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Football Concussion Lawsuits Start To Hit High Schools
HughPickens.com writes Michael Tarm reports that a former high school quarterback has filed a lawsuit against the Illinois High School Association saying it didn't do enough to protect him from concussions when he played and still doesn't do enough to protect current players. This is the first instance in which legal action has been taken for former high school players as a whole against a group responsible for prep sports in a state. Such litigation could snowball, as similar suits targeting associations in other states are planned. "In Illinois high school football, responsibility — and, ultimately, fault — for the historically poor management of concussions begins with the IHSA," the lawsuit states. It calls high school concussions "an epidemic" and says the "most important battle being waged on high school football fields ... is the battle for the health and lives of" young players. The lawsuit calls on the Bloomington-based IHSA to tighten its head-injury protocols. It doesn't seek damages. "This is not a threat or attack on football," says attorney Joseph Siprut, who reached a $75 million settlement in a similar lawsuit against the NCAA in 2011. "Football is in danger in Illinois and other states — especially at the high school level — because of how dangerous it is. If football does not change internally, it will die. The talent well will dry up as parents keep kids out of the sport— and that's how a sport dies."
Previous research has shown that far from innocuous, invisible injuries, concussions confer tremendous brain damage. Individuals with chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) may show symptoms of dementia, such as memory loss, aggression, confusion and depression, which generally appear years or many decades after the trauma. "The idea that you can whack your head hundreds of times in your life and knock yourself out and get up and be fine is gone," says Chris Nowinski. "We know we can't do that anymore. This causes long-term damage."
1. Fully socialised healthcare and comprehensive welfare state like all the most advanced countries in the world do it, then there'd be no need to have this sort of inefficient, risk-avoisive bullshit just because people fear being fucked for life over a moderate injury;
2. Acknowledgment then that lottery-win money is a ridiculous way to compensate anyone for an injury sustained while doing something risky. It fucks things over for everyone.
I know it's being tried at some colleges and high schools, but it would not surprise me if mandatory sensors that communicate to central monitoring station at games and practices are required in the future.
I'd imagine that a threshold of G's and number of times during play time or practice will require the player to sit out for a period of time or for the game/practice.
Only a matter of time.
Concussions are caused by sudden forces applied to the brain, right?
Well then, let's get rid of the helmets. No, really. It's not like there's hard game pieces flying towards your head at 90+ MPH (hockey, baseball, lacrosse). The only long-term damage that a helmet can protect against is skull fractures. Other than that, they reduce the pain associated with hitting your head, making it easier to damage your brain.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
Even if people are inclined to let bygones be bygones, and not poke the touchy question of whether certain authority figures chose to stick with the 'eh, just rub some dirt on it, wimp' theory of sports medicine for sake of convenience even after medical evidence demanded otherwise; this seems like one that isn't going to go well.
Mitigating shocks with helmets that don't make you look like you've been engulfed by a marshmallow python just isn't an easy problem; and there isn't an obvious 'floor' value below which shocks(especially when repeated, often, and often in relatively quick succession) are entirely harmless. Even if you can push the 'eh, they knew the risks and chose to play' at the pro level, that isn't going to go so well with children, who are typically treated as unsuitable for contract-grade decision making.
Those brain cells are gone for good -- and we're talking about minors who are acting under the care of an adult in authority.
Lacking <sarcasm> tags,
who wins - common sense or big money.
Are they still separate? One wonders....
make helmets with sensor .... because they WILL NEVER WORK.
Unless you are constantly scanning the head, there aren't any sensors that can detect a head injury (ie: most are internal).
Let me guess - you played a LOT of football without a helmet?
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Did you start posting here again Ethanol-Fueled? Great post as always!
> If football does not change internally, it will die.
Good.
Then schools and colleges can get back to academic disciplines.
If people want group sports, go to the local sports center and sign up.
