Concussion and medical rules: each body and level writes its own.

The concussion rules side by side

Pickleball

Pickleball Canada (July 2026)

Pickleball Canada's concussion policy, in a pre-tournament package dated July 2026, applies to all players and officials in its sanctioned tournament play.

• Removal. A player must be removed from the day's events if the player, medical personnel, or, where there are no medical personnel, the Tournament Director believes a concussion may have occurred. An incident report goes to Pickleball Canada.
• Return. A removed player may not return in that competition without a written medical letter from a physician or a registered nurse (practitioner). A letter from an allied health provider, such as a therapist or chiropractor, does not count.
• Basis. The policy cites Parachute and the 2023 Amsterdam international consensus statement on concussion in sport (Echemendia and colleagues, British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2023).
• Causes it names. Head contact with the court or a paddle, collisions between players, a ball striking the head, and contact with fixed objects such as net posts, bleachers or fencing.

USA Pickleball

USA Pickleball's concussion protocol page returned an error when the research tried to open it, so this rests on a search excerpt and is unconfirmed. The excerpt describes a protocol for play at any USA Pickleball sanctioned event that aims to educate players, officials and parents of minors, recommends removing a player when a concussion is suspected, and requires clearance from a licensed health care professional before the player returns.

Squash

• A 2025 review of national guidelines. Mangan and Heron (Sports, 2025) checked the 21 countries with a player in the World Squash top 50 as of June 2025. Only Canada had a squash-specific concussion guideline, the Squash Canada Concussion Protocol of 2019. Six more (England, New Zealand, Qatar, Scotland, the USA and Wales) had general national concussion guidance for sport, mostly aimed at grassroots or community play, and the other 14 had neither.
• The world rules. The same review found that the injury-time section of the World Squash rules, which deals with self-inflicted, contributed and opponent-inflicted injuries, makes no reference to concussion, and it reported no PSA concussion guidance. The authors recommended that World Squash add concussion to its injury rules and convene an expert panel to draft squash-specific guidelines within two years.
• The 2025 rule book. World Squash's Rules of Singles Squash 2025, in force from 1 September 2025, has a section headed Illness, Injury and Blood Injury (section 13). Its text was not set out in the research, so this page does not say what it requires.
• Squash Canada. Squash Canada publishes a Concussion Awareness and Protocols page and a concussion protocol approved in September 2019, adapted from Parachute. The protocol itself was not read.

Tennis

No concussion policy from World Tennis (the ITF), the ATP or the WTA was found in the research. The LTA reported on 28 April 2023 that the UK Government and the Sport and Recreation Alliance had published the first UK-wide Concussion Guidelines for Grassroots Sport, developed by an expert panel, under the line "If in doubt, sit them out". The LTA's item contains no rule specific to tennis.

A search result titled "ITF Tournament Concussion Policy" belongs to the International Taekwon-Do Federation, which also uses the letters ITF. It is not a tennis document and is not used on this site.

Padel: medical breaks in the FIP rules

No FIP concussion policy was found. The FIP Rules of Padel (review applying from 1 January 2026) set out how much time a player may have for medical attention during a match:

• A player with an injury or a treatable medical condition gets one 3-minute break for attention, which can be repeated at the next two changes of side within regulation time.
• For an accident not caused by play, fainting, an allergic reaction, dizziness or a breathing crisis, the referee may allow up to 15 minutes.
• After a fall or being hit by the ball, the umpire may allow up to 5 minutes to recover.

These are match rules about time. They say nothing about whether a player is fit to continue, which is a medical judgement.

Badminton: the BWF and on-court medical access

On 30 June 2024 a 17-year-old player collapsed on court and died at the Badminton Asia Junior Championships in Yogyakarta, Indonesia. China Daily HK reported on 5 July 2024 that the BWF said it would review the incident with Badminton Asia and the Indonesian association (PBSI), was waiting for official reports on whether the correct medical procedures had been followed, and would then decide whether its guidelines needed to change. The BWF said it issues overarching medical guidelines that the regional and national bodies hosting its sanctioned events each implement in their own way. A PBSI spokesperson said the medical team had had to wait for the referee's permission to enter the court.

The reported change rests on a single news report. According to one report, from Hangzhou government news on 18 December 2024, the BWF Council approved revised Medical Emergency Intervention Protocols on 9 November 2024, effective immediately, under which medical staff may enter the court at once, without the referee's direction, for a suspected cardiac arrest or a concussion with loss of consciousness. The BWF's own pages could not be opened, and no BWF text of the protocols was found, so the change, its date and its wording are unconfirmed.

Heart problems in the research

No racquet-sport body's cardiac policy was found beyond the BWF report above. Two studies touch on heart problems:

• In Weiss and colleagues' study of US emergency visits by players aged 60 and over (2010 to 2019), cardiovascular events and fainting were 11.1% of senior pickleball cases and 21.5% of senior tennis cases. The authors removed them from the injury counts.
• A 2023 study of 4,078 sudden cardiac arrests in people aged 65 and over in Portland, Oregon, and Ventura County, California (Holmstrom, Chugh and colleagues, as reported by Cedars-Sinai), found 77 (1.9%) happened during or within an hour of sport or exercise, tennis among the activities named. It put sports-related arrest at about 2 to 3 cases per 100,000 older adults a year, about 91% of them in men, and found these patients about four times more likely to survive than people whose arrest was not related to sport. It did not break results out by sport, so it gives no tennis figure.

What was not found

No concussion policy was found from World Tennis, the ATP, the WTA, the PSA, the FIP or World Squash, and no BWF concussion policy beyond the reported 2024 change. That they were not found in the research does not mean they do not exist; at any event, the organiser's and governing body's current rules apply.