OLR Report 2014-R-0142 answers the questions: Does the recent concussion legislation (PA 14-66) impose additional liability on private school athletic coaches? Do the act and the underlying law’s requirements extend to private school coaches?
(The Office of Legislative Research is not authorized to provide legal opinions and neither this blog post nor the linked report should not be construed as such.)
The public act and the underlying law do not create a cause of action for school athletes who sustain a concussion.
It appears that the public act and the law apply only to public school coaches. However, the Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference (CIAC) requires all coaches under its authority to comply with the law’s concussion training requirements and protocols and may impose sanctions for noncompliance. The private, nonprofit CIAC has governing authority over interscholastic sports at its member schools, which currently include all private parochial and public high schools in the state. According to CIAC, no private independent high schools are members and thus, it does not have authority over such schools. It does not appear that the law requires coaches at such schools to comply with its requirements.
We were unable to find any precedential case law that specifically addressed if the statutes apply to private school coaches. In one unreported 2013 federal district court case, the court dismissed certain negligence claims a student athlete brought against a private school coach after she sustained a concussion during a basketball game (Mercier v. Greenwich Academy, Inc., 2013 WL 3874511(D.Conn.)). The athlete alleged, among other things, that the coach had a statutory duty to remove
her from the game as a result of her concussion symptoms. The court issued its opinion without taking a position on the statute’s applicability to private school coaches.
For more information, read the full report.
