Postponing football could save lives
Too many Black youths hitch dreams to sports
COVID-19 has been hell on Shelby County's high schoolers.
Last spring, the pandemic canceled in-person proms. Next, it forced most graduations to go virtual or drive-by.
Now, it's forced Shelby County Schools Superintendent Joris Ray to postpone high school football. In the past, Ray has said that he'd like to see 14 days of COVID-19 cases in the single digits before students, who are now all learning virtually, return to class.
Until that happens, the Friday Night Lights will remain dark.
But nearly 100 high school footballers and their parents recently gathered to protest Ray's decision. Some questioned why Ray waited for the season to start to announce his decision – because now, it's too late for many of them to transfer to high schools that are allowing football.
One parent, Derrick Jordan, said youths need football, and castigated Ray for not involving parents in the decision. Even said that it could “get ugly.”
That's sad and revealing all at once. It's sad because it shows how too many Black youths and parents hitch their fortunes to excelling in contact sports like football; a sport that, even before the pandemic, exposed far too many youths to concussions and injuries that could saddle them with pain and disabilities for the rest of their lives.
And it's also sad that, for many Black youths, the same risky sport that they view as their lifeline out of poverty can expose them to a pandemic that can kill them before they escape it.
A recent study of children and young adults published in the journal
Pediatrics found that Black children were more than four times as likely to contract COVID-19 than white children, while Hispanic children were more than six times as likely as white children to test positive for it.
On top of that, a report from the Centers for Disease Control found that 121 people aged 20 and younger died from COVID-19 between February and July.
While that number is small, experts say the findings reflect a disturbing pattern: Of those deaths, Latinos made up 45 percent, while Black people made up 29 percent and Native Americans made up 4 percent. The CDC also found that while 30 percent of those 121 deaths occurred in children aged 9 and younger, the rest occurred in youths aged up to 20. That likely means Shelby County teenagers who protested the postponement of football; a contact sport in which COVID-19 can easily be spread, might be more vulnerable to contracting the virus and dying from it.
This possibility is emerging at the college level.
Ed Orgeron, head football coach at Louisiana State University, recently said that most of his team had caught COVID-19. That says without the proper testing or protocols in place, football is a risky proposition right now – especially for the Black youths who play it.
Yet when I see Shelby County parents and athletes protesting for the right to play football during a pandemic, I don't see it as a sign of selfishness or ignorance.
Rather, what I see are parents and youths for whom COVID-19 doesn't pose a threat to their lives as much as the idea that they may have to let go of a lifeline out of poverty and into college – and possibly the NFL.
They aren't alone.
Last year, The Atlantic magazine found that as white parents across the nation were abandoning football for their children because of fears about long-term brain injuries, those fears weren't persuading Black parents to do the same.
That's because many Black parents saw football as a sport that not only offered their children a shot at playing professionally, but one which exposed them to coaches as mentors and, in many ways, helped them to avoid gangs and other activity that could wind up being riskier than brain injuries. Or now, for that matter, COVID-19. “Many Black families, unfortunately, see sport and sport only as a means of social mobility for their kids; especially if they are predicting a professional sports career for their kids,” said Billy J. Hawkins, interim chair of the Department of Health and Human Performance at the University of Houston.
But Hawkins, who is author of “The New Plantation: Black Athletes, College Sports and Predominantly White NCAA Institutions,” and whose research examines sports and its impact on Black culture, said that what's also tragic here is that Black parents who believe that football and basketball offer their children the best route to prosperity are actually clinging to a myth.
Less than 2 percent of high school athletes make it to professional levels in football or basketball, he said.
“Yet the delusion that sport is the ‘ticket' is strong in some Black communities,” Hawkins said, something that is fueled by the lopsided representation of Black athletes in the NFL and NBA.
Ideally, Black parents should be able to help their children pursue non-contact sports like tennis, golf and swimming. Colleges and universities offer scholarships in those sports, and unlike football, they won't risk brain injuries or a deadly virus to pursue them.
But that often requires resources that many struggling Black families don't have, Hawkins said. “There is often additional tutoring or coaching required to excel in these sports,” he said. “There is the additional cost of equipment, tournament access, etc. that factor into the equation. Therefore, Black youth from poor families will need various forms of capital to be successful.”
A disproportionate number of Black and Latino youths are contracting COVID-19. But now that pandemic is cutting off one of the avenues to help those youths escape the poverty that is fueling its spread - football.
I can see why, for the football players and parents who protested Ray's decision, that might be too much to take. COVID-19 has already robbed them of prom and summer, and now, possibly their college and professional dreams.
But if they play football in the Shelby County system anyway, or, for that matter, in any other school system, then the pandemic can rob them of their lives.
If that happens, then their dreams won't matter.
You can reach Commercial Appeal columnist Tonyaa Weathersbee at 901568-3281, tonyaa.weathersbee@commercialappeal.com or follow her on Twitter @tonyaajw.