After suffering brain trauma from a tackle in a football game and being flown to a Colorado hospital, 17-year-old Luke Schemm of Sharon Springs, Kan., this week became the eighth high school football player to die this fall in the United States. These deaths — in addition to severe injuries such as broken necks and paralysis — continue to fuel concerns over youth football.
To improve football safety, many observers have been highlighting the importance of coaching and medical supervision. In 2011 Gov. John Hickenlooper signed a concussion act requiring coaches to bench young athletes when they are believed to have suffered a concussion, and to take free annual training online to recognize the symptoms of concussions.
Such measures are laudable, but we should not imagine they will eliminate the risks. Even if all football programs had medical professionals in attendance at every football game to treat suspected concussions, and all coaches were trained in recognizing the symptoms, youth football players would still be at risk of brain trauma, paralysis and even death.
The belief that supervision by coaches, athletic trainers and doctors is the key to making tackle football safer has a long history. For decades, as Americans have debated the safety of youth football, an emphasis on adult supervision has been the foundation of medical and coaching advice about how to effectively prevent injuries.
For instance, in 1940 a football team physician, Dr. Joseph H. Burnett, responded to concerns about football safety in article published by the New England Journal of Medicine. He advocated for “a campaign of education and helpful advice” to respond to the risks of unregulated play, writing that adult supervision would help eliminate serious injuries. He praised fathers in Belmont, Mass., for supervising their 8- to 14-year-old sons’ football matches as an ideal strategy for preventing injuries in this age group.
As Pop Warner and other youth football leagues grew in popularity in the 1950s, organizers reassured worried parents that adult supervision would protect young athletes. In 1957, the president of the East Fullerton Midget Football League told a Los Angeles Times reporter that “Unlike sand-lot football in which injuries sometimes mar contests, Pop Warner League is amazingly free of mishaps.”
In the early 1960s, in response to a public outcry over an increasing number of head and neck injuries in football, Jack Curtice, president of the American Football Coaches Association suggested that supervision just needed to be enhanced. According to Curtice, “We’ve been pushing sports competition for our youth so much maybe we haven’t enough trained people to supervise it in our growing population.”
A sport that involves repeated full-on collisions during games carries inherent risks that the best medical or coaching supervision cannot prevent. Boys in excellent physical health can be catastrophically injured or killed when tackled. More commonly, young athletes sustain less visible but cumulative damage to their brains from repeated hits.
Of course, football programs should strive for the best medical and coaching supervision possible. But if Americans seek to significantly reduce football-related injuries, simply enhancing adult supervision is not the answer.
Some schools have started dropping tackle football in favor of other sports, as one Missouri school board recently decided to do. But in schools and communities where dropping youth football is not a realistic short-term option, administrators should limit how often children tackle each other. Such reforms include restricting drills that involve game-speed tackling, a policy that was recently implemented in California.
Ultimately, coaches and doctors cannot eliminate the inherent risks of tackling. As long as we allow children to engage in a violent collision sport, we have to accept some number of catastrophic injuries and deaths as an inevitable consequence. Given the hazards, parents and schools should consider alternative sports and recreational activities that promote fun and exercise with lower risks of brain injuries.
Kathleen Bachynski is a Ph.D. candidate at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, studying the history and ethics of public health, with a focus on injury prevention.
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