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The Role of Concussion Exit Baselines For Athletes At The End Of Their Career
A neurofunctional framework for documenting career-long brain health in athletes and military service members
Learn to implement neurofunctional exit baselines for athletes and service members, documenting brain changes across an entire career.
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Course Description
Athletes and military service members accumulate years of neurological stress before anyone thinks to measure the result. Intake baselines capture where a brain starts. Exit baselines reveal where it has been. For clinicians working with high-performance populations, that gap in documentation is a gap in care.
This course with Joseph Clark, PT, introduces a practical neurofunctional exit baseline protocol grounded in quantitative ocular motor assessment, visual reaction time, binocularity, peripheral vision, modified balance testing, and memory function. Clinicians gain a structured framework for comparing career-start and career-end neurological performance, identifying meaningful changes, and intervening before athletes and service members transition out of the professional systems that support them.
What you’ll learn:
- Explain the clinical rationale for repeating neurofunctional baselines at career end
- Apply a quantitative ocular motor battery covering saccades, accommodation, and convergence
- Assess multi-level eye dominance and its implications for performance and injury risk
- Use a modified Stroop protocol to screen prefrontal, oculomotor, and memory function
- Interpret intake versus exit baseline comparisons to identify meaningful neurological change
More About This Course
For most athletes and military service members, a neurological baseline is taken once, at the start of a career, and then consulted only if a concussion occurs. That model treats the brain as a problem to manage reactively rather than a system to steward proactively. As awareness of chronic traumatic brain injury, cumulative subconcussive exposure, and long-term neurological sequelae continues to grow in sports medicine and military health, clinicians who work with high-performance populations are being called to think differently about what a complete neurodiagnostic protocol actually looks like.
Exit baseline assessment represents a meaningful advancement in that thinking. By applying a structured neurofunctional evaluation at the end of an athlete's competitive career or prior to military separation, clinicians gain the ability to document how years of high-demand activity have shaped neurological performance, identify changes that may not surface in standard concussion protocols, and provide a clinically meaningful transition record for the populations they serve.
This course presents the exit baseline framework developed and applied by Joseph Clark, PT, at the University of Cincinnati Athletics program and with active military EOD personnel. The protocol integrates quantitative ocular motor testing, accommodative convergence assessment, multi-level eye dominance evaluation, modified Stroop-based cognitive and memory screening, peripheral visual field and reaction time measurement, retinal nerve fiber layer imaging via optical coherence tomography, and balance coordination testing. Each tool is chosen for its ability to generate objective, repeatable data that can be directly compared across a career timeline.
The course is designed for licensed clinicians in functional neurology, chiropractic neurology, sports medicine, physical therapy, and rehabilitation who work with athletic programs, military units, or high-performance populations and want a rigorous, quantitative framework for longitudinal brain health documentation.
Components
Educational Syllabus
- Building a Baseline That Actually Reflects the Brain
- Understand the neurofunctional logic behind a quantitative intake baseline. Learn which systems are assessed, why each is included, and how objective, repeatable data creates the foundation for meaningful career-long comparison.
- Eye Dominance and Suppression in High-Performance Populations
- Discover how multi-level eye dominance testing, including near, far, and cross-limb assessment, reveals performance-critical visual patterns in athletes and military service members that standard protocols miss entirely.
- Stroop, Memory, and the Prefrontal Dimension of Brain Health
- Master a modified Stroop protocol that simultaneously captures oculomotor function, prefrontal processing, and memory recall, generating a sensitive and specific cognitive fingerprint for TBI and career-end assessment.
- The Exit Baseline as a Clinical and Ethical Standard of Care
- Synthesize intake and exit data to document career-long neurological change, understand how brain fitness training shapes those outcomes, and position exit baseline assessment as a professional responsibility for clinicians serving athletes and service members.
Venue, Hotels & Schedule
Also includes
The Role of Concussion Exit Baselines For Athletes At The End Of Their Career
Learn to implement neurofunctional exit baselines for athletes and service members, documenting brain changes across an entire career.
$
$
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The Carrick Institute team is ready to assist with enrollment, CE approval, or program planning. Email visit our CE Portal or Contact Us directly.