NFL concussions and the "trickle-down effect"

Two great articles this week on concussions in youth sports. Alan Schwarz in today's New York Times continues his remarkable coverage of the issue.

This quotation from Alan's piece gets to the heart of the issue. (The issue being, until the NFL takes seriously, or seriously enough, the consequences of head trauma, neither will the millions of youth leagues).

“Walking off the pain in an N.F.L. game turns into walking it off in a Little League game — the trickle-down effects on high school and college players are very real and can be fatal,” Representative Hank Johnson, Democrat of Georgia, said in the hearing.

Over at The Daily Beast, Buzz Bissinger takes on pretty much the same subject, though he argues more broadly against the macho sports culture which reaches down to high schools and, in some communities, even youth sports. There's also a nice mention in Buzz's story of Until It Hurts, specifically to reporting in the book about avoidable injuries.

Those of you who've read it know a 16-year-old pitcher in my family had one.

On my reading list, LeBron's "Shooting Stars"

It's a stretch to recommend a book that you haven't read, but what the heck. I'm giving a nod to Shooting Stars, the new LeBron James memoir. I like that the book's focus is James's formative years in Akron, Ohio, and bonds forged with teammates on and off the court. That interests me a lot more than the more predictable superstar pap about life in the fishbowl of the NBA.

Full disclosure: James' co-author Buzz Bissinger, was a college classmate and a fellow editor of mine at the Daily Pennsylvanian back in, uh, well, during the Pleistocene Period. Buzz, author of the classic Friday Night Lights, also generously blurbed my book. He may be two feet shorter than James but this is a rare case in which the athlete and his collaborator are of equal stature.

More on concussions, criminal charges

Sadly, kids and sports injuries seem to be at the top of the news this week.

NPR's Talk of the Nation aired a pointed discussion on the Louisville prep coach charged in the death of the young player who died from heat stroke. Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights, the Grapes of Wrath of youth sports books, was one of the guests and let's just say it's a good thing for the accused coach that Buzz won't be sitting on the jury. The other guest was Antoinette "Toni" Konz, education reporter for The Louisville Courier-Journal who explained that rather than rush to judgment, the prosecutors actually showed great restraint. Their investigation went on for months before they presented their case - which apparently included numerous accounts of the coach denying water to his players - to a grand jury - .

Then there was the report released yesterday further establishing the link between concussions suffered by football players - mostly NFL players, but not all - and early onset dementia.

The headline from that story as it will be reported in most places is that six former NFL players are now known to have died early from a degenerative brain disease caused by head trauma, the latest being Tom McHale, a former Tampa Bay Buc. The report goes on to say that for the first time evidence of the same brain condition has been discovered in an 18-year-old boy "who suffered multiple concussions in high school football."

From a press release issued by the Boston University School of Medicine:

"The discovery of the initial stages of CTE (chronic traumatic encephalopathy)in an 18-year-old should move the discussion of football's concussion crisis toward youth football. The identity of the 18-year-old will not be revealed at the family's request. According to Cantu [Robert Cantu, MD, chief of Neurosurgery and director of Sports Medicine at Emerson Hospital in
Concord, Mass and a study co-author], "Our efforts to educate athletes, coaches, and parents on the need to identify and rest concussions have only been moderately
successful because people have been willing to look the other way when a
child suffers a concussion. I hope the discovery of CTE in a child creates the urgency this issue needs. It is morally and ethically wrong to allow our children to voluntarily suffer this kind of brain trauma
without taking the simple educational steps needed to protect them."

It's comforting to think that the answer is education. If the coaches and parents understood the risks, they wouldn't be putting the star quarterback who'd just had his bell rung back into the game. Comforting because if the fix were that simple, these injuries could be reduced or even eliminated within a matter of months or, worst case, years. It isn't that simple.