I'm quite thankful that I never ended up on the team, and think the entire concept of high school football is incredibly stupid given what we know about CTE.
At the same time, a lot of parents (myself included) steered kids to other sports. That had another effect: there was even more pressure on parents who didn't care about CTE (and their kids) to get into football because kiddie leagues and especially high school teams were short of players. This happened to a friend whose two boys were strong hockey players, the coach at their school pushed them to try out for football the following season.
Our science writers at BU have been writing about CTE research for at least that long. Oldest I could find was 2010. We've published a lot on the topic on our main news site and our science publication:
Brink CTE stories: https://www.bu.edu/brink/tag/cte/
BU Today CTE stories going back to 2010: https://www.bu.edu/today/tag/cte/
Some favorites:
This 5 part series: https://www.bu.edu/brink/series/cte-how-bu-is-changing-the-g...
This story about Youth Football: https://www.bu.edu/articles/2018/youth-football-linked-to-ea...
And this video from the Director of the CTE research center talking about how these discoveries impacted her as a huge football fan: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yUsDvKyhtA4
I'm a creative director @ BU and our designers have occasionally helped our editorial teams with story designs for these types of research stories. It's been interesting watching the progression of the research over the years and as a parent as well I would not let my kids play football based on the research. There are other, less risky sports they can enjoy. Skiing, Martial Arts, etc. I don't believe we can or should protect them from all risk, but this CTE research has been a clear enough signal in how football is played for me to be wary of letting them play.
Lift weights and play tennis or baseball.
sure you tear an ACL here and there, but thats nothing modern surgery cant fix.
Somewhere, there's a dude in spandex and legwarmers muttering to himself, "It's my time." [Maniac fades in]
Of course people get hurt in soccer, but that’s out of the ordinary. For football, getting hurt is the ordinary. Most likely people aren’t calling ambulances because getting shaken up and a bit nauseated is par for the course for football.
True, but soccer is also susceptible to CTE. It is becoming increasingly apparent that soccer, particularly headers and on field collisions, also yields plenty of CTE cases. So much so that some soccer organizations are introducing protocols, such as no headers for youth soccer.
I think it's more destructive to control and remove your child from the possibility of risk at the cost of preventing them from learning to navigate the world with the information at hand to do so in way they can manage.
There is something to be said about the socialization of sports. But there is such a thing as negative socialization, regression even. I would say football consistently has one of the most toxic cultures of any sport. It’s improving, very slowly. But there’s more to gain than just lower head injury risk by switching to a different sport.
I played football and yet never drink, have never done drugs, am not and was never homophobic, never got into trouble etc.
Would I let a kid play football now, with all the knowledge of CTE? No. I absolutely even worry about it for myself. But it's a bit odd, to me, to say "football made me a bad person".
I think basically all people who were socialized male have had these experiences at one point or another, whether it be in football, in class, in the military, at sleepovers, in the locker room.
My point is more so that football has a particular “culture”, or it did when I was a kid. And that culture was not necessarily socially productive at a young and impressionable age. When we see certain behaviors in particularly young men, we have to wonder where they come from, and what we are doing to cultivate that.
Encouraging them to get a drivers license is fine (run cross-country), but getting them a driver's license and buying your 16-year old a sports car with bald tires and no seatbelts (football) is negligent.
If cars, alcohol or weed caused 75%+ of the people who used them to have massive brain damage then it'd be unreasonable to allow people to use those too.
Yes, you’re optimizing for your kids individual life but nothing we Americans do anymore is holistic. It’s all short-term thinking.
Masculine culture has traditionally, and currently, favored conformance and lack of individuality over basically everything else. It’s one of the more toxic parts of masculinity as portrayed by the patriarchy.
There are many ways to be a woman. There are many ways to be a gay man. There’s really only one way to be a straight man, if you want to be valuable in the eyes of the patriarchy. It’s all about conformity, conformity, conformity. No deviancy, no thoughts, just a blank slate of a man ready for work, family, and an early death, be it at war or doing stupid things.
How you dress, how you speak, how you walk, who you are friends with, what shows you watch, who you respect, how you show that respect, what you do, how you earn a living, how you have sex, how you obtain relationships. Everything, from life until death.
The perfect man is the perfect cog. He works, he doesn’t think too much, he walks and talks right, he makes moral love to his wife, and he raises his kids in a standard American family hand-picked for him by his forefathers. Any deviance from that is marks-off.
I think a lot of men need to believe that their life just so happens to perfectly fit the mold, but you see, it’s by choice. If that’s what they need to believe to be happy, then okay. I’m fine with that.
And they are not courageous. They are so scared they will be seen as unmanly or outsiders, that they will do, enable and tolerate pretty much anything.
If they don’t play and everyone else does, their development will be many years behind their peers which makes it unlikely they could play at a high level.
But maybe you’re okay with that.
And like any responsible parents, they presumably also don't just defer to what they're elementary aged children "want to do with their life" nor feed into the exaggeration that "everybody else" does anything at all, let alone play tackle football.
If you disagree with the dangers of the sport or are afraid of shaping your children's life choices for their own benefit, that's fine for you, but the rhetorical and snide way you presume others should share that view seems strange.
This is the only wise position. Despite the common and misleading film tropes, children do not know themselves perfectly. Often the adults "holding them back" are doing those children a great favor.
The correct thing to do is to ban tackle football below a certain age. Probably college. That levels the playing field.
Sorry about the misread!
And different sports have different safety concerns.
Distance running is known to cause increase chance of cardiac arrest.
How about gymnastics, some of those dismounts are pretty dangerous
Why single out one of them
It's singled out because it's the single sport that appears to lead to life-altering effects from invisible injuries, rather than an acceptable cost/risk of accidental injury or increased chance of extremely rare events in other sports. They are open for debate just the same if evidence comes to light.
The real question is why you believe your personal experience has any bearing on the facts presented, to the point of farcical argument. It's a shame that anything we enjoy may later turn out to be harmful, but you are arguing the equivalent of: "I smoked all my life and I'm fine", "but red meat gives you cancer too", "why are you targeting smoking when people drink", "people have died choking on air".