*PSA: Concussions

[37thchamber]

After numerous discussions with medical professionals and after having lived the nightmare that is a brain injury; if I ever am blessed with the opportunity to have children I will not be putting them in football. The sport is too dangerous for children (or anyone for that matter) and brain injuries are far too great a risk. Improper form tackling and illegal head-to-head impacts; particularly on the line, is something that no amount of coaching or discussions on safety can prevent in youth football. Mistakes happen, and they happen a lot. I've heard that sports like soccer with 'heading' the ball can be equally as bad, though from my understanding they've now banned heading in youth soccer which is a great step forward. If you looking into how the modernization of the sport of boxing has greatly increased the risk of brain injuries or long-term trauma due to the gloves, you'll understand why the football itself as a sport is so dangerous. While the helmet can protect the head from a lot of different things; it also puts the wearer and surrounding players in a very dangerous position. With our current technology, we simply can't make a helmet that's good enough to keep up with the false sense of security that it provides. Removing it altogether would be absolutely devastating as well. There's really no winning, the safe option is to not participate at all. 

Yeahh.... emphasis mine here. Not sure when they implemented these rules in the US, but I think about a decade ago they found that Jeff Astle, a club hero at West Bromwich Albion, likely died due to complications surrounding repeated brain trauma from heading the old style balls (heavy stitched leather, got waterlogged easily; newer ones aren't nearly as bad, but if you've ever taken one to the face you'll know they're still not good) and the discussion started over here. While I was still coaching the youth game, we discussed this and I was always super vigilant for any sign of brain injury in my players. Super protective. In training for small-sided practice games, we often implemented a "head height" rule -- if the ball went above head height, it counts as a "foul" and the other team gets possession -- to try and encourage my players to keep the ball on the ground and play around opposition better, but also because I wanted to minimise the amount of head contact based on the reading I'd done. But there was a lot of resistance to the idea. "Ruining the game", "too soft" and all that. Which I suspect is why it's taken the FA so long to implement these rules in England -- and they still only apply to training, tbf. Not good enough imo. I wouldn't stop my kid playing if they wanted to, but I'd definitely encourage them to completely ignore the aerial game. I was always shit in the air and I somehow got paid to play. 

Some sports can't really accommodate this kind of thing though. Like american football, or boxing (though tbf if you're allowing a child to engage in any form of striking contact sport, you're an idiot imo; this is why youth combat tournaments generally focus on grappling). Like you alluded to here, part of the problem in these sports is that the "protective gear" actually serves to encourage bad types of collisions, which are the type that typically cause brain injury. I remember reading something about how if the NFL went back to the old style of helmet -- closer to the type they have in rugby -- it would reduce the frequency of concussions because tackling technique would adjust etc etc... but surely that would take time? If you've played since high school and you're a second year NFL player, that's what? 9? 10? years of experience, at least. A decade in which you've been able to effectively use the helmet as a weapon, and that's why impact tackles are so common (compared to say, rugby). Not that this would really solve the inherent problem in the sport -- that it's a game of inches, so impact tackles will always be preferred to rugby style tackling in order to prevent territory gains. Boxing has a different problem in that it's just an insanely dangerous sport full stop. There isn't really a way to repeatedly get hit in the head and not risk brain injury innit? 

Sounds like you had a particularly rough go of it, man. I had a couple concussions in my time, but no lasting impact as far as we can tell. Guess I was lucky. This is a pretty great bit of media though, and I think it's awesome you're talking about it. I reckon a lot of people don't really grasp the severity of these injuries -- or their prevalence. Sometimes hearing a personal account from someone they know (even obliquely, like in this case) is enough to shift perception. Thanks for sharing, man. Hopefully you'll at least win that battle with depression. I know that fight a bit better than anything brain injury related, and my DMs are open if you wanna shoot the shit.