More ominous signs for football

In the days after a column I wrote about the decline in high school football participation ran in The Chronicle on Sunday, there was more news.

Novato High, the program that started the discussion with its plan to drop varsity football, announced that — in part because of all the publicity generated — enough athletes had come out to the first day of practice to salvage the varsity team.

On the same day, the National Federation of State High School Associations released its participation survey results from the 2016-17 school year. For the fourth straight year, participation in 11player football declined, and this drop was the sharpest, a loss of 25,901 players. Football is still the most popular sport by numbers in the United States, and the decline represented just 2.5 percent, but the backward trend comes at a time of historic growth in overall high school sports participation.

And then a real shocker: Long Beach Poly — one of the historic powerhouses in the country — announced this week that it would not field a junior-varsity team for the first time in its 110-year history. The team, ranked No. 10 in the country, has been known for its massive turnouts and is a cradle for NFL stars. But it doesn’t have enough players this year to field a junior-varsity team.

Long Beach Poly made the decision because of the same reason behind the declining numbers: safety. Without enough numbers, the safety of the athletes who do play becomes an even greater concern.

This is how a death spiral starts.

Readers weighed in with their thoughts on my column. There were some predictable slur-filled emails about our

“soft” culture and a longing for “real” men. Some touted rugby as an alternative contact sport that results in fewer concussions, thanks to tackling techniques and fewer head-on impacts. Most echoed the growing national concerns about the game of football.

“I agree wholeheartedly that the declination trend will build and accelerate as parents and others learn more and more about brain trauma, particularly when (not if ) they discover a method for detecting CTE in living humans,” wrote UC Davis sociology professor Sanford Simpson, who said he is not anti-football. “Once that happens, one of the ‘others’ paying attention will be insurance companies . ... I believe football’s relegation to ‘niche’ sport status (if not extinction) will be driven largely by financial pressure. When/if the cause-effect relationship is firmly established between football and long-term brain damage ... organizations simply won’t be able to afford the insurance coverage necessary to protect themselves.”

One reader, who has relatives who played football for Miramonte High-Orinda last year, said the boys had decided to stop playing because that school also dropped its junior-varsity program, and the jump to varsity would be too abrupt. And not safe.

Dr. Steve Horwitz, a member of the 1996 U.S. Olympic medical staff and the founder of an organization called TeamSafe, cast doubt on administrators’ claims that football is safer than ever because of increased concussion concerns.

He wrote: “63 percent of public high schools and 78 percent of private high schools lack even one full-time athletic trainer . ... Most schools do not have an Emergency Action Plan and those that do either do not have it posted, do not practice it, or both. …

“Parents simply drop their kids off at practice without asking the crucial question, ‘Is this coach prepared to handle an on-field medical emergency?’

“(While) ‘state law mandates that all programs adhere to concussion protocol’ none of these laws provide an implementation, documentation, communication and oversight system. The standard response of tossing information on a website won’t do it and laws are not a panacea.

“Somebody has to know when to have the child taken out, someone has to take the child to the doctor; someone has to have oversight over the entire process. There must be a safety system in place that gives coaches and parents immediate access to the critical information needed in those first 5-7 minutes.”

One reader was much more succinct: “Outlaw that disgusting sport.”

This debate isn’t going away. But, little by little, high school football might be.

“Parents simply drop their kids off at practice without asking the crucial question, ‘Is this coach prepared to handle an on-field medical emergency?’ ” Dr. Steve Horwitz, founder of an organization called TeamSafe, in an email