Football and injury

Statistics offered early on in the Social Foundations class showed the sports that had the most injuries per 100 participants. The top of the list was football, with 18.8 injuries per 100 players. It is hard to imagine how many kids and teenagers are involved in football in the United States. There are pee-wee leagues, quarterback clubs, middle school teams, JV teams, and varsity teams. Kids start playing football at 6 and 7 years old, and many play until they are 18. This statistic says that nearly 1 in 5 of the people who play football are injured in the course of a year. The injuries reported are both major and minor, but they have to be reported. I know from the experience of playing sports through my youth, that I didn’t always go to the hospital, a doctor, or even a trainer when I had a sport related injury. So the numbers could probably increase a bit if there was a way to measure unreported sprains and strains.
The question this raises in my mind is, ”Why would any parent let their child play football? And why would any child want to play football?” Approaching these questions from different angles allows for many different answers that all have elements of truth, and create a strong culture supporting not only the playing of football, but of other sports that can cause injuries.
One approach – football as a developer of masculinity. How better to get your son to be tough than to put him on a football field where he has to run into kids, tackle them, or try to avoid them or slough them off to avoid falling down. Football trains kids to take each other down, unless you have the ball, then you do all you can to not fall down. Kids are trained to be fast and move quickly, but the primary goal of football seems to be toughness. The toughest players either stay up longer, or take the most people down.
Another approach – football as big business. In the world of capitalism gone wild, profiting off just about anything is good. To play football, you need more supplies than baseball, basketball, and soccer. You need mouth guards, a helmet, different pads to cater to different positions, and spikes. The scary part about this is that most of the goods you need to play football are for safety – yet football has the highest injuries per 100 participants. The business is important not only through goods sold, but also through endorsements and sponsorships. If a town has a great football team, the school may get many donations so that signs can be hung at games. College football programs can end up funding other sports programs due to the amount of money generated by a successful year. The NFL is probably the pinnacle of football marketing and business. Millions and possibly billions of dollars are made every year by the NFL on jerseys, footballs, jackets, hats, shirts, tickets, etc. Football is not just a sport, it is a business that no matter how dangerous to its participants, will continue because it is a well run business.
Football as a social history. Some kids probably play football because their parents tell them they will play. Their dad may have played high school ball and will want his son to carry the torch. A big part of the social history is the identification with a team – especially a successful team. Shows like Friday Night Lights and movies like Remember The Titans show the parental intensity when it comes to football, and they do a decent job of illustrating it. I have seen 8th grade students whom I have not doubt want to play football, but whose fathers have taken it to another level. The father may never make it to a teacher conference, but will never miss a football game. This is most true for fathers who played on the same team when they were younger. They see their identity wrapped up in the sport and their son, and it seems the father wants to live vicariously through their sons.
What about your rep’? I thought the idea of having a reputation was a joke, and having a good reputation meant that you did well in school, not that you were tough. Unfortunately, being a football player and even more, being a good football player means that you have a rep. Your rep is that you are tough, because you hit people 5 days a week, and you are in the weight room on top of that. To play football, you must be able to take a hit. Not only that, but you have a team of 30 other guys who may “get your back” should something bad happen. There is protection with a football team.
Wise parents or wise teenagers would choose to not play football, simply because it is dangerous, and the risk of injury is very high. Not surprisingly, social history, big business, and social identities would be at stake if football was ever made illegal in schools and universities.