Drone use at sporting events has made international news in the last month when a drone piloted by a New York City high school science teacher crashed during a women’s singles match at the U.S. Open Tennis Championship. Days later, a drone crashed at the stadium shortly before a Kentucky football game. There were no injuries as a result of those two incidents. However, in a triathlon filmed in Australia, an athlete was injured by a drone within meters of the finish line.

I’ll bet that on occasion employees of your organization have had to warn a child or adult not to use sports equipment for things other than their intended use. Perhaps you’ve seen someone using a baseball bat to dislodge a basketball from a net; a weight bench to stand on in order to reach something; small weights to prop a door open; or a tennis racquet to kill a bug. Most of the time, using equipment for something other than what it was designed for does not cause any harm.

On August 12, 2011, a Federal Court in Alabama issued a decision in a case in which a former football player at Auburn University sued a former athletic trainer at Auburn for failing to supervise his rehabilitation properly. See Ramsey v. Gamber, Slip Copy, 2011 WL 3568911 (2011). Plaintiff Ramsey had been injured while doing weight training at the University. His athletic trainer thereafter collaborated with doctors to design a rehabilitation plan. Ramsey alleged that Gamber “improperly ordered him to perform weighted exercise before it was safe for him to do so, in violation of doctors’ instructions.”