Why My Wife and I Pulled Our Daughter Out of Soccer
By Ken Reed
The Huffington Post
August 22, 2013
The longer my wife and I spoke, the more the tears started welling up in my 13-year-old daughter’s eyes.
Sitting around an outside table at a restaurant near our home, we were sharing news our youngest child didn’t want to hear: Mom and Dad were not going to let her play soccer anymore.
My wife and I had come to the belief that the risk of short and long-term brain damage from playing soccer was greater than the benefits of allowing her to continue to play the sport.
Bottom line, we believe soccer is hazardous to the human brain — especially for girls.
Girls’ soccer is second only to football in terms of the number of concussions in youth and high school sports. Most soccer concussions are the result of collisions between players, or falls in which a player’s head strikes the ground.
However, we’ve learned it’s not just concussions that soccer players, parents, and coaches need to worry about. It’s the repetitive sub-concussive hits the brain absorbs during games and practices as a result of heading, the act of redirecting soccer balls with one’s head, which of course houses one’s brain.
Habitually heading soccer balls may have similar effects on the brain as the repetitive sub-concussive hits that offensive and defensive linemen receive banging heads along the line of scrimmage in football.
When you actually spend some time thinking about it, sticking your head in front of a hard flying orb — one that can come at you at speeds upwards of 50mph — doesn’t make much sense.
“Long-term (brain) damage may have less to do with the number of diagnosed concussions and perhaps more to do with the number of sub-concussive impacts to the head,” according to Kevin Guskiewicz, a brain researcher at the University of North Carolina.
To that point, the mound of research highlighting the dangers of soccer in general, and heading in particular, is growing larger.
A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association by Harvard researchers compared the brains of soccer players to those of swimmers. They found changes in the white matter of soccer players’ brains that weren’t there in the brains of swimmers.
Another study, this one conducted at Humboldt State University in California, revealed that soccer players who headed the ball the most during a game did worse on cognitive tests after the game than their peers who hadn’t headed a ball. Moreover, the players that did the most heading also suffered more often from headaches and episodes of dizziness compared to players that headed the ball less often.
Moreover, a recent study in the journal Brain found that it’s total head trauma — concussions and sub-concussive hits — that is cause for concern. This is noteworthy because most sub-concussive hits don’t result in any immediate symptoms for athletes. The damage appears to be cumulative.
“Heading a soccer ball is not an impact of magnitude that will lacerate nerve fibers in the brain,” according to Dr. Michael Lipton, lead author of a study that showed that regularly heading a soccer ball can lead to brain injury. “But repetitive heading may set off a cascade of responses that can lead to degeneration of brain cells.”
Dr. Robert Cantu, a neurosurgeon and co-director of the Center for the Study of Traumatic Encephalopathy (CSTE) at Boston University Medical Center, believes heading should simply be eliminated from youth soccer under the age of 14.
But it’s not just young people, or girls, that should be concerned about soccer’s safety. A study of retired professional Scandinavian soccer players showed memory deficits among the pro players.
As a two-sport college athlete, I certainly realize injuries are a part of sports. But brain injuries aren’t like knee, ankle, shoulder, or back injuries. A person’s brain is the essence of who he or she is; it’s the home of one’s intelligence and personality.
I believe strongly in the benefits of teams sports for children — physical fitness, teamwork, leadership, dealing with adversity, commitment to a common cause, to name just a few. But those same benefits can be achieved playing sports other than soccer.
A few days after our dinner table conversation, our daughter began to understand and accept our decision. She will continue to play multiple sports. But soccer will no longer be one of them.
Ken Reed is Sports Policy Director for League of Fans
Sports Forum Podcast
Episode #29 – League of Fans’ Sports Forum podcast: The Honorable Tom McMillen Visits League of Fans’ Sports Forum – McMillen is a former All-American basketball player, Olympian, Rhodes Scholar and U.S. Congressman, and has a long involvement with the President’s Council on Physical Fitness and Sport (now called the President’s Council on Fitness, Sports and Nutrition). We discuss the state of college athletics today, given the pressures of NIL, the transfer portal, sports gambling and huge media contracts. McMillen then provides great perspective on the poor state of physical fitness our young people are experiencing today.
Listen on Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts, Anchor and others.
Follow on Facebook: @SportsForumPodcast
More Episodes on Apple Podcasts; Spotify; Google Podcasts; PocketCasts; & Anchor
Episode #28 – League of Fans’ Sports Forum podcast: A Chat With Mano Watsa, a Leading Basketball and Life Educator – Watsa is President of PGC Basketball, the largest education basketball camp in the world. We discuss problems in youth sports today.
Episode #27 – League of Fans’ Sports Forum podcast: Kids’ Sports: How We Can Take Back the Game and Restore Quality Family Time In the Process – Linda Flanagan is author of “Take Back the Game: How Money and Mania Are Ruining Kids’ Sports and Why It Matters.” We discuss how commercialized and professionalized youth sports are hurting kids and their families.
Episode #26 – League of Fans’ Sports Forum podcast: How Can We Fix Youth Sports? – John O’Sullivan is Founder and CEO of Changing the Game Project and author of “Changing the Game: The Parents Guide to Raising Happy, High Performing Athletes and Giving Youth Sports Back to Our Kids.”
Episode #25 – League of Fans’ Sports Forum podcast: Physical Education Should Be a Critical Component of K-12 School Design – Michael Horn is co-founder of the Clayton Christensen Institute for Disruptive Innovation.
Episode #24 – League of Fans’ Sports Forum podcast: Mental Health and Athletes: Ending the Stigma – Nathan Braaten and Taylor Ricci are the founders of Dam Worth It, a non-profit created to end the stigma around mental health at colleges and universities through sport, storytelling, and community creation.
Media
"How We Can Save Sports" author Ken Reed appears on Fox & Friends to explain how there's "too much adult in youth sports."
Ken Reed appears on Mornings with Gail from KFKA Radio in Colorado to discuss bad parenting in youth athletics.
“Should College Athletes Be Paid?” Ken Reed on The Morning Show from Wisconsin Public Radio
Ken Reed appears on KGNU Community Radio in Colorado (at 02:30) to discuss equality in sports and Title IX.
Ken Reed appears on the Ralph Nader Radio Hour (at 38:35) to discuss his book The Sports Reformers: Working to Make the World of Sports a Better Place, and to talk about some current sports issues.
- Reed Appears on Ralph Nader Radio Hour League of Fans’ sports policy director, Ken Reed, Ralph Nader and the New York Times’ Tyler Kepner discussed a variety of sports issues on Nader’s radio show as well as Reed’s updated book, How We Can Save Sports: A Game Plan. Reed's book was released in paperback in February, and has a new introduction and several updated sections.
League of Fans is a sports reform project founded by Ralph Nader to fight for the higher principles of justice, fair play, equal opportunity and civil rights in sports; and to encourage safety and civic responsibility in sports industry and culture.
Vanderbilt Sport & Society - On The Ball with Andrew Maraniss with guest Ken Reed, Sports Policy Director for League of Fans and author of How We Can Save Sports: A Game Plan
Sports & Torts – Ken Reed, Sports Policy Director, League of Fans – at the American Museum of Tort Law
Books