During two a days my freshman year we had to stop practice for a bit when a JV guy got hit low, flipped over, and landed on his neck. Ambulance took him off. Coach was pissed we had mandatory water breaks “cause some pussy died last year.”
I don’t think he made the team.
(Also in Alabama)
Roll tide! /s
Tellier was “a shining light every day he graced the halls of Morgan Academy,” school headmaster Bryan Oliver said on Facebook. “He was a student, a friend, an athlete and most important a Christ follower.
Ugh. Really got your priorities in order there, Mr. Oliver
I’ve been to the funeral of a 22 year old from a family of true believer born again Christians. It was bizarre. I was the saddest person there and we were only sort of friends. The rest of them honestly believed that he was chilling with Jesus and it would be silly to be sad.
Since then, I’ve noticed that people emphasize the religiosity of the dead when they are trying to reduce their feelings of guilt.
When my Dad died young, 60 or so, the so many “sympathy cards” that we had to read after the funeral emphasized this. I was at such a low point - we were very close and his death was an absolute nightmare - yet it was as if they were comforting themselves by letting me know he was with Jesus now.
And it just made the entire situation somehow worse and more demented.
When I die, I want to be remembered happily by a party. I’m not chillin with Jesus or anyone else and I will demand my family not tone down my atheism, but I want to be remembered for the good times I was able to experience with friends and family. I want the fact that I ever existed to be celebrated. They can be sad and support one another other times, but I want them to put the fun in funeral. Remember me with a barbecue and an open bar. Get some strippers dancing to Highway to Hell. Make it Star Wars themed. I hope there’s at least one drunken hookup. I want people’s last memory of me to be a happy one.
We’ve got such a short time to exist and so much of it is consumed by sadness and the struggle to get by. I don’t want to cause any more grief, or at least I want to balance it when my time is done.
An absolute tragedy, but great on Alabama for only having two people die in the state in two weeks! Gotta be some kind of record!
for only having two kids die on the football field*
FTFY
The NFL acknowledged a link between playing American football and being diagnosed with CTE in 2016, after denying such a link for over a decade and arguing that players’ symptoms had other causes.
So by ~2031 any new high school freshman tackle football players…
…have bad parents?
Or are there equally risky activities I don’t have a problem…
All sports have some level of risk. I’ve got permanent knee issues due to playing softball as a kid. IIRC cheerleading has the highest rate of ER visits for kids sports - the throws and the like are dangerous, and ime parents are slightly more likely to take moderately serious injuries seriously in girls rather than the “walk it off” mentality that my parents and a lot of others have. A shotputter friend has some horrifically wild stories about near misses at their high school.
Sports have a lot of benefit for a lot of kids though, you have to draw the line somewhere. And I think tackle football is over it, I wouldn’t ban anything else that I know of, but I’d definitely support banning youth tackle football. My parents refused to let my brother or I play tackle football as kids because of the danger, I think some awareness of CTE was out there even back in the 90s.
Tackle football is also suuuuper boring as a sport. I honestly don’t understand why it’s so popular.
You can literally say that about anything anyone enjoys…
Correct. I said it about American football this time because I don’t understand how it became so popular and we were talking about it.
Have you watched rugby? I don’t like tackle football either, but rugby takes tackling to a whole new transcendent level.
The difference is the helmet and the pads. If football players were forced to suit up like rugby players, the injury threshold would probably be something similar. The gear makes football players think they can get hit harder while rugby players know they have to tackle in special ways or else they will hurt themselves.
It’s almost custom built for American TV. All the stops and starts make for perfect places to put ad breaks.
I wouldn’t go as far as banning all youth football. I’d say anything before high school would be a good idea. Then scrap things like full contract practices, hitting drills, etc.
I don’t have the study but I remember reading hitting in practice caused the most long term damage. It’s not the big hits but the constant little hits that build up year after year after year
I broadly agree, but I wanted to point out the domino effect. Kids get good by playing up through the younger leagues. If they only play pickup games before High School–and I’d argue it should be even later than that–they won’t have the same level of skills for organized play going in. The quality of the talent pool will drop for college, and then the professional leagues. There is no catching up.
The quality of play will drop. Records will remain untouched. We might see bullshit like the wrong ball trick done in college or even the NFL, because players haven’t been trained to watch for it. People will become uninterested and look for other sports to watch.
I am fine with this outcome.
I think we’re already seeing it with the new players coming in. CTE issues started getting highlighted about a decade ago, and many parents decided their kids ought to play somewhere else. Those kids are now old enough to be looking at playing in college or even the NFL.
Maybe invent a game where you gotta tickle people instead of slamming up against them.
Tickle not tackle. Coaches favourite game to play.
But muh sports complex! Duh church of football! Duh big game is all that matters in life! Day gon gib me a scholarship.
Dead Kennedy’s Jock-o-Rama is playing in my head now… The older I get, the more I realize that American Football is gross.
Can we bring back Gladiatorial combat, make it to first blood and chuck in ship battles. Seriously to first blood would probably be safer for the players overall and would be a lot more tactically impressive, no concussion risk if ya ban blunt weapons.
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