find a good MGA that has access to companies that are booking this class of business,” he continued.
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“Our world is all about relationships. Lucky MGAs who deal in the sports side, there’s the package for you, it’s already set up and ready to go instead of you hacking your way through it little piece here and a little piece there.”
Football comes with a certain amount of risk and that can be scary for more than just the players and their parents.
“There are a lot of insurers that have dropped out of football completely,” Di Perno said, noting his company still covers tackle football.
“It’s inherent risk. A parent couldn’t tell a judge ‘I didn’t know he would get brain injuries from playing football’. There are movies about it, it’s in the news, it’s everywhere.”
When Sports Insurance does its underwriting, it treats concussions and brain damage as an integral characteristic of the sport.
“The NFL has a program called Heads Up, it’s a coaching method now where they’re teaching kids how to tackle properly,” Di Perno said, describing the tackle technique where players literally elevate their heads instead of smashing helmets without knowing when to brace for impact.
“That is one of the questions (on the application form) ‘Do you adhere to the Heads Up program?’ another one is ‘Do you do baseline testing on all your athletes?’”
Baseline testing is for motor skills at the beginning of the season, monitoring how fast a player can run and everything related to cognitive abilities working together with physical ones.
“If you get your bell rung, you probably can’t do well in baseline testing and that’s when you get put in concussion protocol and then it’s up to six weeks until you can come back,” Di Perno said.
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