Is high school football morally tenable? Three more deaths raise familiar questions

IIn December 2022, Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin suffered a cardiac arrest on the football field during a nationally televised game. The incident caused shock and horror across the country and briefly led to ongoing public debate about the safety of the sport. Yet the NFL was soon able to proclaim Hamlin’s triumphant recovery, even showing it during the Super Bowlin a feat of remarkably skillful appropriation and image-whitewashing.

And so the football world returned to its dormant state: utterly unwilling to acknowledge the extent to which the sport remains an ongoing public health disaster. For the near-tragedy that befell Damar Hamlin has repeatedly been a real reality for far too many football-involved families, including those of Jordan McNairthe 19-year-old offensive lineman from the University of Maryland who was reportedly told by a coach to “Drag his ass down the field!” even after he initially collapsed from heat and exhaustion. McNair eventually died. His mother later said“Nobody did anything to calm him down. That’s the part that bothers me the most. There was nothing I could do. And I couldn’t help him. It breaks my heart.”

Now, again, the last days, three young non-white football players suffered acute medical emergencies that resulted in their death during summer football activities: Ovet Gomez-Regalado, 15 years old, in Kansas City; Semaj Wilkins, 14 years old in Alabama; and Jayvion Taylor, 15 years old in Virginia. Although the exact cause of death in these cases has not been released, they all appear likely to be heat-related. In a fourth incident during the same time period, this time in Maryland, Leslie Noble16 years old, also died, with police dispatchers reportedly characteristic at the time, it was considered a “player suffering from heat stroke.” These deaths, which are yet to be learned, are terrible tragedies, but they were also entirely foreseeable given what we know about the dangers of football, especially in extreme conditions. In fact, 77 Heat-related deaths of athletes have been tracked since 2000, 65% of whom were teenagers. Between 2018 and 2022, at least 11 American soccer players, both amateur and professional, died of heatstroke.

Bharat Venkat, an associate professor in the Institute for Society and Genetics, the history department, and the anthropology department at UCLA and the founder of the school’s Heat Lab, told us that heat injury is an increasing risk for young athletes, particularly football players: “Playing sports in high heat puts stress on your body from two different sources: metabolic heat production and environmental heat. On top of that, you have protective gear that makes it harder for you to lose heat. As temperatures continue to rise year after year and the warm season gets longer, it’s no longer safe to just go about your daily activities. That’s probably going to require a fundamental transformation in the way we think about sports, especially for young people.”

These circumstances are also reminiscent of the experiences of former college football players we spoke to for our forthcoming book The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game. One of the players we spoke to described how he passed out in the showers after practice during training camp. He explained, “I later learned that I actually had all the signs of possibly going into cardiac arrest … I had no pulse, so they started putting saline bags in me … I had thrown up so much that my esophagus had scar tissue and it was starting to close up a little bit … I missed that afternoon practice and I felt super guilty about it. You know, Stockholm syndrome, whatever you want to call it. The next morning I went in for an endoscopy. All they found was a bunch of scar tissue. So the next day I practiced again … and I was still vomiting here and there, but it eventually went away. It was crazy. There wasn’t really anyone looking out for my mental or physical well-being. I pushed myself so hard that I literally almost died.”

Similarly, in recent news coverage, we heard about another situation in which an American football player nearly died on the field, but the head coach quickly moved the practice field and continued as if nothing had happened. A coach we spoke to for that story explained, “At this level of the game, that kind of training is common. We have multiple injuries per practice. They can’t just shut everything down if a player is out.” It seems that this disregard for injuries is commonplace at all levels of the game.

It is notable and not coincidental that the vast majority of players featured in this story are racialized as non-white. At the college level, in what used to be the power five conferences, although only 5.7% of the student body is black overall, black athletes make up 55.7% of the football players. This is due to what we call structural coercion: the social and economic pressures that drive athletes of color to enter sports to gain access to resources and opportunities that would otherwise be denied in a society marked by a history of slavery and structural racism.

Venkat, director of UCLA’s Heat Lab, suggests that this dynamic is relevant to the heat question as well: “The sociological side of it is what I call thermal inequality: the unequal distribution of the negative effects of heat, in ways that often overlap with existing forms of inequality along lines of race, class, citizenship, disability, and so on. The thing about thermal inequality is that it structures our societies in ways that often resemble zero-sum games. Some people are asked to sacrifice their comfort, their health, and even their lives so that others don’t have to. From there, you can see how sports like football, which involve high-heat exposure and recruit a lot of young people of color (particularly black men), become a kind of sacrificial ground where the logic of thermal inequality plays out.”

This is something that anyone who enjoys football spectacle should take into account.

“Some people are asked/forced to do labor in high temperatures so that others can enjoy the fruits of their labor while they themselves avoid the heat,” Venkat says. “It’s a fundamental way our societies are already structured, and it helps us avoid responsibility. For example, we can buy strawberries at the store without worrying about the health, comfort, or life of the person who picked them. I think the same analysis applies to sports.”

Furthermore, it is worth always keeping in perspective the brutal fact that every time we watch football, we are actually witnessing players sustain life-changing head injuries – injuries that are essentially invisible to us because they occur within the helmet and the skull. Yet we know that every 2.6 years Participation in football doubles the risk of CTE, meaning that even children and high school students are systematically suffering potentially life-altering harm on the football field, a reality we might reasonably characterize as a form of child abuse.

With all this in mind, as the Earth continues to warm, conditions on football pitches continue to deteriorate and children continue to die, we are left with a simple and obvious question: is this sport morally sustainable?