Should Kids Be Able To Play Football Essay

What Age Should Kids Be Able To Play Football?

Tyrell Cameron lined up for a punt return at his Friday night high school game. What he didn’t know was that that would be his last play. Tyrell died because of a hard hit which ended in his neck being broken. The sophomore for Franklin Parish high school was taken off the field on a stretcher and died later that night at the hospital. There has been a lot of debate recently about what age children should be allowed to play football, if at all. Head injuries are a main reason given to not allow young men to play. I believe that players can make their own decisions based on the risks when they turn 16.

Pop Warner, the biggest organized football organization in the world, allows five through fourteen year olds to strap on helmets and shoulder pads and play football. There were 225,287 youth football players in the pop warner association in 2012. Although this may seem like a lot of players, this number has dropped 9.5 percent since 2010. There are many factors that play a role in this decline. One is

the trend of young athletes focusing on one sport. But this steady decline is coinciding with threatening reports that football causes brain damage. Starting at the age of five is very dangerous because at this age kids heads are 90% of an adult’s, and their bodies are only 50% of an adult's’. These young football players are like little bobble heads running around hitting each other. When they are tackled their head is forced back, since their neck is not as strong, causing their heads to snap back and hit the ground. Research has also proven that NFL players who started football before age 12 were “significantly worse” on three parts of the test: estimated verbal IQ, executive function, and memory impairment (Stamm). Dr. Stern, one of the authors of the Boston University study, said "They had problems learning and remembering lists of words. They had problems with being flexible in their decision-making and problem-solving." The study concluded that since the brain is rapidly connecting neurons until age 12, multiple hits during this age will cause serious long term effect. Knowing that even professional athletes have tremendous brain damage should stop kids from being allowed to hit one another.

A little more than a century ago, football was going to be banished from the United States altogether. During this time period, deaths due to injury on the football field occurred weekly. In 1904, there were 18 deaths and this number increased to 19 in 1905. Columbia, Northwestern, Duke, and many others chose to not take part in the dangers of football. It was then that President Teddy Roosevelt stepped in to renovate the rules of the game to try and reduce the sport’s inherited violence. The number of deaths due to direct injury has since decreased tremendously as shown in Table 1:
This chart is definitely supportive for those who are in favor of keeping football around for all ages due to the mass decrease in number of deaths. But, this does not show how many head injuries occur, or the long term impact of these head injuries. These long term injuries include: memory problems, lack of inhibition, intense anger/ aggression, and great personality changes. Repeated brain trauma can also lead a football player to Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy. This disease triggers continuous degeneration of the brain tissue, including the build-up of an abnormal protein called tau. These changes in the brain can begin months, years, or even decades after the last brain trauma or end of active athletic involvement. The brain degeneration is associated with memory loss, confusion, impaired judgment, impulse control problems, aggression, depression, and, eventually, progressive dementia.

An NFL linebacker, Jovan Belcher, turned from a kind, generous man to a suicidal murderer due to this degenerative disease. Studies showed that Dr. Piotr Kozlowski detected neurofibrillary tangles of tau protein, which is identified with chronic traumatic encephalopathy. The tangles were distributed throughout Belcher's hippocampus, an area of the brain involved with memory, learning and emotion (Kozlowski). Belcher was not the only NFL player to show a drastic change in behavior. Of all the players whose brains were donated to science, 87 of 91 were diagnosed with CTE. It is also important to note that families who had concerns of brain damage in their loved ones are usually the ones to donate their bodies. Even though the data may seem biased, 95% of brains researched upon should not be showing this much brain damage.

An alternative for tackle football for kids would be flag football.

Kids will be learning the basics of football and improve them without permanently damaging their bodies. The main problem in American football is how players tackle. The use of the helmet seems to allow players to use their helmet as a weapon instead of what it was created for: protection. Players lower their head thinking that the momentum will hurt the player they are tackling more than a “heads up” hit. In reality they are actually hurting themselves more, since the head and neck absorb the contact. The correct way to tackle is to keep your head up and make tackles using the shoulder. The Heads Up Football organization has taken initiative around the USA to inform coaches, parents, and players about the importance of safer football techniques. They also encourage teams to get a player safety coach who basically takes the role of an athletic

trainer.

Sixteen is a good age to make the decision to play football. The brain is an important organ, the one that defines each human being, it should be protected as such. There are legal ages for driving, joining the military, consent to sex, drinking. These ages are put in place so that the teens are then mentally developed to make safer decisions. A parent can’t push an eight year old to drive or join the military, it is not safe for them, so why should a parent be able to push a child to play football and risk permanently damaging their brains for the rest of their life?