Of all sports celebrated at New Hartford, football is the most popular. Of all the sports played at New Hartford, football is the most dangerous.
Having a sport be popular isn’t an issue; rather, it is the risks of the sport being supported. Collision after collision, football players ram their heads into each other and slowly obtain brain trauma. It doesn’t take a concussion to completely incapacitate someone for life, but it takes repeated bashings over time to sustain permanent damage. Athletes can wear protective padding, but when they smack into another football player, the brain shakes. Football, as a sport, just isn’t safe. Students who aren’t even adults and have potential to grow are engaging in activities which could slowly turn their brains into mush.
If life was to wait until the metaphorical bus eventually ran us over, playing football would be like continuously ramming your head into a wall to prepare getting run over by a bus. There are surely better ways to make friends than to obtain permanent brain damage.
One athlete on the New Hartford Football team, Peyton Way, a prominent football player has personally witnessed 1-2 concussions that needed intervention. These are the blunt force trauma that take down the players and they really need to get help. Every game there are collisions and “contact to the head is pretty much guaranteed,” said Peyton Way.
There are some rules being developed to mitigate the danger of football. One rule designed to protect players prevents athletes from their head during tackles which reduces damage, but the problem is that football players still receive a lot of energy per collision and their head wobbles, just to hit the ground.
Peyton said athletes work on getting faster and stronger so they get tackled less and minimize contact to their heads, but he acknowledged that “ it is still a pretty dangerous sport.”
Football is a game. It is a game where people watch for entertainment, where so few people rise to the top while sustaining horrible brain injuries. It’s entertainment that pays well. People tackle and hurt each other to get the ball into a patch of grass far away; people ram into each other to give time to carry balls into patches of grass. People at home sit on their TV watching people on the field ramming into each other, sustaining permanent brain injuries. People get paid. They are selling their functioning minds for money.
“I think people would spend more time focusing on other things in life if there wasn’t as much money,” Peyton Way acknowledged.
High school football players rarely become college football players–only around 8% get to play in college. What high school students gain is how to work in a team. However, there are other ways to obtain friends than bashing your head against other students.
Peyton is one of the rare athletes who will play football in college. For him, the risks are worth it. He said he grew up playing football and he’s invested a lot of time and effort into getting good at it.
I do not like football. I find it impossible to enjoy a sport where I know that most people will eventually die of horrible brain complications and that they are selling their brains for money. I find it unfortunate as when they retire with all that money, they will have severe brain trauma and not be able to enjoy life. Whenever I watched football, I kept seeing the horrible collisions and thinking how that brain inside that skull would move and smash into the walls, sustaining permanent damage.
We are watching high school students slowly kill themselves for our own entertainment. We are supporting high school students who slowly kill themselves for the money that very few will receive. I shudder to think of what kind of cruel person that enjoys watching children slowly kill themselves. Football is just a game. Do not waste your life on a game.