Sports fuck up the priorities of schools and colleges to their detriment.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
"If football does not change internally, it will die. The talent well will dry up as parents keep kids out of the sport— and that's how a sport dies."
Good, let it die.
1. Fully socialised healthcare and comprehensive welfare state like all the most advanced countries in the world do it, then there'd be no need to have this sort of inefficient, risk-avoisive bullshit just because people fear being fucked for life over a moderate injury;
Wrong.
The purpose of the tort system is to incentivize people to act reasonably. It has big costs--a bunch of jerks trying to get money--but that's what it's all about.
Socialized healthcare takes care of the cost to the individual who is harmed--it does not incentivize the high school to act reasonably.
Tort Reform. Now is the time.
So what we have here is someone dumb enough to ram their head into a post a few times by accident, listening to some smart lawyer who's saying "you're a victim! compensation!" Smart people don't ram their heads into brick walls or the equivalent. Bet the lawyer wasn't the one playing football.
So how much cotton-wool do we wrap our kids in, anyways?
Frontline did a piece a little over a year ago on the NFL and CTE: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/...
Then don't play football.
Avoidable brain damage is stupid. Avoidable mechanical brain damage twice so.
The talent well will dry up as parents keep kids out of the sport--- and that's how a sport dies.
Let it die. The trend for every decade I've been alive is that more brains are needed to survive in the workplace, not less. Not only are the jobs more skilled, there are more rules to follow--- you have to have the mental wherewithal to know when you can and cannot say "fucked her right in the pussy", to use one famous example. We don't need otherwise healthy people starting at a deficit because they placed some game during their developmental years.
All downside. No upside.
Contact-sports cause much butthurt and crying.
More at 11.
Should be separate from schools anyway. What are the chances of a student actually making a career out of a sport? It does happen, but it's rare. I'm not saying get rid of athletics all together, but schools waste a ton of money on competing. Something that would be better done by a community league of some sorts, separate from the school system.
Why does the helmet only have padding on the inside? Padding on the inside makes it like a construction workers helmet that is meant to protect you from hard objects like girders and falling buckets of nails. Padding on the outside of the helmet would (slightly more) cushion the repeated sudden shocks that can damage the brain. The hard candy shell should be in the middle to distribute the shock over a larger area, which in football doesn't help much because that area is your braincase, but the shell will help the helmet keep its shape. Of course padding outside the helmet would also eliminate the loud hit sounds that the spectators enjoy and make the players look like little cream puffs that can't play rough. We should just give the players weapons and release lions during the game.
As we get ever more data about the danger of even mild concussions, it's pretty obvious Football is never going to be "safe". It's a sport focused on big, meaty impacts between dozens of large men running at each other full tilt. But the idea Football is going to die is laughable. We've know boxing was destroying young men's minds since the 1920s, and it's still alive and....punching. There will always be someone desperate and poor enough to want to "fight their way out of poverty".
But football as the sport of the everyman is probably over. The team captain who bullies all the nerds in 2020 will be captain of the school basketball team or something. Hell, maybe not suffering cranial trauma every week for years on end will mean these jocks won't even be dumb!
Why would parents keep kids out of sports when they can cash in on the lawsuits?
Quite possibly. In fact, schools that feel threatened might deemphasize gridiron football in favor of association football or another form of "football without a helmet".
Let those who want to play sports form private clubs, have their own leagues, rent fields and clubhouses and whatever. Don't waste my money on it.
Similarly no taxpayer money should ever go for stadiums, but considering how fundamentally corrupt most local governments are there is no way that is happening.
Yep, football is very gay, just like the military. Always looking for a *few good men*. And killing does make your dick hard..
And you'd be ran out of town.
In many places in small town america, high school sports (especially football and basketball) are a big entertainment draw. In my hometown of 6,000, it was not unusual to see over 1,000 people at a football game.
I hate to say it, but most people are more interested in winning the state championship than in leading the state in graduation rates.
