Hardknocks
The number of football players at both Peninsula and Palos Verdes High School has been on the decline.
“Two years ago, both high schools had over 100 freshmen playing football,” Athletic Director Wendell Yoshida said. “This year, between the two high schools, we only have 50 players.”
Palos Verdes head football coach Guy Gardner witnessed the same pattern at his school.
“We are losing more kids from the program than I’ve ever seen before,” Gardner said. “Kids are losing their drive for the game with the belief that football always leads to concussions.”
Fear of concussions is affecting local high school participation, and simultaneously, at the youth sports level.
“There is no eighth-grade Pop Warner team on the hill for the first time ever,” Yoshida said of the non-profit, youth football organization.
New studies have explored the consequences of playing a full-contact sport.
“Undetected and untreated concussions are raising a huge concern,” junior running back Braeden Benedict said. “Players like to swallow their pride and pain after taking a tough hit to the head, and they tend not to tell anyone afterwards.”
Repeated concussions over an extended period of time have been shown to contribute to diseases like Alzheimer’s, dementia, Parkinson’s, Lou Gehrig’s and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), all of which have been found in a multitude of retired professional football players. Since the founding of the NFL in 1929, 23 retirees have committed suicide from brain-related ailments, the most recent example being San Diego Charger’s legend Tiaina Baul “Junior” Seau. After leaving the New England Patriots in 2009, Seau committed suicide in just his third year of retirement; he was 43 years old.
“We are just now seeing the residual effects from NFL players who have been playing for 15 or more years from these new studies,” former head football coach Adam Boyd said. “When I was a kid, these kind of problems were unnoticed.”
Companies like Under Armour and Riddell are in the process of constructing state-of-the-art helmets that reduce the impact of hard knocks on the head; however, they will sell at $150 per unit. Benedict and the local tech companies he is working with are on a mission to produce a model of this safety feature that is more affordable.
PVPUSD is taking immediate action by requiring middle and high school football athletes to take pre-season health and wellness tests to monitor the conditions and well-being of the individuals playing football. At Palos Verdes, incoming freshmen are required to attend a seminar where both professional medical doctors and trainers discuss the risks, particularly those of head-to-head tackles, associated with playing football.
“If they do get hit in the head during the season, the athletes take a post-injury test and then compare those results to that of the baseline test,” Peninsula head football coach Michael Christensen said.
Baseline tests are utilized to assess an athlete’s balance and brain function. With the data, the schools evaluate whether or not a student has sustained a concussion or a traumatic brain injury.
“We’re trying to inform parents more on the possibilities of injuries in this sport,” Gardner said. “Nothing is more important to us than the safety of our players.”
The coaches take action by teaching their players how to tackle properly and safely to lessen the risk of injury.
“There is a way of playing football without helmet-to-helmet contact, like lunging low with your arms out ready to tackle,” Boyd said. “It is a trendy thing to have a chin strap unbuckled or to not wear a mouth guard because that is what athletes in the NFL tend to do. We do not want our players to follow suit.”
In an effort to get kids to join the football program, Christensen, with the help of generous donations and the fund-raising efforts of his players, purchased new equipment and jerseys and constructed a new locker room.
Students and athletes are well aware of the fact that football is one of the most aggressive, contact sports; unfortunately, not all contact injuries are visible.
“Concussions are a weird injury, because unlike a broken arm, no one can see the
