American football season is getting hotter. Young players are dying

aAt the end of a preseason football practice in late July, Myzelle Law, a 19-year-old defensive lineman from MidAmerica Nazarene University in Kansas, returned to the locker room and began showing signs of a seizure. It was hot outside, but Law’s internal body temperature had reached 42.2 degrees Celsius. said. He died about a week later from a heat-related illness.

Last summer, the same thing happened to 17-year-old lineman Phillip Laster Jr., a rising senior at Brandon High School in Mississippi. In 2021, 16-year-old Drake Geiger, a player at Omaha South high school in Nebraska, died after collapsing on a practice field.

They are not the only ones. Between 2018 and 2022 minimum 11 Football players in the US – at the student and professional levels – have died from heat stroke. And the number of young athletes diagnosed with heat illness has increased increasing over the past decade, when unprecedented, extreme heat met football season.

This summer, the hottest on record in North America, teams across the US have been forced to deal with a changing climate. High school and college teams in the scorching southwestern states — where temperatures rarely dipped below 43.3 degrees Celsius this summer — Escaped to practice in the mountains or on the coast. Teams started practicing at dawn, before temperatures became unsafe. The Friday evening games were held later in the evening or postponed to the next morning.

And under the burning late summer sun, athletes and coaches are increasingly questioning the macho mentality of the sport. Coaches purchased wet-bulb thermometers, which measure both humidity and air temperature, to better gauge heat stress, as well as cold plunge pools to treat heat stroke.

“We are dealing with heat waves that last longer. They are more serious than ever before. And they’re hitting geographic regions where they weren’t previously experienced,” said Jessica Murfree, a sports ecologist at the University of Cincinnati. “The opportunities to practice a sport such as football are therefore decreasing.”

A more dangerous sport

For Max Clark, a sophomore quarterback at the College of Idaho, the start of each August football season has felt a little hotter than the last. “As each year passes, it feels like more and more of our season is consumed by unbearable or uncomfortable heat,” he said.

Practices were especially tough last year, when Clark was quarterback for the Arizona State Sun Devils. Practices started at 6 a.m. so the team could wrap up before the hottest part of the day. And home games were held after sunset. “People don’t even want to sit in the stands and watch when it’s 39.4 degrees Celsius,” he said. Transferring to the College of Idaho wasn’t much of an escape; Boise was stuck under a heat dome for much of July.

To prevent heat illness, Clark closely monitors his nutrition throughout the day and makes sure he stays hydrated both on and off the field. “It’s about preparing for the heat because you can’t really escape it.” he said.

Players around the world, in all sports at all levels, are struggling with similar realizations. World Cup-winning midfielder Sam Mewis has written about how her performances have been affected by extreme heat and bushfires. This year, the US Open changed the rules to partially close the stadium’s roof to provide shade for players during a scorching heatwave on the East Coast.

But American football players are among the most vulnerable to heat illness. A 2013 study found that the rate of heat illness in high school football was 11.4 times higher than in all other sports combined.

The start of the season coincides not only with the hottest period in much of North America, but also with hurricane season in the South and peak wildfire season in the West. In Idaho, many players and fans have come to associate smoky skies with football, Clark said. And unlike cross-country skiers or soccer players, soccer players wear heavy padding and safety equipment, making it harder for them to cool down.

The artificial grass that students and professionals play on causes even more complications. Research shows that artificial grass can become up to 15.5 degrees Celsius hotter than natural grass, and on summer days radiates temperatures above 71 degrees Celsius.

Most heat illnesses happen right on the get started of the season, or pre-season – when players return to the field for the first time after a long off-season rest. It can take two or more weeks for their bodies to adapt to grueling outdoor training. Certain medications, including common ones used to treat depression and ADHD, can make players especially susceptible to heat illnesses.

Linemen – the biggest and bulkiest players on the team – are especially vulnerable. “They don’t cool down as well as players with leaner bodies,” said Karissa Niehoff, CEO of the National Federation of State High School Association. “The majority of our heat illnesses in football have occurred at the lineman position.”

Nearly a dozen football players died from heat stroke between 2018 and 2022, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. But the figure may be an underestimate as not all football deaths are reported to the center or clearly linked to heat in autopsies.

