From corporate sponsorships to nationally televised events to minute by minute online coverage of the games, high school football is growing bigger by the day.
But the question that lingers in the locker room away from the glamour of the field is whether enough is being done to ensure the safety of kids that play the game as its intensity keeps growing?
PBS’s FRONTLINE, the documentary series, delves in the business of high school football in Football High.Everyone who is close to high school football, may it be football observers, sports journalists or even coaches will agree that there has been a dramatic increase high school players’ size strength and speed in the past ten years. For example, in the country’s No. 1team, Euless Trinity, Texas, 18 out of 89 varsity players now weigh more than 250 pounds.
Gregg Easterbrook, ESPN columnist, say that owing to the increasing pressure on the high school kids and the media attention they are receiving, the games have become more like a little NFL in the past 10 years.
Kelvin Williams, a private trainer, also agrees with the same and says that if one looks at the scenario position by position, one can only compare it to the NFL teams.
Taking up this backdrop FRONTLINE’S Football High, centers its investigation on the incidence in Arkansas where two players collapsed due to heatstroke while practicing during the hottest summer in history. Both the players were put in the same intensive care unit with both suffering from extensive damage to internal organs. Unfortunately, only one of the boys survived with the other dying three months after the collapse.
Dr. Doug Casa, a leading expert on heatstroke, says that since heatstroke is one hundred percent avoidable there should be no person dying from it.
Football High goes on to investigate the differences in the fates of both the boys and how having an athletic trainer on staff weighed in favor of one. It also focuses on other injuries the players suffer on the field and also how a degenerative mental disease that is usually found in NFL players is being discovered in high school player as well.
Rachel Dretzin and Caitlin McNally are producers of this documentary where Rachel is the writer and director as well.
Image official credit website:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontline_%28U.S._TV_series%29
