Youth Football Concussions

Hopping Off The Youth Football Bandwagon

Currently in the United States, football is one of the most popular sports played by the youth population. Millions of parents allow their children to play football every year without acknowledging how dangerous the sport can be at their young age. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported in 2004 that an estimated 475,000 children under the age of fourteen suffered a traumatic brain injury, and almost 90% of which were treated and released from emergency departments per year (Adirim). Although not all of those injuries were solely from football, it is known that football accounts for some of the highest rates of head injury in youth sports. Also, traumatic brain injury is the leading

cause of death and disability for children and adolescents in the United States (Adirim). The hazards of allowing a child to play contact football before the age of fourteen are far more serious than in a non-contact sport, and parents and coaches need to do everything in their power to make the safety of those involved the top priority. Unfortunately, there are many factors that disregard safety as the main priority of the sport and make the game more dangerous. Therefore, all youth contact football leagues should be banned until the child is fourteen years or older because of poor coaching, increased risk of head injuries, and low maturity and development of the body and brain.
Coaches are arguably some of the most important people in the learning and development of a child’s sport. Coaches are the ones whom young players look up to that teach them the rules, discipline, teamwork and the proper form and techniques that are applied in play. Football coaches in particular are also the people that potentially hold children’s lives in the palm of their hand. One of the biggest problems with youth football is inexperienced coaches. Quite frequently, youth football coaches are parents that are undertrained and under qualified, “parents or other volunteers typically attend one evening or maybe one day-long workshop, if any time is spent at all, becoming familiar with the program before taking charge. Most of this training time is spent with managerial tasks, team rosters, and equipment assignment, with little on developmental tasks” (Lumpkin et al., 174). Coaches that are poorly trained to develop the skills that children need to be safe in football increases the odds that children will cultivate bad habits that can lead to injury. This can lead to dangerous situations, especially when children get injured on the field, “Few coaches hold first aid certifications, and because youth sport is typically coached by parent volunteers with little to no formal training or education in sport and sport-related training and injury recognition, injuries go undiagnosed and children are allowed to play when it is not in their best interest” (Lumpkin et al., 174). Allowing children to play when they are injured increases their risk for a much more serious injury exponentially. Furthermore, when concussions are difficult even for a physician to diagnose, a coach with an untrained eye is only going to put that child in serious jeopardy.
Additionally, it has been found that most of the time there are no physicians or trainers at youth practices or games that could provide the critical first-response procedures that many injuries demand immediately. One survey done for Chicago public high school football teams show that only 10.5% had a physician attend games, and only 8.5% of schools had an athletic trainer. Plus, no physicians attended any practices, and only one school had a trainer (Hruby). If these numbers in schools are anywhere close to consistent throughout the United States, then the numbers for youth teams that aren’t school funded have got to be drastically lower. Putting a child in such an aggressively physical sport, matched with a coach that is barely trained, and no medically certified personnel on the sidelines is just a scary combination of potential chaos.
Another major problem with youth contact football is the increased risk for children to receive head injuries, such as concussions.

Concussion can be defined as “a complex pathophysiologic process affecting the brain, induced by traumatic biomechanical forces” that can cause headache, dizziness, light sensitivity, memory loss and decreased mental speed (Adirim, Patel et al., 674). This means that concussions occur when there is a sudden movement or violent impact to the head, causing the brain to crash against the inside of the skull and become damaged. The disadvantage that children have is their necks aren’t yet strong enough to control these impacts, “Before 14, there is a size disparity between the head and the body, causing what concussion experts call a ‘bobble-head’ effect – the head snaps back dramatically after it is hit” (Smith). Dr. Robert Cantu, clinical professor of neurosurgery at Boston University School of Medicine explains, “Our youngsters have big heads on very weak necks and that combination sets up the brain for greater injury” (Smith). The head snapping back in this unsafe fashion puts children in greater danger for concussion than adults; all the more reason to ban contact before age fourteen, when children start developing their bodies. Sometimes, children continue to play even though they have no idea that they have a concussion. One condition, called second-impact syndrome, occurs when an athlete suffers a second concussion before they recover

from the previous one. The outcome is devastating, in which the brain swells rapidly and causes severe disability, or even death (Hruby). Children that continue to play when they have a concussion put themselves in grave danger, and if their coach cannot tell if their player is concussed or not, then that player could be at serious risk for far more than just a bad headache.
Perhaps the most important reason for parents to decide that their child should not play contact football is that their child has simply not matured or physically developed enough in the brain or the body to handle such a rough sport.

It is common knowledge that the brain isn’t fully developed until the mid-twenties, which means that children under fourteen years old aren’t even halfway developed, “With the normal neurological maturation, there is a rapid and substantial development in the cognitive abilities during childhood and throughout adolescence” (Patel et al., 672). Concussions in young children are likely to slow this development down, or even stop development altogether and cause major disabilities. All it takes is one bad hit to impede on a child’s development. One important protein that could help prevent serious injury is myelin, which acts like insulation for nerve fibers in the brain (Smith). Dr. Cantu states, “By 14, children have a ‘better myelin-ated’ brain, making them less vulnerable to injury” (Smith). Without myelin having developed, a child’s brain smashes into the skull and tightens up with no “insulation” to lessen the impact, making the head injury much worse; and one that could last a lot longer. Concussions in children typically take longer to recover than in adults as well (Patel et al., 680). Also, a child under fourteen isn’t mature enough to realize just how serious an injury such as a concussion is, or maybe even to know what a

concussion is in the first place, leaving them with this unknown headache that they don’t know how to report. Although there are no studies that show how repeated concussions affect the brain in children (Adirim, Patel et al., 673), it has been found that NFL football players were four times more likely to develop Alzheimer’s or Lou Gehrig’s disease (Hruby). These diseases affect both memory loss and loss of motor skills and typically do not develop until late adulthood in normal individuals who have not experienced vast amounts of hits to the head. However, football players are at an increased risk of developing these diseases earlier on in life because of repeated trauma to the brain. So it can’t be a good thing for a child to start accumulating these devastating hits to the head at such a young age, or else they are just going to develop these life-threatening diseases much sooner in life.
Contact youth football is dangerous to kids for a variety of reasons. Poorly trained coaches and limited medical personnel create a very unsafe environment for children who should just be learning the basics of the game, not participating in the full-fledged aggressive sport that many know and love. Although it is hard to tell just what age a child should truly start contact sports, there is a mass amount of research and reasoning that proves contact football before age fourteen is not suited for kids. Before fourteen years old, children are at an increased risk of head injury because they have not physically or mentally developed enough to understand the harm they are causing to their brain. Many children, and parents alike, do not even know what a concussion is or how it can have an effect on their young brains years down the road. If retired professional football players are developing brain diseases earlier than people that haven’t played contact sports, then exposing children to the destructive hits that football provides early in life will only make matters worse. The cumulative effect of recurring concussions and damage the brain takes from repeated hits to the head during a season and career could cause severe disability or death. Parents need to be informed of what they are getting their child into so their child can reach their true potential, before it’s too late.