As it becomes easier and more urgent to compare what kids around the world know and can do, more schools may follow Premont’s lead. Basis public charter schools, located in Arizona, Texas, and Washington, DC, are modeled on rigorous international standards. They do not offer tackle football; the founders deemed it too expensive and all-consuming. Still, Basis schools offer other, cheaper sports, including basketball and soccer. Anyone who wants to play can play; no one has to try out. Arizona’s mainstream league is costly to join, so Basis Tucson North belongs to an alternative league that costs less and requires no long-distance travel, meaning students rarely miss class for games. Athletes who want to play at an elite level do so on their own, through club teams—not through school.
Basis teachers channel the enthusiasm usually found on football fields into academic conquests. On the day of Advanced Placement exams, students at Basis Tucson North file into the classroom to “Eye of the Tiger,” the Rocky III theme song. In 2012, 15-year-olds at two Arizona Basis schools took a new test designed to compare individual schools’ performance with that of schools from around the world. The average Basis student not only outperformed the typical American student by nearly three years in reading and science and by four years in math, but outscored the average student in Finland, Korea, and Poland as well. The Basis kid did better even than the average student from Shanghai, China, the region that ranks number one in the world.
“I actually believe that sports are extremely important,” Olga Block, a Basis cofounder, told me. “The problem is that once sports become important to the school, they start colliding with academics.”
In a column published in 1927, Roy Henderson, the athletic director of the University Interscholastic League, a public-school sports organization in Texas, articulated the challenge of keeping sports and academics in balance: “Football cannot be defended in the high school unless it is subordinated, controlled, and made to contribute something definite in the cause of education.”
The State of Texas announced in May that the Premont Independent School District could stay open. The district has a lot of work to do before its students can feel the kind of pride in their academics that they once felt in their sports teams. But Ernest Singleton, Enrique Ruiz, the teachers, and the students have proved their ability to adapt. Nathan, the onetime quarterback, started college this fall, as did Mariela, the cheerleader—and, as it turns out, the valedictorian. This fall, Premont brought back a volleyball team and a cross-country team, in addition to basketball, baseball, track, and tennis. But for now, still no football.
PATRICK HRUBY
The Choice
FROM SPORTSONEARTH.COM
MARIETTA, GEORGIA—His name is Parker. Everyone called him Tank. In his first season of youth football, he made two boys cry. Knocked three boys out. He was four years old, going on five, big and strong for his age. A bobble-headed bulldozer. His mother didn’t mind. She was too busy cheering. Boy, get out there and hit somebody!
Besides, Monet Bartell was the one who signed her son up.
“My husband wanted him to play chess,” she says.
Her husband, Melvin Bartell, concurs. The three of us are having dinner. It’s August. Another season is about to begin, and I’m here to answer a question: should your child play football? The answer, of course, is complicated, because the question is complicated. It’s hard to know where to begin. What to believe. Who to trust. How to weigh the risks against the rewards. I’m hoping Monet can help. Only now she’s asking me for help.
“Do I want my son to play football?” she says.
A long pause. Melvin is silent. Monet lets the question hang. Her father, Mel Farr Sr., played in the NFL for seven seasons. Her uncle also played in the league, as did both of her brothers and a number of cousins. Before Parker was even born, Monet had his life mapped out: play football at UCLA, and then play in the NFL. Just like her dad. Just like her brothers, Mel Jr. and Mike. Such was the plan. It did not include chess. And then one day in 2011—around the same time Parker first put on a helmet and shoulder pads—a relative wanted to talk. About the problems in his life. The problems in his head. Dark, desperate thoughts. He was done with football—had been for years—but scared that football wasn’t done with him.
“Have you heard of CTE?” he said. “I believe that is what I am suffering from.”
Monet had heard a little. Not a lot. She knew it was a disease, a bad one, and that it happened to other people. She started going online, searching for answers, for help. She read about concussions. Suicides. Lawsuits. Brain bleeds. Blows to the head. Former football players suffering from depression and memory lapses, cognitive and emotional dysfunction, weird neurological diseases with hard-to-pronounce names, like chronic traumatic encephalopathy and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. She learned that helmets protect the skull, not the brain, and that even boys as young as Parker could suffer lasting damage. She found herself sitting in the stands at the youth league championship game, chatting with another team mother. Both had a choice to make, and the choice was harder than ever before.