Column: Will youth football take another hit after NFL player’s frightening collapse on the field Monday night?
Here we go again.
Just when I was beginning to ease up on my resistance to kids playing football, a young NFL player is fighting for his life on a ventilator after collapsing and going into cardiac arrest on Monday Night Football.
And all the concerns about the violent nature of this sport have once more risen to the top of our news stories and the consciousness of moms and dads – and grandparents – everywhere.
What happened to 24-year-old Buffalo Bills free safety Damar Hamlin is a nightmare come true for everyone who has ever watched a loved one go down on the field or court and not pop right back up.
If you have had a kid in contact sports, you know what I mean.
Watching this young man spring up after a seemingly insignificant collision with Cincinnati Bengals wide receiver Tee Higgins, and then immediately fall backward and hit the ground, was jarring enough. But what followed on national TV what like viewing a slow-motion horror film.
While cameras were on the Cincinnati and Buffalo players as Hamlin was given CPR after suffering cardiac arrest, my mind was on his family, and what they had to be going through, particularly his mother who watched her son’s collapse from her stadium seat and rode in the ambulance with him to the hospital, where he remains in intensive care on Thursday afternoon but is thankfully showing signs of improvement.
While there has been no official word on the cause of Hamlin’s cardiac arrest, experts speculate it likely was the result of commotio cordis, a rare occurrence brought on when a blunt force launches an apparently healthy heart into a potentially deadly rhythm because of the timing of the impact.
Note the words rare and apparently healthy.
What happened on Monday night is being called “unprecedented” in NFL history. Which makes this incident
different from the other NFL scary story, chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), which is caused by concussions and other head blows that can lead to death and debilitating symptoms.
As I’ve written about several times in the past, the CTE time bomb that quickly dominated so many news stories several years ago terrified me because of my own son’s many concussions through his high school and college football years.
As study after study, case after case, continued to paint an even uglier picture of this brain condition, my love for the game faded, to the point there was a time I could not watch college or NFL games because every hit I saw on the screen reminded me of the potential my son had for serious future consequences.
Many other parents agreed, which thinned a lot of youth and prep football rosters, but also led to safer equipment and protocols to keep all players safer, from the Pop Warner tykes to those making mega millions on our nation’s most elite teams.
But as the CTE headlines faded, so also did my concerns. And the oldest grandson I hoped and prayed would never play the game received a football for Christmas this year – from me – with the blessing of his mother who once upon a time was also dead set against him ever wearing a set of shoulder pads.
Turns out, after Monday night, she was more concerned about putting a chest guard on the kid for baseball than keeping him off the gridiron.
The dangers of a fast-moving pitch or a ball coming off a metal bat are well-documented. Who can forget the horrific freak accident in the spring of 2012 when Eric Lederman, a 12-year-old Oswego boy, was killed from a ball thrown by a teammate that hit him in his neck?
Young athletes in our area have also died while playing sports over the years from undetected heart problems, which is why there’s been a constant push to screen for such medical landmines before students step onto the field or court.
Hamlin’s situation is, of course, different from the concussion danger because it appears to be such a freak occurrence, where so many things had to align for such a devastating outcome.
Some have told me this likely could not even happen in youth tackle football because the kids aren’t going fast enough to cause a collision at that level. At the same time, others note younger kids tend to be more susceptible to these deadly jabs to the heart because their rib cages are not as strong as those of a mature athlete.
It’s too early to say how this tragedy will impact the NFL. Or college football. Or even games played at the prep level and below. Do we surround our kids with bubble wrap and keep them from doing the things they love because there is the potential for serious and fatal injury?
I reached out to several football parents and coaches to get their reactions, with a couple insisting that, as horrible as the Hamlin incident is, football will continue as is.
“I think people will reflect on what happened for the time being, but it won’t affect participation,” said Brian Aversa, Kaneland’s head baseball and assistant football coach who has two young sons in sports.
“Some may reconsider or talk about reconsidering, but I don’t believe it will change what people do.”
Aversa and others have told me they are actually surprised that, with the size and speed of players and the intensity of the game at the upper levels, this tragedy has not happened before.
Ryan Dolan, whose son’s Aurora Gators team made it to the Pop Warner national championship tournament in November, tends to believe this nationally-televised incident and the reaction from the masses who watched it unfold, will indeed affect youth participation, despite the incident being so random and rare.
“We live in a very fear-based society these days, and a lot of time for good reason,” Dolan told me.
Unfortunately, “with the concussion and CTE scares and now seeing this, parents have another reason to not want their kids to play,” he insisted.
“We’ve come a long way from those dark days,” Dolan said, but quickly noted there will always be the potential for major injury, which “looms in the back of my mind as a parent.”
“It was a play where essentially the players did everything right,” he added, “and yet the result was catastrophic.”
That’s because football has always been a violent sport. But that’s also its big draw, which has turned the game into an American addiction that shows no signs of abating.
Still, there’s no doubt Hamlin’s was the hit heard around the world. And at least for a while, it will continue to resonate as we pray for the fallen athlete’s recovery and are left to grapple with where to draw that line between risk and reward.
“Like anything else, as the kids grow up, all we can do is teach them as best we can and try to put them in the best situation possible,” said Dolan. “And we just hope they stay safe.”
Which is just what youth football programs are working hard to do, insists Jaime Castaneda, who is head of football operations for Tomcat Youth Tackle League on Aurora’s East Side.
The game is “not a contact sport, but a collision sport,” and needs to be treated as such, he told me. And that’s why, just as the NFL has learned how to respond faster and better to safety issues, so also have local kids’ programs.
Youth football coaches, he pointed out, are trained not just in concussion prevention, but in everything from cardiac issues to heat exhaustion to cold assimilation to positive reinforcement.
What happened Monday night is another “teaching lesson” that will help not just the NFL and other football programs get better but all of us as a human race, said Castaneda.
“We are all,” he added, “learning as we go.”
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