Is high school football morally tenable? Three more deaths raise familiar questions

In December 2022, Buffalo Bills safety Damar Hamlin went into cardiac arrest on the football field during a nationally televised game. The incident prompted shock and horror across the country and briefly led to sustained public discourse about the safety of the sport. Yet, soon after, the NFL could be found trumpeting Hamlin’s triumphant recovery, even showcasing him at the Super Bowl, in a feat of remarkably adept appropriation and image laundering.
And so the football world returned to its resting state: completely unwilling to acknowledge the extent to which the sport remains an ongoing public health catastrophe. For, the almost-tragedy that befell Damar Hamlin has repeatedly been an actual reality for all too many football-participating families, including that of Jordan McNair, the 19-year-old University of Maryland offensive lineman, who was reportedly told by a trainer to “Drag his ass across the field!” even after he had first collapsed from heat and exhaustion. McNair ultimately died. His mother later said, “No one did anything to even try and cool him down. That’s the part that bothers me most. There was nothing I could do. And I couldn’t help him. It breaks my heart.”
Now, again, in recent days, three young non-white football players suffered acute medical emergencies resulting in their deaths during summer football activities: Ovet Gomez-Regalado, age 15, in Kansas City; Semaj Wilkins, age 14 in Alabama; and Jayvion Taylor, age 15 in Virginia. Although the precise cause of death has not been disclosed in these cases, they all appear likely to be heat-related. In a fourth incident during the same period, this one in Maryland, Leslie Noble, age 16, also died, with police dispatchers reportedly characterizing it at the time as a “player had a heatstroke.” These deaths, about which more still must be learned, are horrific tragedies, but they were also entirely foreseeable given what we know about the dangers of football, particularly in extreme conditions. In fact, 77 heat-related athlete deaths have been tracked since 2000, of which 65% were teenagers. Between 2018 and 2022, at least 11 football players in the US, at the amateur and professional level, died of heatstroke.
Bharat Venkat, associate professor in the Institute for Society and Genetics, department of history and department of anthropology at UCLA and founding director of the school’s Heat Lab, told us that heat harm is an increasing risk for young athletes, particularly football players: “Playing sports in high heat puts stress on your body from two different sources: metabolic heat production and ambient heat. On top of that, you have protective gear that makes it harder to lose heat. As temperatures continue to rise year after year, and as the hot season extends in duration, it’s no longer safe to go about business as usual. That probably requires a fundamental transformation in how we think about sports, especially for young people.”
These conditions also echo the experiences of former college football players that we spoke to for our forthcoming book The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game. One of the players we spoke to described how he lost consciousness in the showers after practice during training camp. He explained: “I later on learned that I basically had all the signs that I was potentially going to go into cardiac arrest … I didn’t have a pulse, so they went to put bags of saline in me … I’d been vomiting so much that my esophagus was scarred and was starting to close a little bit … I did miss that afternoon practice, and I felt super guilty about it. You know, Stockholm Syndrome, whatever you want to call it. The next morning, I went and had an endoscopy. They just found a bunch of scar tissue. So the next day, I was practicing again … and would still kind of vomit here and there, but it eventually subsided. It was nuts. There wasn’t really anybody looking out for my mental or my physical wellbeing. I pushed myself so hard that I literally almost died.”
Likewise, in recent reporting, we learned of another situation where a college football player nearly died on the field, only to have the head coach swiftly move practice fields and continue as if nothing had happened. One coach we spoke to for that story explained that, “At this level in sports, that type of practice is common. We have multiple injuries a practice. They can’t just halt everything and everyone once a player goes down.” It appears that the disregard for injury is normalized in all levels of the sport.
It is notable and not coincidental that the vast majority of the players mentioned in this story are racialized as non-white. At the college level, in what were the power five conferences, although only 5.7% of students overall are Black, Black athletes comprise 55.7% of football players. This is because of what we refer to as structural coercion: the social and economic pressures that push racialized athletes into the sport to receive access to resources and opportunities otherwise denied in a society defined by a history of chattel slavery and structural racism.
UCLA Heat Lab Director Venkat suggests that those dynamics are relevant to the heat question as well: “The sociological side of it is what I call thermal inequality: the unequal distribution of the negative effects of heat, in ways that frequently overlay existing forms of inequality along the lines of race, class, citizenship, disability, and so on. The thing about thermal inequality is that it structures our societies in ways that frequently resemble a zero-sum game. Some people are asked to sacrifice their comfort, their health, even their lives, so that others don’t have to. From there, you can see how sports like football that involve high heat exposure and heavily conscript youth of color (in particular Black men) become a kind a kind of sacrificial ground where the logic of thermal inequality plays out.”
This is something all of us who enjoy consuming the spectacle of football need to consider.
“Certain people are asked/made to perform labor under high heat so that others can enjoy the fruit of their labor while avoiding the heat themselves,” says Venkat. “It’s a fundamental way in which our societies are already structured, and it helps us to avoid responsibility. For example, we can buy strawberries from the store without worry about the health, comfort, or life of the person who picked them. I think the same analysis applies to sports.”
In addition, it is worth always keeping in perspective the brutal fact that every time we watch football, we are actually witnessing players suffer life-altering head trauma–harm that is essentially invisible to us for it occurs inside the helmet and skull. Still, we know that every 2.6 years of participation in football doubles the chances of CTE, which means even children and high school players are systematically suffering potentially life-changing damage on the gridiron, a reality we might reasonably characterize as a form of child abuse.
With all this in mind, as the globe continues to heat, conditions on the football practice field continue to worsen, and kids are left to die, we are left with a simple and straightforward question: is this sport morally sustainable?