'It's un-American': will the government and CTE fears kill US youth football?

With evidence mounting that football damages children’s long-term health, should the state step in to protect young players?

Youth tackle football is a sport in crisis. While participation rates in recent years have remained relatively steady, the broader culture has begun to move against the sport. In recent years, everyone from scientists to politicians and even NFL stars who have made millions from the game have publicly declared that they would not let their children play tackle football.

Now, four states – California, Illinois, Maryland, and New York – are weighing up legislation that would restrict or even outright ban youth tackle football for children under 14 years of age. While there’s no guarantee that any of these four bills will become law, they mark a new front in the battle over America’s most popular sport.

The legislation is at the heart of a conflict that pits the right of parents to decide what’s best for their children against the state and its mandate to protect the health and safety of the public.

In California the debate has taken center stage as opponents of the state’s proposed bill, the Safe Youth Football Act, have quickly mobilized to try and defeat the legislation, which they view as an existential threat not only to youth tackle football, but also to other contact sports.

“This is downright un-American,” said Michael Wagner, the executive commissioner for Southern California Pop Warner Football. “I think [for] the government to tell parents that they’re mistreating their children because they’re allowing them to play a sport ... is an impingement on their freedoms. It’s an impingement on their choices and it creates a slippery slope because what is the government going to tell us that we can’t do next?”

According to Jason Ingman, a coach and parent whose Change.org petition to raise awareness of the bill and “save youth football” has received over 40,000 signatures, few in California’s youth tackle football scene recognize that the proposed bill could end their sport altogether.

“When I [spoke] to people I know in the football community, I received one common thread: ‘That will never happen in California.’” Ingman told the Guardian. “And this comes from football coaches, parents, high school coaches, peripheral members of the community ... And I don’t think they really understand; it’s not that it won’t happen in California, it’s that it is happening in California right now.”

Kevin McCarty, one of two co-sponsors of the California bill, told the Guardian that the government is exercising its role to ensure public health and safety.

“Every once in a while there’s an issue where it’s not just the parents’ obligation, but [also] the government’s obligation to promote child safety,” McCarty said. “And this is an issue that is one of those [where] the research shows that these little kids’ brains are in a fragile growing state and ... the risk-reward from big hits to the brain for tackle football just doesn’t make sense.”

Right now, both sides of this debate seem to be talking past one another. As one side uses a recent CTE study as evidence for why youth tackle football should be banned, the other points to editorials written by neuroscientists that preach legislative caution.

As Illinois state representative Carol Sente put it to the Chicago Tribune: “In public safety, sometimes with issues of how much government should get involved, some people will take the side that you have to prove this 100% before you stop. My feeling is these are children’s lives ... There are important changes that have happened, but I do not think the changes are enough.”

Those “important changes” include new blocking and tackling techniques (some of which have since been discredited), rule changes, and limits on contact in practice. But as much as proponents of youth tackle football like to point to these changes as evidence of progress, even they are aware that those changes are not being uniformly implemented across the country or even across their state or county.

“We’d like to make these things universal, codified, state-wide requirements, so if there are organizations or teams that aren’t following these best practices ... they have to follow best practices so we do make the game safer for all involved,” said Ingman, the Sacramento-based youth football coach.

But as reasonable as proposed regulations may sound, they may still not be enough for those like Chris Nowinski, the co-founder and CEO of the Concussion Legacy Foundation. Nowinski, who has studied the effects of CTE on the brains of former football players and high-school athletes, is convinced that children under 14 are at far greater risk of long-term brain damage. No tackle, he says, is ever safe enough for a developing child.

“The reality is that you should respectfully wait for a child to hit puberty and let their brains develop so they develop fine motor control before you ask them to tackle another human being,” he told the Guardian.

When asked whether parents should be able to choose whether their young children play tackle football, Nowinski was unequivocal.

“Where the players are old enough to have a choice and a voice, the game has gotten much safer,” he said. “The problem is, they can’t trickle down to the youngest levels because five year-olds can’t unionize and ... they probably wouldn’t understand what the safest version of the game is. So it’s our job to try and advocate for them.”

Yet if the goal of both legislators and youth tackle football officials is a safer game, then the legislation crafted in Maryland may provide a path towards compromise.

Maryland’s House Bill 552 (HB-0552) would establish mandatory concussion and risk management training for youth sports coaches and officials. It would also make the use of public facilities and fields contingent on compliance with the regulations outlined in the bill. Most importantly, the bill does not single out one sport – in this instance, youth tackle football – instead encompassing all organized youth sports.

“What [the Maryland law] does now is it puts the emphasis on people who will be teaching the children at the Pop Warner level – their skill level has to be up, their knowledge of football has to increase,” said Madieu Williams, a former NFL player and now a law school student, who helped legislators in Maryland craft the language of HB-0552.

In California, Assemblyman McCarty told the Guardian that he and Gonzalez Fletcher have lowered the age limit for tackle football in their bill from 14 to 12 years of age because of the conversations he’s had with local coaches. McCarty also says that he’s willing to continue those conversations with opponents after the language of the bill has been made available to the public.

While the science of CTE is far from conclusive and comprehensive, evidence continues to surface that football presents risks at every level, especially for young children. Proponents of regulation like McCarty and Nowinski even liken youth football’s safety measures to filtered cigarettes, cosmetic changes that do little to change the fundamental dangers inherent in the product.

Regardless of what happens with these four bills, this legislation marks the beginning of a broader cultural and political battle over the future of America’s favorite sport.

• Since publication, it has emerged that the Maryland bill mentioned in this article has been killed by the state’s Ways and Means Committee before it could come to a vote