Is High School Football Too Dangerous For Your Child?

The 16-year-old Turman, a rising junior cornerback who had been receiving significant recruiting attention, suffered a broken neck, including a fracture of his third cervical vertebra, on what was described as a routine football tackle during his team's scrimmage against Banneker High.

Witnesses said he went instantly limp after the blow and the especially well-liked Turman was pronounced dead hours later at Grady Memorial Hospital. Several hundred turned out for a candlelight vigil on Sunday night, and other events are expected in the time following Turman's Saturday funeral. 

Over the weekend, Ralph Swearngin, Georgia High School Association executive director, expressed his sympathy at the GHSA website:

”Any kind of death of an adolescent, it’s a tragedy,” said Swearngin. “You think about the loss to the family and a young life being cut off whether it’s an athletic event or car accident or natural causes. As a father and grandfather, it strikes you personally.”

Deaths from high school football are very rare according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research at the University of North Carolina, which says that over the last decade, fewer than three boys a year on average have died as a result of football on-field injuries.

Spinal injuries are also rather rare in prep football with the same UNC-based research center reporting that fewer than 1 in 100,000 high school participants suffer a spinal injury each year. 

But there’s no denying that football is a rough and violent game, and the risk of catastrophic injury or death is present. The reality is that equipment improvements have helped reduce the rate of injury, but because of other factors, including the angle of a person’s head at impact, there will continue to be serious injuries suffered on the football field.

Forty-nine states, including Georgia, have in the last five years passed laws to help better care for young athletes who have suffered head injuries, as well as heightened the overall awareness of concussions and their long term effects.

Nearly 50 percent of the concussions in high school sports occur on the football field, and the National Federation of State High School Associations has approved new rules for the 2013 football season in an effort to minimize player injuries to the head. 

Even President Barack Obama chimed in on the subject earlier this year: "Those of us who love the sport are going to have to wrestle with the fact that it will probably change gradually to try to reduce some of the violence," the president said.  

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