Man-making days of August
Training camp is here - and with it, questions and answers for football parents
August. The answer to the judgy question is August. I now know what millions of other parents whose sons play football know. The reason you let them do it is August.
At 8 a.m. on August’s first Saturday, while he otherwise would have been snoozing, my son was instead lacing his cleats for a 10-hour day of football team activity, with more coming the next day, and a month of humid pre-season brutality to follow.
He knows how hard the month to come will be – he got a taste as a freshman-squad lineman last fall – but he woke up smiling anyway on Saturday, insisting we get him to the field earlier than required.
In 2023, 1,031,508 high school boys participated in 11-man tackle football, still the most common sport for the 4.6 million male prep athletes. But football has been in decline. This current Friday Night Lights cohort is the same size as the one for the fall of 2004, despite the fact that the country’s population is 14 percent larger now. More dramatically, the raw number of football-playing boys has only grown by 17 percent since 1970 as population swelled by 64 percent. It does not take algebra to track football’s erosion.
Playing football has declined even as America’s passion for watching football has soared. Pigskin broadcasts now annually chart over 90 of the country’s 100 top-rated TV programs. The National Football League is easily the nation’s most powerful entertainment platform and the value of each of its franchises has skyrocketed from $600 million two decades ago to $5-6 billion today. College football’s pageantry and tradition have propelled it to become the NFL’s only rival as a uniting cultural force in an otherwise polarized nation.
So, if America is getting more football-crazy, why are fewer of our sons strapping on helmets? Blame our growing understanding of CTE, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, the brain injury syndrome instigated by repeated concussive blows to the head.
As our understanding of CTE has emerged, we have learned youth football is a culprit. A Boston University study concluded:
“Every one year younger that participants began to play football resulted in earlier reported onset of cognitive and behavioral/mood symptoms by approximately 2.5 years.”
My wife and I did not know about that research, but the same presumption led us to steer our big-bodied son to other sports when he annually asked to play tackle as a pre-teen. And while data suggests limited harm reductions with a later start to football, there is little doubt that all football, even just one season, involves brain injury risk.
That is why football parents get raised eyebrows from acquaintances and some well-meaning friends. The skepticism is fair, and substantiated. But now in it, we see football provides attributes less otherwise available as a package to teenagers like my son who were fated to live cushy suburban lives.
His great-grandfathers knew hard physical labor working timber in Appalachia as teenagers. His grandfathers were expected to play sports without today’s modern understanding of training while also holding down a part-time job and doing yard work at home. But somewhere along the way being a boy in America became a softer experience and fathering became ill-equipped to reverse it. But there still is football – and other sports equally demanding when pursued hard.
August heralds the hell of pre-season for my son and his team, but their grind started months ago. All summer, four or five times a week, they have spent hours a day in conditioning drills, skill sessions, weight training and camps – a fully immersive commitment. Teammates have learned each other’s strengths and vulnerabilities – key knowledge for men who must mesh at full speed against opponents trying to physically wreck them.
A middle-aged friend went to college on a wrestling scholarship, but he gets a different smile when talking about high school football. “It’s going to war with your brothers,” he says. “There’s nothing like it.”
We have grasped that reality in our first 12 months in football culture. We see the urgent bonds he is forming with people he does not know well. We appreciate his learning to lean on his high pain threshold, and to prioritize sleep in a way neither of us ever did as teenagers. We grit as enduring difficulty and bearing harsh critique become his points of pride. We value his collaborative perspective on the broader endeavor and look forward to watching him hug his fellow warriors to celebrate their shared perseverance when the playoffs end.
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Hall of Fame quarterback Tom Brady, a multi-sport athlete in high school, said the character-building, summer-time resilience we are observing now is why parents should let their kids play football. A sport with only a dozen contests a year, but many months of practice, is one whose value disproportionately comes from its discipline.
“I would encourage everyone to play football for the simple reason that it is hard…It’s hard when you’re on your way to practice, weighed down with all your gear, and it’s 90 degrees out…and your body is already completely exhausted...It’s hard to throw, catch, block, and tackle, and hit kids when they’re way bigger…only to go home that night, bruised and battered and strained, but knowing you have to show up again the next day…”
Is football risky? Undoubtedly. Its premise is violent, so injuries are inherent. Combining participation statistics with injury report data quantifies that truth. For every 2.2 football players, there is one injury per season, and 23 percent of football injuries are concussions. That math is scary, but in line with girls’ soccer, which records an injury for every 1.7 participants, with 21 percent of reported injuries being concussive events. Boys’ soccer (1 per 2.5 participants and 17 percent concussions) and wrestling (1 per 2.7 participants and 20 percent concussions) are close.
My wife and I have three autumns, 36 games, some scrimmages, and an endless number of practices to cheer on and worry through. And hopefully much of a manly lifetime to see it bear out as a good decision.
SOURCE NOTES: Population figures are derived from U.S. Census estimates. High school sport participation data comes from the annual study published by the National Federation of State High School Associations. Injury observation data sourced from research done by R. Dawn Comstock, PhD and Lauren Pierpont of the Colorado School of Public Health, cross-matched to NFHS participation in the same years. CTE research papers mentioned are: “Age of first exposure to tackle football and chronic traumatic encephalopathy” by Michael L. Alosco, et al., and: “Subconsussive head impact exposure and white matter tract changes over a single season of youth football” by Naeim Bahrami, et al.
With school starting this week in the South, today was our last 2 a day practice. Just this morning, and almost every day, my talk to the players includes how the lessons that they learn in football apply to everything in life. Sports, but especially football, are the greatest teacher we have. But nothing is free and the price is usually paid much later in life. Still, as I walk into a room as a "middle aged man", wondering why I walked into that room, I believe the lessons learned were worth the price paid. BTW, the picture sure looks like a Marist helmet.
Fewer people playing football.. while (counterintuitively) many more watching.. I assume is explained by the explosion of sports betting. Basically everybody is betting on the NFL, and being in money Fantasy leagues.. it's drawn an expanded audience that traditionally never played/followed the game, but now have a vested financial interest. The public keeps learning more about football's potential dangers, but since there is so much money (literally) on the line.. people will increasingly continue to watch/milk the shrinking talent pool. It won't surprise me, if/when human players are eventually replaced with some kind of AI simulation, like they're beginning to replace human chain crews & baseball umpires, etc.