I love football. I was the quarterback of my alma mater’s back to back, intramural flag football championship team at Roberts Wesleyan College in the late 90s, early 2000s. I was even captain of my 8th grade football team (the very peak of my athletic career) at dear old Glens Falls middle school. Everything was downhill since. I hope my kids have better outcomes with athletics that I did. But sports are changing.
As a father of 3 boys, my wife and I will have some decisions to make as they age and get interested in contact centric, organized sports (hopefully). The biggest fear for many athletes and parents nowadays are the potential for neurological degeneration associated with concussions. You know this as CTE (Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy). It’s mentioned every NFL Sunday, there’s a movie about it, and it’s not being taken lightly by many pro football players.
The problem is that it’s not just a football thing and not just a concussion thing. Wrestling and hockey have higher rates of concussions than football. The other problem is that there are many other athletes that have a had concussions but don’t have CTE. In my paradigm that the body never does stupid stuff and no ailment occurs in isolation, there must be more to the story that makes one susceptible to neurological degeneration associated with head trauma, especially when the symptoms show decades after the events.