Football is the United State's most popular sport. In the 2012-2013 school year, 1,088,158 high school students signed up to play football. The second highest sport with participation is track and field, with a total of 1,053,611 students. (NFHSA). While football is mostly made up boys, track and field's population consist of roughly 40% girls. There is no sport even with combining the sexes that beat the population of high school football players. Recently, the number of high school football participants is down. Everywhere in America has mostly seen declining numbers for football except for the South. States such as Alabama, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas are still rising in football participants significantly. Youth football leagues are feeling the biggest impact. ESPN reported that in a two year period from 2010-2012, Pop Warner, the nation's most recognizable youth football league, saw a 9.5 percent drop in participation. Since the recent studies on Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE) and the link it has to football, parents have been questioning whether they should sign their child up for football. It makes sense that high school numbers have not dropped much compared to youth leagues because they have already made the decision to play. Many icons, including star basketball player Lebron James, President Barack Obama, and Hall of Fame football player Mike Ditka, have spoken out saying they would not let their child play football. The movie "Concussion," starring Will Smith, was made to bring the spotlight to the dark side of football: brain damage. The media has been in a frenzy of reporting the dangers that any football player faces, short or long term. The goal for this paper is to explain that parents should continue to let their child play football because of the life values it teaches, the safety adoption football is making, what it brings to a community, and the lack of alternative sports.

 Some life values football teaches are discipline, teamwork, commitment, and leadership. These values all add up to build character, which helps turns young adults into productive members of the community. These life values are not exclusive to football, as they can be taught in other sports, activities, schools, and so on. However, there are certain aspects of football that make these life values more likely to be engrained in its participants. Certain positions have life values practically attached to them. For instance, when a running back runs for a touchdown, he receives the spotlight and credit for the score. The people not credited for the touchdown are the lineman that blocked for the running back. Linemen perform a thankless job, one that does not receive any credit or stats, yet they are expected to give it their all every play. This highlights teamwork and putting others over themselves to strive for something bigger, which is a success that is needed in real life. A society is combined of people that do their jobs daily to make life better for themselves, their family, and the community as a whole. People perform thankless jobs that are needed for a community to function. As John Harbaugh stated, "the value of football is the values in football." Discipline is gained from not jumping off sides and maintaining composure. Usually football draws the biggest crowd, and that causes chaos. A player must stay within their normal psyche and not let anything get to them. For teamwork, on the field there is eleven guys all relying on each other. If one fails, all fail. Ten players could do their role perfectly but the one to mess up can be exposed and cost their team. Since football is the most popular sport, it draws the most competition. There is a level of competition that is comparable to the job market. In order to be the best, one must work year round and be committed to their goal. Football is a blend of speed, strength, and mental toughness. This means there are no off days to be the best, whether that means practicing, studying film, or hitting the weight room. Leadership is the most effective value. Certain positions need vocal leadership such as quarterback or middle linebacker. Football teaches that not everyone needs to be a vocal leader but anyone can lead by example. That means giving it your best or displaying great integrity off the field. Any of these values can be attributed into one's life and helping towards success and being a better person. 

Football is evolving to become safer. In fact, it has been evolving over one hundred years. In 1905, there were nineteen football-related player deaths compared to 2015, which had eleven player deaths. While eleven is an alarming number and may not seem like much of a decrease, the amount of players in 1905 compared to 2015 is a huge difference by hundreds of thousands. Therefore, the fatality percentage has drastically decreased. Within the last few years, there have been many studies that link brain damage to football. Since the emergence of the dangers, football has changed how the game is played. There are more rules now to minimize risks. The biggest example is the banning of helmet-to-helmet contact made by the NFL in 2013. The rule states "A 15-yard penalty will be called if a runner or a tackler initiates forcible contact by delivering a blow with the top/crown of his helmet against an opponent when both players clearly are outside the tackle box". The NFL's reasoning for the rule was to avoid concussions at all costs. This rule helps players realize that they wear their helmets for safety, not for a weapon. Since the rule was implemented, helmet-to-helmet contact has happened less as the number of penalties for this occurrence have been declining. (NFL) There is new technology being made every year to decrease the impact on the brain when getting hit. The most recent technology is pads being put over helmets during practice. The pads absorb the shock and impact of force to the player's brain. Also, there are helmet sensors being used that will alert trainers or coaches of potential damaging head trauma. The sensors show where the collision occurs and the force of the hit. These new technologies are making players safer while helping studies continue on how often a player hits their head during a practice or game.

Coaches have the biggest effect on a player's safety. Not too long ago, it was common for coaches to allow a lot of contact at their practices. Since the emergence of brain damage being linked to football, coaches have minimized contact made in practice. The brutal part of football is dying out. Coaches are more aware and concerned about player safety. If a player mentions anything about his head hurting, he must be evaluated and take a concussion test. Practices have been regulated and can only be held so many times for a certain length of time. An argument used against football is by examining former players who have killed themselves or speak out against the game currently. Jack Betcha, a sports agent, has a reason for this. He admits that all of his retired clients are "beat up" but that is because they played they game when there were not any rules prohibiting dangerous hits. He states "My clients believe the game is much safer now as players now practice way less than they had to when they played and only have about ten percent of the contact they had. So many rules are in place now to limit contact and dangerous hits especially to the brain." The media will jump all over any former player speaking out against football but will not cover the players that support football. The players that played football as a living do not shy away from the fact that their bodies are damaged from football. The former players that support letting kids play football acknowledge the changes being made to make football safer.

