By Brody Goucher and Gavin Swanson Posted December 16, 2015
Luke Schemm, Tyrell Cameron, Ben Hamm, and Cam’ron Matthews. These names may not mean much to the average person, but to the families, teams, and communities they represented they mean everything. What they have in common is that they all played high school football and they all died as a result of playing the sport.
It’s obvious to even the casual fan that football is America’s game, if not its passion. It far surpasses baseball and basketball in terms of popularity and revenue.
The top 10 most-watched TV programs for 2015 are all football games. In 2014 the NFL recorded $12 billion in revenue (CNN), Major League Baseball brought in $9 billion (Forbes), the NBA recorded $4.8 billion (NBA), and college football $3.4 billion in 2013 (Business Insider).
However, will this trend continue considering the reduction in participation? According to the National Institute of Health, in the six years ending in 2013, participation in youth football is down 29 percent. Many think this is just a statistical aberration; the game can be made safe; there is inherent risk; or the injuries are the result of poor coaching/training of players. Others argue that a collision-based sport cannot be made safe.
Lowry football coach Shaun Murgel played and coached the game at the college level.
“I don’t think that there is much more that you can do for safety. There are always going to be tragic events where kids are going to die from any sport,” said Murgel. “It could be that they have a bad heart that was never diagnosed or they might get hit wrong. There are always going to be risks in anything that you do.”
This downward trend started with the proliferation of head injuries in the NFL. Of course these injuries had been occurring for years, but chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) wasn’t diagnosed by Dr. Bennet Omalu until 2005 and the NFL denied its relationship to football for years. Will Smith is playing Dr. Omalu in the upcoming film, “Concussion”.
Dr. Leonard Perkinson is a local doctor at Humboldt General Hospital who specializes in family and maternity care, Dr. Perkinson is also a strong supporter of football and believes that the pros outweigh the cons of the sport.
“First off I would like to say that I am very pro football, I played and I think that football has evolved over the years to be safer mostly driven by the equipment,” said Perkinson.
CTE has been one of the biggest issues with the health of football players who are further into their careers or even retired.
“CTE is basically a bruise on the brain and just like any bruise there is an area of swelling, that part of the brain is injured and if you get another injury right on top of it then you’re going to get a worse bruise then you had before, so it’s not the first time it’s the second time when the hit happens that really causes the damage because the brain needs a certain amount of time to heal. When these things happen over and over again eventually it starts to affect the neurons and they don’t have the same connections that they normally do anymore,” explained Perkinson.
Perkinson strongly believes in improving the techniques and equipment of football rather than radically altering football to make it safer.
“Part of the danger just comes with the risk of the game but to be perfectly honest, just teaching better techniques, altering equipment, and simply teaching people not to lead with the head would go a long way in improving the safety of the game,” said Perkinson.
Common sense says that the risk cannot be removed from football, just as it cannot be removed from any other sport. Football, however, increases the risk of traumatic injury more than other sports. Out of the major sports, football had the highest amount of head injuries with 46,984 in hospital emergency rooms according to the American Association of Neurological Surgeons. Football has the highest rate of head injuries because there is contact on every play; contact is the point of the game. In other sports such as basketball, baseball, and soccer intentional contact is often penalized.
Lowry vice principal, Tim Connors, played and coached college football. Connors is an advocate for the sport because of the many lessons football taught him, but at the same time, he acknowledges the risks of playing football.
“I learned a great deal about life, I learned about dedication, discipline, and determination. I became a better person through perseverance from playing football,” said Connors
For kids aged 5-14, there were more than 215,000 cases of youth football head injuries in 2009 according to Stanford Children’s Health. The earlier a player sustains a head injury in his or her life increases the chance of more concussions and CTE later on in life.
Former Lowry football player and current college football player Jace Billingsley thinks some of the head injuries are preventable with better helmets.
“I think the one thing they can do better is get these newer, better helmets out to more people. They’ve been around for a couple years now and you still don’t see very many players wearing them. However, the newer and better equipment also allows players to play faster and more reckless which in return causes more injuries,” said Billingsley.
Pop Warner is a youth football organization that has enacted various rules in order to curb the amount of concussions and brain injuries by introducing sounder tackling techniques as well as limiting contact during practice. Pop Warner hopes the techniques will not only protect kids now but also in the future by encouraging all players to continue to practice safe tackling form and to continue “heads up football” in order to make football safer at the high school, collegiate, and pro level. Results have been mixed on whether all the efforts by Pop Warner and the NFL have been working, concussions and other brain injuries have declined, but the long-term effects of playing football are still uncertain.
Billingsley knows that football is dangerous sport, but believes participating at a younger age could encourage safer play down the road.
