by Adam Peck Aug 24, 2018, 6:22 pm
High school football suffered a two-percent decline last year even as a record number of students — nearly eight million — participated in at least one school-sponsored sport, according to the annual High School Athletics Participation Survey.
Last year was the 29th consecutive year of growth for participation in high school sports. But the survey, which is conducted by the National Federation of State High School Associations, found that 20,000 fewer students played football last year than the year before. It continued a downward trend begun in 2010 — just after the first studies linking football to Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy, or CTE, came out. Participation in high school football has declined by seven percent since 2010, even in states like Texas where top-flight high school programs have traditionally filled their stands better than some Division I colleges.
Even with the decline, football remains the most popular sport for high school boys by a wide margin. More than a million high schoolers played football last year, with boys’ track and field a distant second at 600,000 participants.
The future of the sport has routinely been called into question as more and more evidence emerges that competitive football can lead to serious, sometimes fatal, brain trauma. One recent study by the American Medical Association examined the brains of deceased NFL football players and found that 110 out of the 111 brains examined suffered from CTE. The disease can only be diagnosed posthumously and is known to cause memory loss, behavioral anomalies, suicidal thoughts, and other cognitive impairments.
All but one NFL player’s brain examined was diagnosed with CTE. Credit: AP Photo A new study looked at the brains of former football players and found CTE in almost all of them
What makes CTE particularly nefarious is that younger players — with less-developed skulls and more delicate brain tissues — are thought to be more susceptible to the kinds of repetitive sub-concussive blows that results from, among other things, violent collisions on the football field.
A 2015 study by the Mayo Clinic examined the donated brains of both non-athletes and people who played a contact sport in high school. One third of the athletes exhibited signs of CTE, compared to none of the non-athletes.
The increasing body of evidence has also fueled sharp declines in participation in youth football leagues. Several states are considering legislation that would impose an age requirement on tackle football, and advocates for new regulations on contact sports — including Dr. Bennett Omalu, who is credited with discovering CTE — have argued that allowing anyone under the age of 18 to play tackle football is tantamount to child abuse.
The problem of declining participation has already caught the attention of the NFL, which has introduced several new rules meant to make the sport safer for athletes in the hopes that college, high school, and youth leagues begin to teach their athletes safer techniques as well. But the new rules have been selectively enforced and poorly understood even by the officials tasked with adjudicating infractions on the field. And the league’s initial reluctance to accept the scientific evidence — they went so far as to hire several of the same lawyers, lobbyists, and consultants who worked for the tobacco industry to try and discredit research that found cigarettes to be lethal — further delayed their response to the unfolding crisis.
NFL games have dropped from 16 million viewers to 14 million viewers in the last year. Football still remains a popular sport for both players and fans. Despite declining viewership over the last few years — declines that have nothing to do with protests by players during the national anthem, by the way — football remains the most watched sport in the country by a wide margin. Whether it chooses to do more to protect its players, however, remains to be seen.
https://thinkprogress.org/high-school-football-declines-again-83b78e3a1c41/
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