Would their sons continue to play football?
Earlier that season, Parker had leveled another boy. He earned a personal foul. Monet remembered the moment, how proud she felt as her son skipped back to the sideline.
Mommy! Mommy! I made a kid eat dirt!
“I sat back and said, ‘Wow,’” she says. “What if I’m the parent of that other kid?”
Football is fun. And football means eating dirt. That’s the trade-off. Always has been. The game is inherently dangerous, rooted in violence and physical domination, hitting and tackling, knocking your opponent on their ass before they do the same to you. Football breaks bones, shreds ligaments, ruptures internal organs. Occasionally, it kills.
And yet for just about forever, the harm has seemed manageable. Perfectly acceptable. A reasonable price to pay for both Friday Night Lights and weekend tailgating. Because bones heal, and ligaments can be fixed. Deaths are horrific, but freaky and rare. Week after week, season after season, the sport teaches life lessons, rallies communities, provides excitement and entertainment for millions, inspires military flyovers and breast cancer awareness drives. It helps define American masculinity and pays NFL commissioner Roger Goodell’s $29.5 million salary. At the youth level, most players walk away from the game with fond memories and without serious, lasting harm; for parents and society alike, football’s rewards largely have outweighed its risks, so much so that even in an era of helicopter parenting and school safety zones, more than four million American children play high school and youth football.
Because of brain damage, that calculus is changing.
Scott Hallenbeck is sweating. Profusely. Like a human lawn sprinkler. I can’t blame him. It’s an early November morning in Washington, DC, and the Aspen Institute’s “Sport and Society” program is hosting a roundtable discussion on youth football safety and the sport’s future. The NFL’s top lobbyist is here. So is the head of the players’ union . There are journalists and academics, lawyers and school officials, coaches and scientists.
Almost everyone is a parent.
Sports concussion expert Robert Cantu proposes that children under age 14 not play tackle football, largely because both their brains and bodies are still developing and therefore more vulnerable to serious injury. This puts Hallenbeck in a tight spot. He’s the executive director of USA Football, the NFL’s national youth arm. His day job involves telling America why its children should play tackle football, the same way his 16-year-old son does.
“I think we all recognize there are challenges,” Hallenbeck says. “We’re all looking for ways to try to create a better and safer environment for parents and players. I also hope that we’re in this to provide accurate and whenever possible evidence-based data for parents. I think we have to be careful certainly not to scare parents.”
Too late. A recent Marist College poll found that roughly one in three Americans say that knowing about the damage concussions cause would make them less likely to allow their sons to play football. Earlier this year, a Washington Post survey of more than 500 NFL retirees found that less than half would recommend that children play. According to the National Sports Goods Association, tackle football participation has dropped 11 percent between 2011 and now. The National Federation of State High School Associations reports decreasing football participation numbers since 2008–2009. And according to ESPN’s Outside the Lines, Pop Warner—the nation’s largest youth football program—saw participation drop 9.5 percent between 2010 and 2012. Even President Obama has expressed doubts about letting his hypothetical son play the sport.
Still, fear is not the problem. Physics and biology are the problem.
Reliable youth sports brain injury statistics are hard to come by. A USA Football study of almost 2,000 youth football players reported a concussion rate of 4 percent; however, non-industry-funded research suggests that concussions are chronically under-diagnosed and -reported. Meanwhile, the American Association of Neurological Surgeons estimates that between 4 percent and 20 percent of college and high school football players will sustain a brain injury during the course of one season. The Institute of Medicine reports that football consistently has the highest concussion rate of any high school sport (11.2 percent), and that the concussion rate in prep football is nearly double that in the college game (6.2 percent). The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which has labeled sports concussions “an epidemic,” reported in 2011 that roughly 122,000 children between the ages of 10 and 19 went to emergency rooms annually for nonfatal brain injuries—and for boys, the top cause was playing football.