There is a common agreement; football is dangerous. Not many people deny this and if they do, they are viewed by most as crazy. The argument is whether football is too dangerous to play. It is also true that football does have the most concussions diagnosed out of every high school sport. The top four sports with concussions per 100,000 athletic exposures are football (64), boy's ice hockey (54), boy's lacrosse (46), and girl's soccer (33). (CDC).  These numbers give a greater representation for concussions in high school sports instead of the more commonly mentioned fact that 47 percent of concussions come from football. That number is misleading because football is the most participated sport in the US by a large amount. With men's lacrosse being the third most dangerous sport for concussions, it is surprising that it is America's fasting growing sport. Between 2009-2013, men's lacrosse grew 15 percent. Hockey has a gritty and tough reputation attached to it that is generally accepted. It is a part of Canada's culture and is their most popular sport. There is not much of a debate going on for whether a kid should be allowed to play hockey. This sparks the question of why is football under attack and not the other collision sports, such as hockey or lacrosse, getting any heat. The main reason is money. While the NFL is highly criticized for trying to hide concussions and brain damage in the shadows to keep generating revenue, there is also revenue to be gained for studies against football. Football, being the most popular sport in America, is chosen to attack because it will gain the most interest. Studies that can exploit the already known dangerous nature of the game can make money. Off those studies, movies such as "Concussion" will use the opportunity to exploit the danger for cash. This leads to the continuous panic and attention of the public to football, which the media will continue to pump out stories of former players from the NFL suing the league for the damage they suffered while having limited knowledge of the dangers that the NFL is said to have withheld. This also gives people that do not like football the opportunity to attack it into the ground and replace it with their liking.

The main thing parents need to realize is that the majority of brain studies of CTE in football are done on former professional football players, not high school teenagers.  97 percent of kids do not play past high school and of the few that make it to college for football; a small percentage of those will make it to the NFL, where their career will last an average of 3.3 years. (Statista). The main concern for letting a child play football is their safety. A parent values their child's health more than anything else. A parent worries he/she is responsible for harming their child because the child cannot fully process the danger of football when they want to play. An argument is that parents should wait until high school to let their child play football. By doing this, the child misses out on proper technique and learning the fundamentals of the game at a slower pace. The teenager starting football in high school with no experience is potentially in more danger than their peers. There was a study done that aimed to measure and characterize head impact exposure (HIE) of youth football players throughout one season and explore associations between HIE and changes in the selected clinical measures of neurologic function. The conclusion formed from the results was that youth football players can experience remarkably similar head impact forces as high school players but cumulative sub concussive HIE throughout one youth football season may not be detrimental to short-term clinical measures of neurologic function. The results acknowledge that youth football can be just as dangerous as high school football that could be a big worry to parents. However, the study also concludes that the head impacts did not have an effect on short-term clinical measures. This means that the danger of kids sustaining serious brain damage is not as risky as originally thought. The kids being tested were showing normal neurological function after a year of playing football.

Football is America's sport. That is not an opinion, it is a fact supported by numbers. There is no other high school sport with participation rates higher than football. There is no other sport that is watched as much as football. The super bowl is the most watched sporting event every year. Football is makes up a large part of American culture. Patrick Findler, a professor at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia, Canada, wrote a journal observing both the arguments for and against football. His conclusion was that no argument for football had strong enough support to make it acceptable for parents to let their child play football. What he did not cover in the article is the importance of football to the United States culture and history. It is unknown whether or not he supports whether kids should be allowed to play hockey. As he is from Canada, that is the country's most popular sport. Hockey has very similar concussion rates to football as mentioned earlier in the essay. There may be reason to think that some doctors, professors, and researches cannot understand the importance of football in America's history, culture, and economy unless they experienced a lifetime of football in America. Every country has a different culture and football may be something that cannot be fully understood to certain cultures.  

Dr. Bennett Omalu, the researcher who discovered the link between football and CTE, has mentioned he is not anti-football. However, in the article "Don't Let Kids Play Football", written by Omalu and published by The New York Times, he states, "Playing football is like smoking cigarettes." He continues by mentioning the example of how as a society, it has been made harder for tobacco companies to advertise and smoking is now generally accepted as a negative thing. He argues that isolation of harmful things have been done to nearly anything that is very dangerous except to sports like football. This article does not take the benefits of football into account. Comparing football to smoking cigarettes is faulty. The child that plays football learns important lessons from football and can use that for the rest of his life, on or off a field. The people that watch the players are not only entertained, they are brought together by something thought of a just a game. His comparison is anti-football, the thing he claimed exactly not to be. By comparing smoking cigarettes to playing football, he dismisses any positives of football.

 Football should continue to be the most popular sport in the United States. Football is dangerous and does have links to CTE, but for youth and high school, the rewards outweigh the risks. Playing beyond that should be part of a different discussion. If a player has the opportunity to play in college or the NFL, the risks of getting long-term brain damage increase significantly, but at that point, the player is an adult and can fully process the dangers of continuing to play football. Football needs to continue to adapt to make the game as safe as possible without destroying the core of the game. Football is too important to go away. First, it is a billion dollar industry that is apart of America's culture. That is not the true importance of the game though. There is something to it that is unlike any other sport. Something that is impossible to explain that the only way to know it is to live it. There needs to be middle ground between the opposing sides. The NFL plays a big role in the future of football at all age levels; any knowledge they know about football needs to be released. Parents need to stop over fearing football. Their child is likely to come out with all positives from football. There will be injuries, as there is in any sport, but they only have a certain amount of years to play the game before they miss out for life. Parents should encourage their child to play a sport if they want to, not hold them back. Parents should let their children play football because the sport is adapting safer measures and the benefits of football greatly outweigh the risks.