The risks are compounded for young athletes of color, who are more likely to attend school and live in “heat island” neighborhoods that lack shade and green spaces.

“Imagine if you live in a place where there is no air conditioning, you don’t have enough shade to keep you cool on your walk to school, and then your school doesn’t have air conditioning either,” says Ruth Engel, an environmental data scientist at the UCLA studying microclimates. “By the time you have to play football, you’ve never had a chance to cool down, so you start at a huge disadvantage.”

A changing culture

The year University of Maryland offensive lineman Jordan McNair died – 2018 – ended up being the fourth warmest year on record worldwide.

The team had just returned from a month-long break to begin their first practice of the season. It was a balmy day – just over 80F (26.6C), with 70% humidity, and all the players were running 110 meter sprints. By his seventh sprint, McNair began to cramp, but he kept running. About an hour later he started foaming at the mouth and about thirty minutes after that he was loaded into an ambulance. The 19-year-old died two weeks later.

“The main thing I kept asking myself was why?” said his father, Marty McNair. “What did I miss? What did I miss?”

A 74-page independent investigation commissioned by the university placed much of the blame on the university’s trainers and medical staff, who failed to monitor wet bulb temperatures and modify workouts to reduce the risk of heat illness. Instead, the trainers urged McNair to keep running even after he showed signs of heat stress and failed to deliver life-saving cold immersion therapy before it was too late.

The university ultimately agreed to pay a $3.5 million settlement to Jordan’s family, and in the years since has adopted new policies to better recognize and prevent heatstroke. And Marty McNair started a foundation named after his son to train coaches and athletes in heat safety.

Since then, after a slew of torrid football seasons, he’s heard more discussion and action about heat safety, he said. “It is clear that global warming is real, and it will impact the safety of athletes. And I think people are starting to become more receptive to that idea.”

In 2021, the state passed a law named after McNair that required the creation of new health and safety requirements in Maryland’s athletic programs. Lawmakers have also introduced a federal version.

Yet Marty McNair sees vast differences in the expertise and equipment schools have to help athletes experiencing heat stroke. “Your black, your brown, your rural community teams, you don’t see them checking a wet bulb thermometer – because they barely have the basics down,” he said.

But as the climate changes, he believes football culture will have to change too. “I always told Jordan he had to be coachable. So I never taught him that if you feel uncomfortable with something the coach has asked you to do, you don’t have to do it. You know, listen to your body first.”

‘These are still children’

Zac Taylor can barely remember what his body felt like before he collapsed on the gridiron in 2018. It was hot and his high school varsity team had to do about 280 “up-down” push-ups after two hours of sprinting and drills. as punishment for poor performance during a scrimmage.

Taylor remembers waking up in the hospital a week later. He lost more than 50 pounds by the time he was discharged, his mother Maggie Taylor recalled. Since then, she and other parents have started a nonprofit organization that donates safety and medical equipment to school teams and teaches young athletes how to look for signs of heat exhaustion.

Part of that work includes teaching players to slow down and coaches to take it easy. The idea goes against football culture in many ways. (“Water is for cowards,” Denzel Washington coach Boone proclaims in Remember the Titans.) Players are encouraged to push their limits by coaches who themselves have been guided with the same kind of tough love.

“There is a culture of ‘keep pushing’, of punishing practices and if you stop you lose your position in the team,” said Maggie Taylor. “That’s how a lot of these old-school football coaches operate.”

Part of the problem, says sports ecologist Murfree. “The environment in which today’s athletes play sports is completely different from the environment in which their coaches played sports. Year after year, we are surpassing heat records and catastrophic disaster records.”

Although very young athletes – at the primary and secondary school levels – are physically the most susceptible to heat illness, it is teenagers and young adults who are at greatest risk of heat stroke during exertion, research shows, simply because they go beyond their body’s warnings. characters.

“With these young adults, all they want to do is get the varsity team off the bench and get recruited by the best college teams,” Murfree said. “They want to make their coaches and parents proud. And all of that can be counterproductive if the body is overworked.”

There’s this idea that young athletes are superhuman, or act like they are, McNair said. “Jordan was 6 feet tall, he weighed 300 pounds. He was wearing a size 16 shoe, but he was still 19 years old,” he said. “These are still children.”