From a judge or jury who decides to award damages anyway. The plaintiff in that famous suit against McDonald's over a defective coffee cup was seeking only to cover her medical bills, but she was awarded far more than that.
I use football as a litmus test in my company. If an interviewee shows enthusiasm
for football when he or she is asked about the game during the interview process,
I make sure that person doesn't get hired. Sure, that person may have good skills,
but I honestly believe that enthusiasm for a game which involves so much brutality
indicates things which are not healthy about the individual who shows such enthusiasm,
and I will not have such people working for me.
"Sports" like boxing and football will never be safe because they involve repeated blows to the head. Single blows are bad enough if they are of high force, but research has shown that repeated blows to the head, even moderate ones, are more than additive. The window of vulnerability has been found to be between 3 and 5 days, meaning that you need to avoid any additional impacts for that long after you have an initial impact. Because boxing and football involve hitting the head repeatedly over the course of a single day, it is apparent why football players and boxers have the worst cases of post traumatic encephalopathy (PTE). The only way to prevent this is to stop after the first blow to the head, which would make both of these "sports" unplayable by human beings. If you want to help out with this problem, invent robots that can engage in these activities. They too will sustain damage over time, but unlike human brains, they will be repairable. They also won't file lawsuits.
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
See subject-line above: THINK about it (would break necks)...
I say that, since yes - I used to 'spear' people ALL THE TIME (before it became illegal) to stop them (mainly tight ends, running backs, or wide receivers until they left my zone & safeties would pick them up instead).
I kept my brain safe by using 2 pieces of equipment that kept me from getting concussions OR a busted neck.
1.) Water Helmet (not the "mixed ones" with air & water, but JUST water with journals between packets to allow flow @ a slower rate between cells + foam layer beneath that)
&
2.) A "DONUT" (1/2 a donut shape really, & made of thick rubberized foam that attached to my shoulder pads) that kept your head straight during impacts.
The latter WAS really needed. The one "disadvantage" of water helmets, pure ones that is, is they WEIGHED a lot more. You needed #2 above unless your neck was a tree-trunk!
(They worked - never HAD a concussion, or brain-injury due to them...)
APK
P.S.=> Former starting cornerback for a state champion in my day (gave football up though, for lacrosse - better chance @ scholarship in my area, Syracuse N.Y. was why AND my father told me the day I turned 16 to get a job (& had long talk about which sport gave ME the most benefits, meaning collegiate aid/scholarship, which Lacrosse did (room & board partial combined with academic scholarship))... apk
Let me guess - you played a LOT of football without a helmet?
In Australia all codes of football are played sans helmet.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I like Australian football and I respect the game but things are a bit different here. The few Australians that play in the U.S. are either place kickers or punters. Both would get knocked around like rag dolls if they decided to try to tackle anybody here. It's a completely different game.
No, football means it is played on foot, rather than on horseback.
Football is modeled after warfare. The idea of charging the line in violent confrontation and almost assuring great injury or death was a common thing to do in the Civil War, WW1 and several lesser wars. At the time people didn't normally live very long and few were feeling good at the age of 40. We have classic players in major plays who called them selves old and senile at 35. So the idea of being snapped in half on a football field seemed quite acceptable and players were told that it was their responsibility to be trained and able to handle the conflict of the game. It is like telling them if they die in the game they just did not try hard enough. In 1860 a 10 year old boy might be treated as an adult. These days some parents consider their offspring to be kids until they are in their 40s. But after they mess up football what about boxing, motorcycle racing and sports that rip people limb from limb? In motorcycle racing there have been incidents in which the brain was bashed completely out of the head. The famous Mike Hailwood actually stopped to attend a dying rider in the middle of a race and other riders were actually driving over the brains on the track. Then again Mike the Bike and his son died in a car going out for fish and chips.
A little dose of reality: Colleges do FAR more to recruit and court sports talent than academic talent.
