My wife doesn’t think my 9 yr old should play tackle football. She’s a firm believer that heavy contact of that sort at that age will lead to permanent brain injury. She isn’t wrong. Tackle football can lead to significant and lasting physical damage. Of course the same can be said of biking or skating or karate or any of the other activities the kids participate in. Baseball in fact is more dangerous at this age because the pitchers are so unskilled that they often hit the batters. But that isn’t the point for her. She sees the pros, she reads the articles, and she knows that football is, by its own nature, a dangerous sport. That nature she subscribes to is an image conjured by the media and made worse by the type of shows they thrust on the air to feed a violence hungry audience. The worst offender is a show called Friday Night Tykes.
FNT follows the lives of a dozen or so coaches and parents whose kids compete in the 8-9 tackle football league in Texas. Anyone familiar with the sport or the state knows that Texas lives and dies football. As such they didn’t have to look far to find the most competitive and difficult people to be the avatars of our public youth football awareness. These are men and women who live for the game. They sweat and bleed for the chance to see these kids win. I admire that, but I don’t admire that they remove the fun of the game almost entirely. Football isn’t so much about teamwork and fun here as it is about desire and pain. They want to turn these boys into bone crushing men. They stamp out emotion as quickly as I would a roach and care for it far less. If the way they play is the only way youth football could be, I would applaud my wife’s reluctance. However, it isn’t the only way.
Football is dangerous, but it is also a highly regulated sport that cares for the health of the atheletes. Like any other organized sport there are good people and bad people involved. So long as you stay associated with the good folk, your kid should have a healthy and happy career–that is if you can convince a nervous wife to just let the kid play.