“I would encourage kids to play who are 12 and under. Kids who play at that age are not at as high of a risk for serious injury. Of course, they are more likely to play when they are older if they start at a young age. But it may be beneficial for kids to play at a younger age, this way they can learn how to play the game properly and in a safer way. This is better than having to learn once the competition is at a higher level,” said Billingsley. “There is also a very big emphasis on coaching at this age group which is good. Coaches are now encouraged to teach kids to play while keeping their heads up, which reduces head injuries. In many places I think that this type of coaching is even monitored in some way.”
Pop Warner did major concussion prevention reforms in 2012. It mostly prohibits full on head-on-head tackles, full speed tackles, face tackles, and spearing. This goes especially for practice.
Just like in Pop Warner, head injuries have decreased in the NFL due to rule changes and fines but there still are not enough studies on whether players will sustain long-term injuries just from the sheer amount of contact from the sport. The NFL didn’t change its tune on the issue until multitudes of studies came out showing the relationship between concussions and CTE which obviously leads to brain disease-related deaths.
As far as the NFL is concerned they claim that concussions are down 36 percent from 2012 although the NFL largely ignored the issue until recently and downplayed concussions and head injuries in general. However, according to ESPN’s “Outside the Lines”, concussions have actually increased 9 percent if you include the preseason.
Competition Committee Co-Chairman of the NFL Rich McKay believes that the league has made tremendous progress in injury prevention because of the 36% number and that as players go through the game playing with new safety rules the game will be made safer.
Connors also believes that football is becoming a safer sport and points to the improvements since he has played that have been made to the game.
“When I played there were a lot of things that weren’t in place, for example, the concussion rule wasn’t really enforced and if you got dinged you still played, very seldom did you sit out during a game for a concussion, I only sat at once in four years of playing college for a concussion,” said Connors.
While participation in football is decreasing, there is not a proven cause behind the decrease. The popular belief is that parents are holding their kids out because of the risks. However, the popularity of two sports with heavy contact is increasing. Both lacrosse and ice hockey have seen their participation rates increase despite the fact that it’s the third most likely sport cause concussions in boys. Hockey participation is also increasing although it has the second highest rate of concussions. Interestingly, most of the increases for hockey have been credited to the changes the sport has made in relation to travel and participation. When USA Hockey found 43 percent of players quit by age nine it reduced travel, banned body-checking, made the game more accessible, and encouraged players to play other sports rather than focus on year-round play and single sports specialization according to Sports Business Daily.
Murgel thinks kids learn a lot from participating in sports.
“If you can provide kids a structured environment in which they are learning a lot of valuable things from participating. They are learning to work as a team, they are learning that there are expectations to show up when you make a commitment to participate. I would rather have my kid participating and learning valuable skills than sitting at home in front of the TV,” said Murgel.
So maybe it’s not about injuries; maybe it’s just about the current generation of kids. Data from the Sports and Fitness Industry Association show that all participation in youth sports is declining across the board except in rugby, hockey, lacrosse, and gymnastics. Children simply are not as active as they used to be.
According to The Aspen Institute, an educational and policy studies organization, nearly 3 million fewer children aged 6-12 played popular sports such as football, baseball, basketball, and soccer from 2008 to 2013. In addition, less than 33 percent of children participate in a calorie burning activity at least three times a week.
While participation in youth and high school football is declining, it’s hard to finalize that it’s because of the risk of concussion. This can be countered by the ever-increasing participation rates of lacrosse and ice hockey, both high school sports that have high concussion rates. So either parents are only aware of the risks of football and not other sports, or it’s not just football that is the dying sport. Pop Warner, an organization that pretty much holds a monopoly over youth football, has enacted head injury prevention rules to protect child players. It’s also too soon to assume what’s going to happen to the NFL’s talent pool as a result of this. The deaths of former players due to brain disease will continue but may die out eventually because of all the precautions the NFL is taking, but anyone can tell that the NFL’s concussion problem is far from solved. All-in-all, football is probably not going to go away anytime soon. We can be sure football and all of its risks will be back in full swing next season.
Billingsley feels fortunate in that he has not sustained any major injuries and did not miss a college game due to injury but still feels the effects of years of playing.
“There are a lot of times when I feel like simple tasks such as getting out of bed or even walking probably shouldn’t hurt as bad for someone as young as me. For myself and others who continue playing football after high school, there comes a time when you have to decide if the game means enough to you that it is worth putting your body through all the rigorous activities involved in football that often result in pain or injury,” said Billingsley.
Football is a dangerous sport, you can break just about any bone in your body, sustain injuries that will last a lifetime, or end up losing your life from the repeated beating that your body and brain take from the sport. The bottom line is that if football is not made safer then parents are not going to continue to put the lives of their children in danger, no one can deny that science has revealed the dangers of concussions and if players don’t lose their lives from them then they could end up caught up in depression or saddled with life altering disabilities.
