Six high school football players have died in recent weeks. It’s time to take action

Six teenagers have now died while playing school football in less than three weeks. This astonishing rash of football-related school deaths should be understood as nothing less than a public health emergency. It is also a clarion call to question why we are exposing our young people to such a dangerous activity at all, much less in institutions designed to care for and nurture them.
The first four of these recent deaths were due to apparently heat-related causes and the latest two due to head trauma. Five of the athletes were high schoolers, the eldest only 16, and one was a 13-year-old eighth-grade student. The young athletes who died were Ovet Gomez-Regalado, age 15, in Kansas City; Semaj Wilkins, age 14, in Alabama; Jayvion Taylor, age 15, in Virginia; Leslie Noble, age 16, in Maryland; Caden Tellier, age 16, in Alabama; and Cohen Craddock, age 13, in West Virginia.
This is in addition to the death of 18-year-old college freshman Calvin Dickey Jr, who died on 12 July, two days after passing out at a Bucknell University practice from sickle cell-related rhabdomyolysis.
There should be no sugar-coating what has transpired here, nor any claims of coincidence. We already know that football can cause life-altering harm. Between 2018 and 2022, at least 11 amateur or professional football players have died in the US from heat-related causes. We also know that every 2.6 years of participation in tackle football – a sport many American kids are enrolled in as young as five – doubles the chances of contracting the degenerative brain disease chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). We also now know that football players have a 61% greater chance compared to athletes in other organized sports to develop Parkinson’s disease, a risk that is 2.93 times higher for college and professional players.
The effects of tackle football on the brain – while long understood at this point, and acknowledged by the NFL in its concussion settlement – are often easy to normalize and dismiss because they are obscured by helmets and skulls and the convenience of the passage of time. But the traumatic deaths of kids playing football at school must not be ignored.
Kathleen Bachynski, assistant professor of public health at Muhlenberg College, author of No Game For Boys to Play: The History of Youth Football and the Origins of a Public Health Crisis, is unequivocal about what is at stake.
“Can you imagine the public outcry if one NFL player, let alone six, died from heatstroke or head injuries?” she says. “We should be equally outraged about the deaths of children.”
Similarly, a former Southeastern Conference football player, who asked to remain anonymous, was shocked by the recent deaths.
“Hearing about this is horrifying,” he told us. “I’m not sure what the typical number is when it comes to kids or young men dying playing football, but six in the past month just sounds wrong. Being both a player and a coach myself, the system seems stacked against our players, regardless if the program the athletes are at has a high amount of resources or not.
“I personally had an experience where I was at an SEC football camp and asked a trainer for heat guard – something my Alabama high school coaches and eventually my college program stressed when playing in hot or humid conditions. I was denied the salt tablets even after telling them I was cramping and didn’t feel good. Within the hour, I had blacked out and fallen on concrete.”
Former Vanderbilt offensive lineman Jabo Burrow is also not surprised by the recent news.
“I am horrified by the start to this season, but not at all surprised,” he told us. “I still hold to the belief that traumatic brain injuries and football are synonymous. Participation in the sport, at any level, will lead to long lasting changes to your neurological state, regardless of your skill level, and it only increases and compounds the longer you play.
“At the high school level and below, it is past time to ask ourselves the question of what is the allowable level of risk when allowing our children to participate in any organized, state sanctioned activity? When tragedies happen, they are usually accompanied by the phrase, ‘freak accident’. Freak may apply, but it’s definitely not an accident. The ultimate risk of participating in football is death by traumatic brain injury.”
For Burrow, “There will continue to be changes to the game, but the root issue will stay unchanged. Practicing and/or playing football where there is head-to-head contact, or contact between the head and the ground, or contact with the head whatsoever, you will always be at risk of brain injury – which means you are at some risk of death. The articles on the young person that died in Alabama last week seem to state that witnesses could not pinpoint a single moment that led to the death of the player. Football is the moment. Every collision that involves the head is a moment where it could happen. Football can not exist in its current state if you choose to eliminate that risk from your child’s life. I personally believe that allowing participation in tackle football is signing a waiver stating that you understand those risks. It shouldn’t be downplayed and it shouldn’t be swept aside as a freak accident.”
Similarly, some of the former college football players we spoke to for our forthcoming book were convinced after their experiences in the sport that it was not morally sustainable given its devastating costs.
One player explained, “I don’t think the game should exist. You can’t consider yourself an advanced society while having this continue to be so pervasive … That’s why the game shouldn’t exist. You cannot guarantee you can keep these kids safe from that game, in that game, during that game. Your rules and your whistle does not keep them safe.”
Another player added, “I played basketball my whole life. And then my high school coach … convinced me to play football, because I was bigger … So yeah, no, I would have never played football. I would say that’s probably the worst mistake I’ve ever made … If I knew what I knew, I would have never played.”
He later added, “Football is absolutely the worst sport ever created. Like, I would be more OK with two people just trying to kill each other in a boxing ring, because at least that happens once every few months. This is like every day.”
In 1905, 18 people died playing football, leading multiple colleges to drop the sport, US president Teddy Roosevelt to push for safety reforms and Harvard’s president to call the game “more brutalizing than prizefighting, cockfighting or bullfighting”. Over a century later, it’s clear that the reforms that have ensued have not been sufficient to protect our kids from that brutality.
If we genuinely want to protect our kids, reforms just aren’t enough. We need to take seriously the question of abolishing tackle football – especially in our schools.
As Burrow put it in describing the reality of tackle football as it currently exists, “You will sustain some type of trauma to your brain, you may never know the full consequence of your participation in the sport, and you are always at risk of death.”