My niece has some talent with soccer and decent grades. She was offered full rides at a lot of schools (tuition and living expense). She was offered special dorms, special tutoring, super nice facilities reserved for sports people. The coaches flew her out to their schools for sales pitches and gave her the red-carpet treatment, expensive dinners, etc.
Me with my paltry top-1/2 percent test scores, straight A's in hard classes won with hard work, and extracurriculars, (but NOT outstanding in sports)? No heavy recruitment, no full free rides offered, though I too got offered some priority dorm access and some money.
It dismays me how much more *kicking a ball* is worth to colleges than my big brain and hard academic work was!
And no, you can't just "study harder". Innate talent is NOT distributed equally and people who studied and worked harder than I achieved less simply because they weren't lucky enough to be born with a first class brain as I was. And there is NO way I could physically compete with the typical football player without heavy chemical enhancement no matter how hard I tried. So much for *choice*. You must play the cards you are dealt!
Australian Rules is not the only code of football played in Australia - hence the plural above.
Rugby forwards are not the same as Australian Rules forwards, and are unlikely to do rag doll impersonations.
Obviously they aren't usually as big as NFL linemen since they have to full 80 minutes in a game without the constant breaks in play of American Football and hence can't ignore endurance when building strength, they don't have to be tiny though: http://www.rugby.com.au/wallab...
I like Australian football and I respect the game but things are a bit different here. The few Australians that play in the U.S. are either place kickers or punters. Both would get knocked around like rag dolls if they decided to try to tackle anybody here. It's a completely different game.
juicing may have something to do with that players get heavier and die sooner than they did pre-juicing. http://www.boston.com/lifestyl...
I'll just leave this here.
You miss the virtues that are given to millions of kids who play football. The value of HARD work, team work, obey the rules, learn complex strategies.
When you have games that nobody loses and nobody gets hurt, you end up with SOFT kids that do not know how to compete.
Some kids get hurt, they learn that life is not fair. The parents should be watching over their kids and not abdicating responsibility to the school.
"The talent well will dry up as parents keep kids out of the sport— and that's how a sport dies" WRONG hitting all the HS orgs with sueballs is how you kill a sport.
I know, my HS (small catholic) did not have football because of a lawsuit many years ago.
Keep the PEDS out, teach good form and let the kids play or watch the US get FATTER and SLOWER and lose all competitive fire.
...is not to play.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
First you need a warning caution hot on a coffee cup and now this?
Well of course trauma to the head is bad, it is where you brain is after all.
This is like kicking a wall bare foot and blaming the wall after you shatter the bones.
You're the one w/ delusions of grandeur of being a psychiatric pro http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... and, you're not. This is no first for you, as is seen in the link above also, regarding your additional obsession with apk.
Exactly my friend. Sports don't belong in schools. Reading, writing, math, science, engineering, technology, and life skills (like cooking, finance, and basic first aid) belong in schools.
Are you talking about the free college education in phony classes for a sports scholarship? Take some of these pro-sports players out of their million dollar contracts and see what kind of job they can hold. Maybe a security guard at Target, or some other brainless job. Pro sports is a joke. Real sports are the Olympics, but even that is getting out of hand with training starting at 3 years old. I stopped watching pro sports when MLB went on strike, it's not a sport anymore. They're vegetables even before they get brain damage.
Attempting to be a human being and failing shown here http://www.softedconsult.com/i...
"I'm going to take my kid out of football because it's dangerous!"
Said nobody, ever. Here in the USA, if your kid is good at football that's even better than being a super genius.
I sell sports flooring for a living. One of my sales points is concussion and how to best prevent it. I can't tell you how many K-12 school administrators & architects tell me "if there isn't a law and we aren't getting sued, I don't care." It is disgusting. They choose the cheap option rather than the safe option every time. And they never take into consideration the standards set by ASTM, EN, or DIN. Low price cheap cheap cheap
Tell us more on being a schizo, dope smoker (yes we know what "420" means) http://soylentnews.org/article...