Contact sports are sports that emphasize or require physical contact between players. Some sports, such as mixed martial arts, are scored on impacting an opponent, while others, including rugby, American football and Australian rules football require tackling of players. These sports are often known as full-contact, as the sport cannot be undertaken without contact. Other sports have contact, but such events are illegal under the rules of the game or are accidental and do not form part of the sport. The contact in contact sports can also include impact via a piece of sporting equipment, such as being struck by a hockey stick or football. Non-contact sports are those where participants should have no possible means of touching, such as sprinting, swimming, darts or snooker, where players use separate lanes or take turns of play. Consideration should also be given to other sports such as Moto-cross and Bicycle Moto-cross and cycling which all involve riding/racing in packs of riders. This often results in brushing and bumping off other riders.
Many sports will penalize contact with rules for certain situations or instances to help reduce the incidence of physical trauma or litigation for assault or grievous bodily harm. Many sports involve a degree of player-to-player or player-to-object contact. The term "contact sport" is used in both team sports and combat activities, medical terminology and television game shows, such as American Gladiators and Wipeout, to certain degrees. Contact between players is often classed by different grades ranging from non-contact, where there is no contact between players, to full-contact or collision sports, where the rules allow for significant physical contact.
Equipment
As a result of the risk of injury, some sports require the use of protective equipment, for example American football protective equipment or the gloves and helmets needed for underwater hockey. Some sports are also played on soft ground and have padding on physical obstacles, such as goal posts. Most contact sports require any male players to wear an Abdominal Guard to protect their male genitalia. The cost of equipment can be an obstacle to participating in many sports.
Trends
Because of issues involved with any sport that involves rapid contact, many sports governing bodies are changing their rules to decrease the incidence of serious injury. An example of this is the NFL banning concussed players from re-entering the same game in which they were injured in order to decrease further damage.
A semi-contact sport is typically a combat sport involving striking and containing physical contact between the combatants simulating full-power techniques. The techniques are restricted to limited power, and rendering the opponent unconscious is forbidden. Some semi-contact sports use a point system to determine the winner and use extensive protective gear to protect the athletes from injury. Examples of semi-contact sports include karate, kickboxing, kalaripayattu, various Korean martial arts that incorporate contact rules sparring, kendo and taekwondo. Another indicator of a semi-contact martial arts competition system is that after a point is rewarded the adversaries will be separated and resume the match from safe distance, but often it is possible to argue if some martial arts sports belong in one contact group or another.
Limited-contact
Limited-contact sports are sports for which the rules are specifically designed to prevent contact between players either intentionally or unintentionally. Contact can still happen, but penalties are often used to disallow substantial contact between players. For instance, "Basketball, by rule, is a non-contact sport." If you've watched a game, you know there's plenty of contact in basketball, but it is all illegal, refs allow it until it affects the game. There is no way to legally bump or knock a player down in basketball, as opposed to full-contact sports like rugby where it is perfectly legal to knock a player off the ball, or even to the ground in several ways. These penalties, including physically removing players from the field of play, mean that contact is moderate or rare. Examples of limited-contact sports include basketball, baseball, softball, handball, Gaelic football, field hockey, ultimate, flag football, tag rugby, dodgeball, women's lacrosse, netball, volleyball, squash, bandy, floorball, underwater hockey, Paintball, polo, korfball, walking football, Jianzi, cycle polo and goalball.
