This is a topic pretty near and dear to me. As a parent of 6 and 7 year old boys (Plus another baby on the way, lol) with a long, complex history of football related TBI's I can kind of see this from both directions.
First off, I love football. When I played, I loved everything about it. It was the first sport I played that I had success in, and to this day I dream of being able to coach it somewhere. Playing football in high school truly steered me away from a bad path a lot of my friends went down, and I can't say enough about the role being part of that sport helped me grow as a young adult.
Thanksgiving of my Junior year, I suffered a grade 3 concussion catching a pop-pass over the middle. I was knocked unconscious for a pretty significant amount of time, I was taken to the local hospital and kept there for the weekend. That had been my 3rd documented concussion, and the doctors told me in no uncertain terms that my football career needed to be over and that my recovery this time needed to be slow and deliberate, because they honestly didn't know what to expect. I thought I did. I had two of them before, and I figured a week later I'd be fine.
I was wrong. Right away, I just felt cloudy. Bright lights made me sick, like a knife was going through my head. My short-term memory was shot, and I was struggling to maintain a train of thought or put coherent sentences together. Perhaps most difficult, I just couldn't fall asleep. Within the first week, I went 72 hours straight without sleeping until my body basically shut-down. That became a constant occurrence in my life. Sleep for a few hours every couple of days. My body had lost it's internal clock, and when I finally could fall asleep, I had no control over when that was. I'd just fall asleep in the middle of class just to be woken up 10 minutes later and reprimanded. This developed into a big problem (I was in a Voc-Tech HS no less, so falling asleep while in shop is dangerous). I felt constantly confused, overwhelmingly anxious and entirely angry that no one seemed to understand. I had done well in school up to that point, and my grades fell off a cliff. I sat out the basketball season, and I started missing more and more days of school.
It was really a hazard for all involved to have me in my shop while I was going through that. Some days I felt like I could hardly see with the bright lights shining through the shop. I was rarely engaged in learning anyway, and I became a drag and a danger on everyone else. By the end of my junior year, the school was at a loss. Some of my teachers just thought I was lazy for a while, and the school had trouble understanding it because I didn't understand it. It took months of "negotiations" with my child advocacy lawyer and the school to formulate a plan so I could graduate. I had seen half a dozen neurologists, including two of the best at Children's and MGH in Boston, and even they were unsure what my prognosis was. I tried so many different changes to sleep habits, melatonin and more advanced sleep drugs and therapies. I started seeing Psychiatrists and counselors to help with my decaying sense of self worth. I had sank into the kind of black hole of depression I never dreamed existed before. It took over a year and half (much longer, by certain measures) to start to really climb out of it. I cycled through countless medications, I had to go to both summer and night school to catch up at school. I wouldn't wish that on anyone. The after effects of the serious TBI I dealt with were far-reaching and complex. I applaud a guy like this who, even after he finally realizes his dream, has the sense to know when to walk away.
As my kids are now reaching the point where they wanna play pop Warner, I'm really divided in how I feel about it. On one hand, I know just how dangerous it can be better than anyone. On the other hand, I loved the sport and it shows, so that's part of the reason they wanna play in the first place. I'll probably make them wait until high school, but after that I'll let them make their own choice. But that decision is fast becoming something parents don't want to go along with, and I wonder about where Football will be in 30 years. I'm not sure exactly what they can do to make it safer, but I hope they do. The more stories like my own that are brought into the light, the more important a conversation it will be. And that's a good thing.