By Omkar Pratapwar
On October 2nd, high school football player Tom Cutinella died. His school’s officials do not know the official cause of death, and it won’t be announced publicly, but they say that the team executed a “typical” play before he collapsed on the field.
Cutinella was the third death on the football field that week. Just 6 days earlier, 17 year-old Demario Harris from Alabama also was reported dead while playing football. Harris’s coach reported that Harris had a brain aneurysm, but the official cause of death is still not known. However, Harris’s father posted on Facebook that Harris suffered a brain hemorrhage “that was caused by a hit he took during Friday’s game”. Harris’s father believes that Demario may have had a pre-existing condition, but there is no way to tell now. Also on the field, a North Carolina high schooler, Isaiah Langston, collapsed on the field before his team’s game just one week before Cutinella died.
More than 1 million kids play high school football across the country, and fatalities related to the sport remain “rare”, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research at UNC. Death rates in the sport have declined, according to the Center, but when they happen, they occur primarily at the high school level. There were eight fatalities related directly to football in 2013, according to NCCSIR, and all were high school players. That was the highest total in more than a decade.
Despite advancements in technology, equipment, and gear, the occurrence of deaths in football seems to be a constant. According to the Youth Sports Safety Alliance, high school players suffer 3 times as many catastrophic injuries, permanent disability injuries, such as fractured necks or serious head injuries, and also temporary paralysis, heat stroke, or cardiac arrest than players at the college level.
There is no doubt that certain parents will want out when it comes to their kids playing football or any sport for that matter. But the truth is these deaths are rare, and the likely case is that these kids had some sort of a prior condition or these incidents were just flukes. In the end, football isn’t going to stop in America. we just need to be more careful.
