By Drew Anderson
The results of a recently published Boston University School of Medicine and VA Boston Healthcare System study show that football players who take up the sport before the age of 12 may develop symptoms of brain disease earlier in life. It is one of many studies that further link brain trauma and brain diseases such as chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE) to the violent contact sport of football. The concussion/CTE issue continues to cloud the sport, and more and more parents of youth football players may be agonizing over whether or not to allow their children to play tackle football. One such case involves Hamilton College student Drew Anderson, who tells his story of why he walked away from the game he loved.
For a few months every fall, football meant everything to me. It’s a game of sacrifices, and that’s why I loved it. The hours of practice after school, two-a-days at the end of summer and playing through pain are challenges ingrained in the sport. My high school football coach used to preach to our team if we were struggling and behind at half-time, ‘You gotta make sacrifices for your teammates! You gotta decide, are you hurt or are you injured?’ Nobody ever wanted to admit the latter.
I started playing football in sixth grade in the Tonka Football Association in Minnesota, and immediately I knew it was for me. I was overweight, but I was strong and had a head for the game. I started playing center — the player who hikes the ball to the quarterback — and I loved the sport. I enjoyed the rush off the line, the head-to-head battle all game, and the satisfaction of a well-executed play. As a lineman, much of my game was based on intuition. I just had a feeling for where I needed to be to execute a play, and I got a great rush from that. Football is addictive — you’re never satisfied with your last play. Every tackle and block, every touchdown or interception, I would visualize each play in my head after games, and I wanted to do them all over again, only better. For me, I wanted to completely dominate my opponent. A lot of my friends played football and we were like brothers. We wore our jerseys to school with pride on game day. We spent lunch and recess together. We lifted together over the offseason. As a center, my coaches used to tell me I was “the quarterback of the line,” and I took pride in that designation.
During my eighth-grade year, our football team was undefeated, and we were conference champions. The elation my team and I felt after executing a perfect season stuck with me. The next season I was on the high school team and the game moved so much faster. The upperclassmen were much stronger and there were more complex plays to run and memorize. The intensity of the team, players and coaches was a lot more difficult for me to process.
I attended The Blake School, a small college prep school in Minnesota where junior varsity and varsity teams practiced together. As a freshman, I was lucky if I’d get thrown in for the last few plays of a varsity game. At practice I played across from the near 300-pound senior starters. The varsity starters outweighed me by 100 pounds, and at 5-10, I was shorter than most of the other players. My freshman year, I estimate that I sustained around 100 hits every practice, day in and day out, all season. But I never suffered a concussion playing football, or at least, I wasn’t diagnosed with one. At center, nobody was ever trying to tackle me, but I still worried about all those ‘little’ hits on the line, the constant jarring of my head.
Then in October 2013, deep into the football season, the documentary “League of Denial” was released, and it forever changed my relationship with football. Here were renowned neuroscientists