You get the news in an instant these days, and then you move on to the next thing. You might have seen it in the paper this morning, heard it on the radio in the car or maybe you saw
You get the news in an instant these days, and then you move on to the next thing. You might have seen it in the paper this morning, heard it on the radio in the car or maybe you saw it on the Internet, and it was bad. But then it was gone.
Bad news travels fast, they say, and in a world of instant information, everyone is getting their 15 minutes of infamy. Two weeks ago, as the country celebrated the start of high school football in little hamlets, big cities and everywhere in between, the news could hardly have been worse for high school football.
In Texas, two players were seen on video tape running away from the play, directly at an official, taking him down with an ugly double team ambush. The incident was brutal, selfish, cowardly, and was said to have come from an assistant coach.
Not far away in Louisiana, the season opened with a high school player returning a punt, having his neck broken on the play. He was carried off on a stretcher and died from his injuries.
These aren’t just oddball occurrences to be shrugged off as isolated incidents. It’s true that players aren’t being killed in football every day, but a 2007 report in the American Journal of Sports Medicine revealed that an average of nine high school players die every year, not all from blunt trauma. There’s dehydration in summer workouts, other accidents than can happen, but nine a year? Isn’t that a lot?
It was enough to prompt USA Today to research a story last November it titled, “Why are high school football players dying?” If you’re a parent of a football player, it might be worth an investment of a few minutes of your time.
“It’s already happening here,” said Kalei Namohala, Ka’u High athletics director, “thankfully, not to the extent we saw in some of these other places, but it wasn’t all that long a ago a BIIF (basketball) player attacked an official in a game, right there on the floor; we’ve had incidents with coaches saying things, taking it a step too far, and the same with parents. Oh, it can be a real challenge keeping up with the parents.”
This is a good time for coaches to remember the spotlight we put them in culturally. It might be a matter of under-inflated football in a National Football League game, it could be a school’s Heisman Trophy candidate acting a fool in the student union building and getting publicly reprimanded, or it might be two players viciously taking out an unprotected official.
“I kind of hate to say it,” said Waiakea football coach Moku Pita, “because I am one, but when I heard about (the Texas ref abuse incident), the first thing I thought of was, ‘Must be the coaches.’ It doesn’t always seem fair, but these are high school kids, they’re just learning, they don’t come to us with much football education.
“Most everything we do in the offseason is geared toward safety,” he said. “This is a collision sport, it gets violent out there sometimes and you really have to have your techniques in order. When you see bad technique on film, you start thinking about what they’ve been coached, same thing when you see an outburst like what we saw in Texas.
“But I will say, I’ve never seen anything like that attack on the official,” Pita said, “and I hope I never do.”
Pita is fortunate in that he’s been a football coach for 12 years and has never been on the field for a serious injury.
Not the case for Namohala, who earned her professional athletic trainer’s certification in 1998.
“I don’t want to say I’ve seen it all, but I’ve been around a lot of injuries,” she said, “spinal injuries with EMT involved on the field, an ankle facing the wrong way, I used to do rugby (training), and guys were always coming over with flappy ears, almost ripped off their heads.
“It has all made me more of a practice person than a reactive person, so when people ask about safety, I just tell them to get the kid in every technique-oriented camp or clinic they can find. I mean, really stress it with the kids and talk face-to-face with the coach about it, at the appropriate time.”
When parents, teachers, coaches and players get together, good things tend to happen, even in high school football.
