By President Obama made news in the sporting press today for his explicit concern about catastrophic injuries among football players. In one of the lighter passages of an interview published today in the New Republic the President singled out the NCAA with regard to concussions among its football athletes:
You read some of these stories about college players who undergo some of these same problems with concussions and so forth and then have nothing to fall back on. That’s something that I’d like to see the NCAA think about.
The President and father of two girls was even more direct about his own family saying, “if I had a son, I’d have to think long and hard before I let him play football.”
By far the most popular high school sport in the US, with over a million participants in 2011-12, there is also evidence that football’s growth is slowing. Eric Sondheimer of the Los Angeles Times reported last August that over 12,000 fewer athletes were playing high school football, and that 38 schools had dropped the sport. This he speculated was due to a combination of injury concerns, single-sport athletes, and increasing popularity of alternate sports, such as lacrosse and water polo (the quote from Harvard-Westlake freshman Ben Hallock is instructive). Data from the CIF showed similar results with a drop of 4,000 football athletes between 2007 and 2011 in California, while both boys and girls water polo gained participants in that same period (.7% for boys; 1.4% for girls).
Meanwhile, injury data does no favors to football. In the 2011 Annual Survey of Catastrophic Football Injuries the authors found eight cervical cord injuries with incomplete neurological recovery, and 14 similar brain injuries. Thirteen of those were at the high school level and one at the youth level. Not surprisingly, no similar injuries were found in water polo.
As the President said in the New Republic interview, football is bound to find ways to ameliorate its inherent violence. In the meantime water polo may have a pool of several thousand more youth athletes from which to recruit.
