Former U.S. women's national team player and 1999 World Cup star Brandi Chastain is well beyond her playing days, but the sport in which she once rose to prominence, remains very close to her heart. Now 47 and a mother and coach, Chastain remains committed to soccer and, perhaps more importantly, making it a safer game for future generations of athletes.
While no female athlete has been found to have suffered from CTE - chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease that forms as a result of repeated traumatic brain injuries - Chastain has decided to commit herself to the process of furthering research into the effects of concussions on the human brain.
Chastain announced that she will donate her brain to researchers at Boston University, who are among the leaders in the field of CTE research. And while CTE is most often associated with sports like football, hockey and boxing, it has been found in the brains of a number of male former soccer players and has been linked, through circumstantial evidence, with heading the ball.
The fact that CTE has not been found in the brains of any female athletes to date is also less a function of hard evidence, and more a function of limited research. Of the 307 brains examined by Boston University researches, only seven belonged to women. And while no female athletes have been found to have suffered from CTE, it has been discovered in the brains of women who were known to have been subjected to repeated head trauma.
Chastain's decision to donate her brain follows that of another former national team member, Cindy Parlow Cone.
Cone and Chastain, along with several other members of the 1999 World Cup-winning squad, have spoken out against heading in youth soccer. U.S. Soccer announced in November 2015 that it would be implementing more stringent health and safety guidelines for players under the age of 14.
This mirrors changes in other sports, like football, where some rules have been implemented to lessen the likelihood of head injuries, while some parents are holding players out altogether until an age at which their brain has more fully matured. Some even believe a sport like football may soon change, on a fundamental level, based on the concerns over the long-term effects of concussions.
While soccer, a sport not based on contact, isn't likely to face the same threat to its very nature, it may someday soon look a little different than the sport the generation of kids who likely still remember watching Chastain knock home that World Cup-winning penalty kick, grew up with.
