Head injury and concussion coverage remains the most difficult exposure to insure in contact sports, according to Sarah Hanson (pictured), senior vice president, national sales leader at NFP, who said carriers routinely narrow their exposure through exclusions built specifically around long-term neurological risk.
"There is a variety of different wordings and exclusions around head injury and concussions," Hanson said. "Specifically, neurodegenerative conditions can be excluded. Carriers try to reduce their exposure in that way because of the length of injury that can come about."
That difficulty sits inside a broader misconception Hanson said she encounters often: that sports insurance, given how common and community-based sports are, should be straightforward to place. In reality, the market for contact sports specifically is narrow, and few carriers are willing to write it at all. Hanson is the lead commercial insurance broker for Rugby Canada.
That narrow appetite compounds further when contact sports intersect with programs involving children or other vulnerable participants, since liability coverage in that space is already limited on its own.
“When you add that with contact sport, you really need a specialized broker to be able to assist you."
Coverage also has to extend well beyond the athletes themselves, Hanson said, since risk exposure in a sports program touches nearly everyone connected to it, not just the people on the field.
"It's not just injured players," Hanson said. "There's a lot of risks off the field with spectators, volunteers, facilities, and then the directors and officers. One policy doesn't necessarily cover everyone, so you do need a coordinated program."
A sophisticated national governing body illustrates that complexity clearly, Hanson said, given the sheer range of divisions and participants involved under a single organizational umbrella.
"An organization like Rugby Canada has more than 40,000 registered participants, broken into men's and women's divisions, then senior and junior, then 15s and sevens," Hanson said. "You really need a coordinated national program rather than one policy."
Part of what makes contact sports specifically harder to underwrite, Hanson said, comes down to the physical nature of the game itself, since the rules governing contact sports are not designed to prevent certain injuries from happening in the first place, which shapes how carriers assess the risk from the outset.
"Because the nature of potential injury isn't reduced, the carriers might not see the exposure to them as significant," Hanson said. "With a contact sport, the already limited marketplace is even further limited in terms of appetite."
Within that limited market, Hanson said the work of a specialized broker becomes finding coverage that doesn't quietly exclude the exact risks an organization is trying to protect against, or at minimum making sure a client understands clearly where the gaps are if that coverage simply doesn't exist.
"Where there is appetite, you need a special broker who can read the exclusions and make sure that they're not excluding something that could cause the organization any harm," Hanson said. "Or, if the coverage isn't available at all, that at least everyone is aware."
Despite those structural challenges, Hanson said the market for contact sports coverage has remained relatively stable in recent years rather than tightening further.
That stability, she added, isn't only a function of broker relationships. She said the risk management practices of the organizations themselves play a direct role in shaping how carriers view the class overall, and ultimately how much appetite remains available for it.
"Our clients as well have fantastic risk management, and that really does help with the carrier's appetite," Hanson said.
That combination, in her view, is what keeps a genuinely difficult class of business insurable at all: brokers who understand exactly where the exclusions sit, paired with organizations disciplined enough to reduce the underlying risk carriers are being asked to take on in the first place.
