I thoroughly enjoyed watching the Super Bowl LIV (“54”) football match on Sunday — especially, perhaps, because everyone sitting at the bar was rooting for the Kansas City Chiefs and left in a joyous mood after their favored team overcame a 10-point third-quarter deficit to win the game by a score of 31-20.
For myself, this marked the first time I’d watched a Super Bowl game since 1969. I’m not a big football fan. Nor did I end up a fan of Super Bowl commercials, many of which I found to be confusing and obscure. And I was not a little bit shocked to see a pole dance performance in the middle of the half-time show.
But most of all… I was pleased that no one was carried off in a stretcher. That’s not always the case, when football teams take the field.
Jake Snakenberg was a high school freshman playing on Grandview High School football team on September 19, 2004 when he died from what were later diagnosed as repeated concussions suffered on the football field. From an article from reporter Michael De Yoanna, posted to the KUNC.org website on December 16, 2019:
Kelli Jantz lost her son, Jake Snakenberg, during a high school football game. She will never forget his last moments on the field.
“He lined up,” Jantz said. “He set. And then he fell forward and was trying to get up and you could tell something wasn’t quite right. He turned to come to the sideline and he went down and that was it.”
The 14-year-old Grandview High School student from Aurora, Colorado, died in 2004 from brain swelling caused by apparent repeated concussions in the sport he loved playing. In the years after his death, doctors, experts, coaches and others studied ways to reduce the risks of such deaths and to better protect young athletes from the potentially debilitating consequences of concussions…
Kelli Jantz lost her son, but gained a life’s mission: to protect children who engage in sponsored contact sports. Over the next seven years, she met with Colorado lawmakers to find some way to prevent brain injuries resulting from football, hockey, soccer, and other sports. Ultimately, state lawmakers passed a bill in Jake Snakenberg’s name — Senate Bill 40 — and then-Gov. John Hickenlooper signed it into law on March 29, 2011. It requires that kids be pulled out of play if they take a hard hit to the head, and then obtain written medical clearance to return to play.
The law applies to children as young as 11 years old, and requires coaches in public and private schools and even volunteer Little League and Pop Warner football coaches to take free annual training — online — to recognize the symptoms of a concussion.
“This is the most far-reaching bill in the country with regard to protecting children,” said Republican state Sen. Nancy Spence, a sponsor of the legislation, which went into effect in January, 2012.
From a 2011 San Diego Union-Tribune article by reporter Ivan Moreno:
Concussions in youth sports are receiving more national attention recently as the NFL helps states craft related legislation or endorse local measures. The league’s senior vice president for public policy, Jeff Miller, said the NFL is changing its culture surrounding concussions and player treatment as information emerges about the risks and consequences of head injuries.
But as far-reaching as Senate Bill 40 might be, it turns out that schools and youth sports teams are not required to track or report the number of suspected concussions here in Colorado. according to a collaborative report by Greeley radio station KUNC and the Center for Investigative Reporting, When KUNC filed Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) requests with 10 large school districts on the Front Range, only six of districts provided information on concussions. The other four districts did not keep detailed records or declined to provide data.
The state’s largest district — Denver Public Schools (DPS) — was among those that did not provide suspected concussion numbers.
In a written statement, DPS said that though athletic trainers keep information at the school level, “we do not report on any injuries publicly.” Loveland’s Thompson R2-J School District said it does not keep information “at a comprehensive district level.” In Fort Collins, Poudre School District stated that it does not “compile or maintain” such data. In Longmont, the St. Vrain Valley School District said it had “no records responsive” to our request.
KUNC found that students had been pulled out of play more than 6,000 times in the past five years. That’s from just six of the state’s 178 school districts.
From the 2019 KUNC article mentioned above:
In 2011, then-state Sen. Shawn Mitchell warned, before the Jake Snakenberg Youth Sports Concussion Act became law, that it had no accountability mechanisms.
“This bill has no teeth,” the Republican said in a committee hearing. “There’s no enforcement provision. There’s no penalty provision. There’s not even a reporting provision.”
Bit bit if history. Back in 1994, NFL Commissioner Paul Tagliabue created the Mild Traumatic Brain Injury committee and appointed rheumatologist Dr. Elliot Pellman as its chair. Pellman had no previous experience dealing with brain injuries. When asked about concussions in 1994, Pellman told Newsday:
“‘We discuss it on the list of things every time we have a league meeting … We think the issue of knees, of drugs and steroids and drinking is a far greater problem, according to the number of incidents.”
Pellman also told Sports Illustrated that “concussions are part of the profession, an occupational risk.”
But in 2012, a lawsuit in US District Court filed on behalf of 4,000 former NFL players claimed that the NFL had documented medical evidence, as early as 1996, that repeated blows to the head could cause permanent brain dysfunction, dementia, clinical depression, and other long-term mental problems among football players. (Evidence of brain injury among boxers had been documented as early as the 1920s.) The lawsuit claimed that the NFL hid their research and continued to claim that football concussions could not cause long-term brain dysfunction. In a series of scientific papers published between 2003 to 2009, members of the NFL’s Mild Traumatic Brain Injury Committee wrote that “no NFL player” had experienced chronic brain damage from repeated concussions.
How are Colorado parents and young athletes responding to the unfolding evidence?