High school football has become a public health crisis. It’s time to take action | Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva

S9 teenagers have now died playing school football in less than three weeks. This astonishing series of football-related school deaths should be treated as nothing less than a public health emergency. It is also a clarion call to question why we are exposing our young people to such a dangerous activity in the first place, let alone in institutions designed to care for and nurture them.

The first four of these recent deaths were due to apparently heat-related causes and the last two to head traumaFive of the athletes were high school students, the oldest was only 16, and one was a 13 year old eighth grade student. The young athletes who died were Ovet Gomez-Regalado, 15, in Kansas City; Semaj Wilkins, 14 years old, in Alabama; Jayvion Taylor, 15 years old, in Virginia; Leslie Noble16 years old, in Maryland; Caden Tellier, 16 years old, in Alabama; and Cohen Craddock, 13 years old, in West Virginia.

This is in addition to the death of 18-year-old freshman Calvin Dickey Jr., who died on July 12, two days after passing out during a Bucknell University practice. sickle cell related rhabdomyolysis.

There can be no glossing over what happened here, nor any claims of coincidence. We already know that football can cause life-changing damage. Between 2018 And 2022at least 11 amateur or professional soccer players have died in the US from heat-related causes. We also know that every 2.6 years Participating in tackle football – a sport that many American children participate in from the age of five – doubles the risk of developing the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). We know now that football players are 61% more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease than athletes in other organized sports. For students and professional players, this risk is 2.93 times higher.

The effects of tackle football on the brain – while long understood and recognized by the NFL in its concussion settlement – are often easy to normalize and ignore because they are obscured by helmets and skulls and the ease of passing time. But the traumatic deaths of children playing football at school may not be ignored.

Kathleen Bachynski, assistant professor of public health at Muhlenberg College, author of Not a game for boys to play: The history of youth soccer and the origins of a public health crisisis unambiguous about what is at stake.

“Can you imagine the public outrage if one NFL player, let alone six, died of heat stroke or head trauma?” she says. “We should be just as outraged about the deaths of children.”

A former Southeastern Conference football player, who wished to remain anonymous, was also shocked by the recent deaths.

“It’s horrible to hear about this,” he told us. “I’m not sure what the typical number is when it comes to kids or young men dying playing football, but six in the last month just doesn’t sound right. Being both a player and a coach myself, it seems like the system is stacked against our players, regardless of whether the program the athletes are in has a lot of resources or not.

“I had an experience when I was at an SEC football camp and a coach asked for a heat guard – something my high school coaches in Alabama and eventually my college program emphasized when playing in hot or humid conditions. I was not given salt tablets, even after I told them I was cramping and not feeling well. Within an hour I was unconscious and collapsed onto concrete.”

Former Vanderbilt forward Jabo Burrow is also not surprised by the recent news.

“I’m shocked by the start of this season, but not surprised at all,” he told us. “I still believe that traumatic brain injury and football are synonymous. Participating in the sport at any level is going to cause long-term changes in your neurological state, regardless of your skill level, and it just gets worse and worse the longer you play.

“At the high school level and below, it is high time to ask ourselves the question, what is the acceptable level of risk when we allow our children to participate in an organized, state-sanctioned activity? When tragedies happen, they are usually accompanied by the phrase ‘freak accident.’ Freak may be appropriate, but it is certainly not an accident. The ultimate risk of participating in football is death by traumatic brain injury.”

For Burrow, “There will continue to be changes in the game, but the core of the problem remains the same. If you are practicing and/or playing football that involves head-to-head contact, or head-to-ground contact, or head-to-head contact of any kind, you are always at risk for brain injury — which means you are at some risk of death. The articles about the young person who died in Alabama last week seem to state that witnesses could not pinpoint a single moment that led to the player’s death. Football is the moment. Any impact that involves the head is a moment when it can happen. Football cannot exist in its current state if you choose to eliminate that risk from your child’s life. I personally believe that participating in tackle football is signing a statement that you understand those risks. It should not be minimized or dismissed as a freak accident.”

Similarly, some of the former American football players we spoke to for our soon to be released book were convinced after their experiences in the sport that it was morally unsustainable given the devastating costs it entailed.

One player explained: “I don’t think the game should exist. You can’t consider yourself an advanced society and have this be so pervasive… That’s why the game shouldn’t exist. You can’t guarantee that you can keep these kids safe from that game, in that game, during that game. Your rules and your whistle aren’t going to keep them safe.”

Another player added: “I played basketball my whole life. And then my coach in high school convinced me to play football because I was bigger… So yeah, no, I would never have played football. I would say that’s probably the worst mistake I ever made… If I had known what I knew, I never would have played.”

He later added: “Football is absolutely the worst sport ever created. I would be more okay with it if two people tried to kill each other in a boxing ring, because that happens at least once every few months. This is every day.”

In 190518 people died playing football, leading to several universities dropping the sport, US President Teddy Roosevelt pushing for safety reforms and The President of Harvard to call the game “more brutal than prizefighting, cockfighting or bullfighting.” More than a century later, it is clear that the reforms that followed have not been enough to protect our children from such brutality.

If we truly want to protect our children, reform is not enough. We need to take the issue of eliminating tackle football seriously, especially in our schools.

As Burrow put it when describing the reality of tackle football as it exists today: “You’re going to have some sort of brain trauma, you may never know the full consequences of your participation in the sport, and you’re always at risk of dying.”