Aug. 29, 2024, 1:22 PM CDT
By Sarah Jacoby
In just the last few weeks, at least six teenaged football players have died. Their grieving families are now calling for better safety measures that may have helped save their sons.
Ryan Craddock told NBC’s Sam Brock that his 13-year-old son, Cohen, had only been playing organized football for a year when he died due to a head injury sustained during practice.
Semaj Wilkins was just 14 when he suffered a medical emergency and collapsed during football practice on a 90-degree day near Enterprise, Alabama, his mother, Regena Adams, told TODAY. Adams said her son didn’t have any health conditions that would have predisposed him to an emergency like this. “I am very heartbroken,” she said.
Along with Craddock and Wilkins, at least four other middle and high school football players have died in August, as NPR first reported.
While football deaths like these are rare, they do happen. And, experts tell TODAY, many of them may be preventable.
How many kids die due to youth sports?
There were 16 football fatalities in 2023, according to the annual report from the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research.
Of those deaths, three were due to traumatic injuries while 10 were related to exertion or medical issues like sudden cardiac arrest, heat stroke, aneurysms or asthma.
Some deaths, like head injuries, occur as a direct result of the sport. But other tragedies, like deaths due to heat stroke, are indirectly related to the sport. These indirect deaths and happen typically about three times more frequently than direct deaths.
How to prevent deaths in youth sports
Experts do have some recommendations to prevent deaths like these — and that list starts with proper training.
“Every time you hear about a death happening in practice, that was avoidable if we could retrain coaches on how to teach kids to play football without them getting hit in the head so much,” neuroscientist Dr. Chris Nowinski, told The TODAY Show.It should be basic practice to teach kids how to block and tackle in a way that protects the head.
Craddock wants to find a way to provide padded Guardian Caps to other players, he told local West Virginia outlet WSAZ. The NFL has been testing out the caps as well, but their effectiveness in preventing head injuries isn’t clear yet.
For example, heat stroke deaths during practice are always preventable, experts told TODAY. Coaches and school safety personnel should know the signs of heat stroke and how to manage and treat the condition, the NCCSIR explains. And in the case of other medical emergencies, like sudden cardiac arrest, schools need to have an action plan that’s reviewed and rehearsed annually to ensure young athletes get the care they need as quickly as possible.
In many states and school districts, there are already recommendations in place intended to protect young athletes. But, at the high school level, “most of the safety regulations are guidelines,” Nowinski said. “And I think we wouldn’t be seeing these deaths if they were more widely enforced.”
Finding better ways to enforce the existing safety guidelines, possibly by enshrining them in state law, is the next step for the parents.