In most respects, I miss the fact that my son no longer is in high school. In one very important respect, I don’t miss it at all.
I don’t miss spending three hours or so every Friday night worrying that he’s going to be seriously injured, or worse, playing football.
Injuries happen at every level of the game. Deaths happen all too frequently at the high school level of the game. Via Deadspin, a 17-year-old Chicago boy named Andre Smith died early Friday after taking a hit on the last play of a Thursday night game.
That’s seven deaths for high-school football players this year. But there’s no national outcry, no demand for investigations or regulations or anything other than a candlelight vigil for the victim, a discreet exhale from any parents in the community who aren’t burying a son, and a quiet hope that the next football player who dies on the field won’t be the football player who lives in their house.
The odds remain incredibly small, given the number of high-school football programs in the United States. As Deadspin notes, the 2015 numbers aren’t out of whack, which means that losing seven young lives to football before Halloween is just another year in the shared American experience.
Of course, if only one NFL player were to die in any year as a result of injuries suffered while playing football, the reaction would be immediate, and defeaning. There would be instant calls for Congressional hearings and dramatic reforms to the sport, especially if the hit that turned out to be fatal were broadcast on the big stage of a prime-time game.
The basic physics suggest that the forces generated by NFL players who hit other NFL players should be much greater than the forces generated when high school players hit other high school players. In some cases, it could be that the high school player applying the hit is simply much bigger and stronger than the one taking the hit. In other cases, injuries resulting in death to a high school player may be the result of less-than-adequate medical attention.
The item posted by Patrick Redford of Deadspin notes that only 37 percent of high school football programs have athletic trainers on the sidelines. That number is unacceptably low, and if the NFL is truly concerned about the long-term health of the sport, the NFL will find a way to increase that percentage to as close to 100 percent as possible.
The other practical reality is that plenty of high school football games are played in rural areas, where the paramedics stationed in the ambulance may not be aware of the best possible techniques for assessing a player whose injury may be more serious than it appears. Likewise, the paramedics who are present at high school games sometimes don’t move with nearly the same speed and urgency that we see when an NFL of college player is motionless on the ground.
Earlier this year, I attended a high school game during which a player suffered what was believed to be at the time a very serious neck injury. The paramedics moved excruciatingly slowly, with more than 10 minutes passing before the stretcher was even out of the ambulance. They then wheeled it slowly to the far end of the field, with a demeanor that suggested anything but the kind of emergency in which prompt attention could be the difference between permanent paralysis and an injury from which the player fully recovers.
When the player finally was placed onto a backboard and loaded onto a gurney and wheeled (slowly) back to the ambulance, the paramedics had to wait at least another 10 minutes while the backup ambulance, which had to remain on site in the event another serious injury occurred, figured out how to get to the field.
We now know plenty about the dangers of football and the risks that those who play the sport assume. We now know plenty about how to treat the injuries that are inevitable at every level of the sport. The next challenge facing the sport is to ensure that high school players have access to the kind of medical attention that would reduce or eliminate an annual parade of funerals to which we inexplicably have become numb.
If that just can’t happen, then maybe parents should steer their kids away from football not because of the inherent dangers of the sport but because of the available methods for ensuring that an inevitable injury doesn’t become a worst-case scenario.