“I would have played [football] if I could have, absolutely,” she says. “Even today, I’ve never sat and watched my nephew play. My brother Mike coaches him, and I’m on the sideline, yelling at him.”
“I stand on the sideline too,” says Monet’s mother, Mae.
“The other moms drink wine from coffee cups,” Monet says. “I don’t dress up cute. I’m there for the game.”
When Parker turned four, Monet searched for a local youth football league that would take children that young. She wanted him to play. Get his first taste of the family business. No question in her mind. When she found one, she was pumped. God bless the South. “Our coach’s son was three years old when he first came out,” she says. The boys went through spring training—no, really—doing bear crawls and running through tires. They had full-contact practices, complete with Oklahoma drills, coaches screaming Knock his lights out! The actual games were full-fledged events, with packed stands and tailgating adults.
For Monet, all of it felt familiar. Like an old childhood blanket. Was she worried about brain trauma?
“No,” she says. “I was getting mad at [Parker] if he didn’t tackle, like, ‘What are you doing out there?’”
University of North Carolina researcher Kevin Guskiewicz studies football collisions for a living. Big hits and little ones. Full-speed human missile strikes. Mundane helmet-to-helmet blows delivered across the line of scrimmage after every snap of the ball. Much of his analysis involves using sensor-equipped helmets to measure impact forces and locations. Guskiewicz has been doing this since the 1990s, and his campus office is home to one of the world’s most extensive databases of football brain-rattling.
He also has three sons. One of them, a high school junior, plays football. The other two have given up the sport in favor of baseball and basketball.
“I never pushed or pulled them to play,” he says. “As long as I knew there was a coach out there who cared about health and safety, it was fine.”
Guskiewicz published some of the earliest research linking football to long-term cognitive harm. At one point in time, he was an outspoken critic of the NFL’s decades-long campaign to deny and minimize that connection. While working as an athletic trainer for the Pittsburgh Steelers, he saw the sport’s brutality up close.
That said, he coached his sons in youth football, and says he would do so again.
“For some reason everybody thinks there is a concussion epidemic,” he says. “That frustrates me. I sustained two concussions playing football in high school myself. There’s not an epidemic. We just know a lot more about them and care more about them than we ever have. We need to be smart about how we’re doing this.”
Should your child play football? In most cases, Guskiewicz isn’t against it. But he can’t really answer for anyone else. Not his place. There are too many variables to consider. Besides, his work focuses on a different question: what, if anything, can be done to make football safer?
The NFL, some college conferences, and a number of high school and youth leagues have mandated limits on full-contact practice, the better to reduce the total number of head hits that players absorb. Guskiewicz believes that’s a good first step. So do many others. He also advocates for state laws requiring that players who show signs of being concussed be removed from games or practices and not be allowed to return until they’re cleared by a health care professional—largely because research indicates that unresolved concussions leave the brain more vulnerable to additional damage and concussions, which in turn increase the risk of long-term harm. The worst-case scenario? A condition called second-impact syndrome, in which an athlete suffers a second concussion while still recovering from a previous one. Though the precise physiological cause is uncertain, the outcome is not: the brain swells rapidly and catastrophically, causing severe disability or death.
Of course, there’s a problem with said laws, a problem that dogs football at every level. How do you spot concussions in the first place? Self-reporting is unreliable. Players are conditioned to hide injuries. The sport’s entire ethos revolves around playing through pain. Moreover, brain damage affects the seat of awareness, so even a player who wants to report a concussion may not realize that he has one. As for coaches? They’re distracted. Mostly unqualified. Asking them to consistently diagnose a mysterious, invisible injury is foolhardy. Would you ask a neurologist to draw up a goal line defensive play?
Speaking of neurologists: the NFL recently required teams to have an independent one on the sideline at every game. During Philadelphia Eagles home games, said neurologist is joined by an orthopedic surgeon, an internal medicine specialist, a spine specialist, a chiropractor, a dentist, a podiatrist, an ophthalmologist, and an anesthesiologist.