<p>Speaking as a football fan (thus not speaking from a negative position) I have a lot of problems with what I see in a lot of High school Football these days. Football in the past 30 or 40 years has changed, in a sport where defensive lineman used to weight 250 pounds on average, they now are at well over 300. What makes it worse is these aren’t ‘fat buddhas’, many of these guys are fast as well…</p>
<p>And this has moved down to the high school level. When I was in high school, I would be considered a bit on the bigger side in the league our school played in, at 5’ 11" and 190 pounds, as a defensive/offensive lineman, today a lot of schools are fielding kids much bigger then that. More importantly, high school football has moved up the tempo on things like strength and weight training, and the kids playing today are from my observation tremendously faster and stronger then back then. And in many cases, there is tremendous pressure on the high school programs to win, the coaches act more like division 1 college or pro coaches then high school ones. Among other things, this has also led to steroid use moving down to the high school level…</p>
<p>What concerns me about it is that they have built these kids up, fired them up, but I seriously wonder if other things have caught up, like equipment and coaching ability to teach avoiding injuries, or coaches trained and ethical enough to nip dangerous play in the bud. The kid who was paralyzed at Rutgers was paralyzed because he put his head down when tackling, he went with his helmet, which besides causing harm to the person being tackled, also easily can lead to concussions and worse. Likewise, coaches often emphasize ‘popping’ other players, “ringing their bell”, which can lead to things like concussions, especially when the kid is hit when they are defenseless, and many consider this ‘part of the game’. Hard hitting is part of the game, this is a physical, rough sport, but there are also ways to teach it and reign it in, especially at the high school level. Even when I was in high school, these were issues, but we were fortunate to have a coach who knew the difference, and he would suspend kids from the teach if they violated rules like helmet to helmet contact, spearing and hitting defenseless players to basically hurt them, and he threw kids off the team who violated it more then once. And the rules in leagues and such are haphazard, even with issues like concussion it also depends on the conference and state they are in.</p>
<p>What worries me about high school football is also the size disparity. While there are a lot more of the bigger kids, you still see kids that are 5’ 9" 150 pounds playing, there is a wide range of size. By the time you get to big time college programs, that isn’t as true, there are smaller players but even they are pretty rugged. Most high school conferences don’t have rules on size, whereas for example in Pee Wee football most leagues either differentiate by weight class, or they have rules about what bigger kids can play or not. That weight disparity is a big issue, it can lead to the lighter kid getting really screwed up when hit by a freight train style defensive lineman. The other problem is when kids play college football, they are pretty much done growing, they are not going through the rapid changes of adolescence. </p>
<p>I am not like some, I don’t say ban high school football, but I also think that there are problems with how it is played a lot of places. The winning is everything attitude like you saw in “Friday night Lights” is great for a movie, but it also doesn’t take into consideration the cost of doing that with kids (actually the movie does in fact show that, one kid tears up his knee, comes back to play when he shouldn’t, and ends up with a knee that is shot).
In my opinion there needs to be better standards and rules that apply across the board, including rules about coaches having training in spotting problems, and rules that if kids get caught in games doing things like spearing or helmet to helmet, lead to suspensions of kids and also of coaches if it is found that his kids are doing these kinds of things routinely.</p>
<p>I also think it is disingenuous to make claims like “life has risks” or “you can get hurt playing soccer, volleyball, etc”. While true, it also is making someone who thinks football is too dangerous for their child seem like a hovering parent wanting to encase their kid in bubble wrap, and that is unfair. Yes, you can rip up your knee playing soccer, you can get a concussion playing baseball, or get hit by a line drive in the chest and go into cardiac arrest, you can get hurt skiing, but that leaves out a statistical fact, that football by the nature of the game, especially as played today, has a risk level much above those sports, based on any kind of risk assessment. It also leaves out another statistic, the odds of recurring injuries, and that is crucial. Yeah, a volleyball player can get a concussion from getting hit by a serve in the head or falling and banging their head on the floor, but statistically it is unlikely for someone to have another one during their high school career, same for other sports, in those sports those are relatively rare (pretty rare in baseball these days, though back in the days of concrete walls, guys like Pistol Pete Reiser of the Brooklyn Dodgers used to get several a season). In football, the problem is that injuries like concussions are often repetitive, you don’t just get one, and each subsequent one according to the research I have read makes it less likely to recover without injuries…</p>
<p>The only way to make decisions on matters like these is look at the risks, look what has been documented and decide what is your level of tolerance in terms of your child. Yes, most things in life have risk, you hear all the time about the guy who is the bridge painter or high iron worker who dies slipping on his front steps and so forth, but in life risks are always quantified, and one risk is not the same as the other. I think with risk it comes down to risk versus rewards; a kid who is athletic and has real ability to play football, for example, might have the hope of an athletic scholarship that would allow him to attend college without a huge debt, or maybe even play pro ball, so playing is a lot more imperative then the kid doing it simply because they love the sport but aren’t on that path, it all has to be added up and it is up to the parents involved to weight that. </p>
<p>As far as kids hating us for our decisions, well, that is what parents are for, in the end we have to do what we think is best for our kids, and to quote something from a tv show, where a doctor sent a 15 year old kid home who had been wounded in combat (kid had lied to get into the military), and the kid tells him “I hate you” and the doctor tells him “may it be a long lived hate”.</p>