A hit ended a boy’s dreams. We must move toward ending youth tackle football | Opinion

I’m a hypocrite. I will admit it. Football has revealed my hypocrisy, exposes it daily.

That latest chapter comes from the story of Logan Wood. He and his mother Sarah Wood filed a lawsuit against Horry County Schools in 2017 for gross negligence.

According to the lawsuit, Logan was on the North Myrtle Beach Junior High B-team in 2016 when he was hit several times and felt off balance, but coaches told him to continue playing.

He did what most young football players would have done. He listened to his coaches despite having “confusion, visual impairment and a loss of balance,” the lawsuit said. Of course he sustained several more hits during the game. Afterwards, he was diagnosed with a major head injury, experienced short- and long-term memory loss and had to stop going to class because of the impairment.

That ended his dream of playing college football or going into the military.

A jury awarded the Woods $850,000. The school district appealed. The S.C. Supreme Court recently ordered the district to pay $750,000. That it took eight years from the time Logan sustained his injuries to reach a resolution because of the school district’s stalling is a travesty. Justice delayed can feel like justice denied even if you win in the end.

But there are even bigger issues at play — whether student-athletes that young should be involved in a collision sport such as football, or if public schools should encourage and sponsor hard-hitting games given the growing body of evidence showing it is just not good for young, still-developing brains.

I must admit that it feels wrong, hence my hypocrisy.

I played tackle football from roughly about the age Logan was when he sustained his serious injuries through college at Davidson.

My son began playing football for St. James Middle in Myrtle Beachand played some in high school.

My daughter tried out for her high school football team.

Now, I watch football games multiple times every week and I will likely throw a makeshift Super Bowl party in February, joining more than 100 million others on what is effectively an American holiday.

The sport is dangerous, violent and, yet, beautiful and awe-inspiring. It has been used as a tool to channel the aggression of young boys who may have gone astray without it, as well as a platform for teaching them about discipline, hard work and other valuable life lessons.

In the aggregate, it has been an overwhelming positive in the lives of millions.

I can’t even imagine a United States of America without tackle football, particularly here in the South.

Fortunately, we don’t have to do without, though we need to continue making more changes about safety, beyond what we’ve done over the past decade. We need to prevent young boys from playing tackle football, or at least discourage them from doing so.

There should be no tackle football for young boys. Student-athletes can be taught the fundamentals through flag football and other means. They can put on the pads and helmet in high school, or the eighth grade only in exceptional circumstances.

The fewer hits to the head, the fewer full-on collisions for the youngest bodies, the better.

While some coaches swear that getting conditioned to hard hits early is foundational to good development in football, others have been successful while cutting back on the toughest practices.

I don’t know if such a change would have prolonged the career of former Coastal Carolina University and N.C. State star Grayson McCall, who recently retired because of head-injury concerns rather than take his immense talents to the National Football League.

I suspect it could have.

Young boys and their parents probably aren’t going to lead the charge for such a massive cultural shift. But someone must.

It would also mean Horry County Schools and other districts would be less likely to have to pay large sums of money to young boys and their families — and make me feel less like a hypocrite.

This story was originally published December 19, 2024 at 5:00 AM with the headline "A hit ended a boy’s dreams. We must move toward ending youth tackle football | Opinion."