I’ve posted a lot of words this year about youth football and how I’ve felt about the season thus far. I go back and forth about my motives here. It is hard to get a real sense of what is brewing beneath all of the personal disappointment and confusion I feel about how my own children are being utilized on the team. I am used to watching my boys be team MVP candidates and, at the very least, be in the conversation for playing time. It is a hard shot to go from that to hoping my kids get in the game for at least five plays over the span of two hours. Still, as I continue to unpack the way I was feeling and process everything I watch go down in practice and on the field, I am closer to recognizing the real issue at play here: I am noticing a groundswell around youth football in the way it is played and reacted to. We are quickly taking sides for or against a sport that isn’t going away and in that we are losing sight of and ability to control the real issue at play here, which is how do we make this sport we love more safe for the people we love who are playing it?
I read an article on Grantland about the recent death of High School player Evan Murray that stated, “American football is the great, gravitational force at the center of the universe in which our spectacle sports operate. It is fine to operate from the moral high ground, but the fact remains that the existential crisis of physical destruction in American football is an existential crisis at the heart of American sports.” There is truth in those words and truth in the idea that, perhaps, we shouldn’t let our kids play this sport. Well, I prefer they play the sport now and develop the fundamentals for safety instead of being thrust into it at an age and a style of coaching more concerned with wins (and thus job security) than the safety of the kids. It is a slippery slope at all levels. Coaches and players and parents want wins. We want to cheer the big hits and in fact do cheer the hits that end with a player being carted off the field. As a result, we lean on the players and plays that get the wins and the big cheers.
Ostensibly, my son is not being given the chance to do what he is good at, which is utilize his speed, because he hasn’t shown that toughness to go out there and tackle the way some of the other kids do. I get it. When I played the first thing the coaches did was throw me, a raw walk-on, onto special teams and demand that I lay out to bring down the returner. What my boys’ coach did was to throw my eldest on the offensive line and tell him to block boys who are, at the lightest, twenty pounds heavier than his 68 lb frame. It is worse in practice where he lines up against kids who are anywhere from 120 to 187lbs and is expected to hold them back for ten seconds. That is when he isn’t lined up against his 65 lb little brother in one on one drills, which is a whole different set of issues a father can only hope he doesn’t have to deal with (fortunately, I turned it around so they war on the field and not in the living room).
I will continue to unpack this and continue to search for understanding. I know this: I am spending a great deal of mental energy thinking about coaching and I’m not actually coaching right now. That seems like a waste of psychological resources.