Did your kids play football? Would you let them?

[disney4us2002]

No and no. Thank goodness they never wanted to play football so it was not a fight. We had soccer, baseball and basketball and that was plenty.

 

[tcufrog]

My younger son played flag football for one season but neither kid has a desire to play tackle football. They know about the concussion risks. My best friend's son had 3 concussions before he reached middle school, 2 from soccer and one from basketball. He's in high school now and has completely gone off the rails to the point he's been kidnapped and sent to a wilderness camp. The psychiatrists and psychologists claim his horrible behavior isn't even partially caused by his concussions but I wonder.

 

[amylevan]

Both of my kids play soccer, and let me tell you, there have been games where my son has been absolutely abused and I have a hard time watching. I’m not sure how I would handle football.

Granted, my son only plays at 1 speed - full throttle - and he has always been a lightweight. So when he is fouled, which is often, he usually goes flying. I often joke that I wish he would take up a non-contact sport like golf or swimming. But he loves it, is willing to put in the hours to be good, and is currently spending serious time in the weight room to put on some muscle mass, so I wouldn’t have the heart to ask him to quit. Something tells me if his sport was football, we’d be in the same boat.

My daughter hasn’t gotten hurt quite as much, but she’s only 11.

 

[EACarlson]

Neither of my kids have any interest in organized sports. My wife and I have had the discussion because I was a huge sports kid and played four sports in high school. I now officiate two sports so I see what happens to the kids, the worst concussions I've ever seen were in girls' softball. If either of mine wanted to play football, we would allow it, but my wife would not be happy about it and I would be concussion checking them on a daily basis and would have no qualms about holding them out if I was uncomfortable with what I saw.

 

[TiggerTrigger]

I don’t think clubs advertise it, but some will sponsor players who can’t afford to play.

I also think it’s somewhat of a stereotype to think that all who are playing ”club level” ball are salivating trying to get into D1 programs or make it to the pros. Most of us just wanted a good quality sports experience.

We've seen a couple of examples of lower income kids with talent getting some help. I know one club manager who has been known to cover air travel and hotels for some of his kids. I know another that was able to raise public donations for one girl's uniform fees. Still, unless you get some people with really deep pockets in the mix like the first example, it's often not enough to cover the costs in the long run.

We see that as well. You'll hear a lot of parents bragging about their kids playing select/travel/club after moving away from recreation/little league. While I know many parents get unrealistic visions of D1 sports the first time their kids make a select/travel/club team, it seems to be a vital steppingstone in their athletic growth for many sports. It's sort of the wild west in the early stages, but most youth sports have some kind of class/level system that becomes more evident and defined as they get older. The definition of a quality experience is subjective and hinges on your goals. We're seeing that by the time the kids get to high school, many decide that select/travel/club is too much money and time if their kid doesn't have the talent and aspirations to play beyond school ball, especially if it's not a sport where they're looking to go pro and there are incongruencies between the best fit schools for their academic/career goals vs. their athletic abilities.

 

[dez1978]

View attachment 819196

DS wanted to play but they would only "play up" two years and he was always too big to play with kids even two years older. So, his first year was 12U when he was 10. He is the big guy in the middle.

I wasn't really worried about injuries - as big as he was. He did get one concussion in practice. Was was not only in favor of him playing, I encouraged it. Unfortunately, size does not always equal talent so he didn't play after high school and COVID robbed him of a yer of that.

Dang! Hes huge! My 12.5 year old isn't even 5 fttall yet. Hed look like that little one in the green getting shoved by #23 lol

I feel like this is a subject for another thread. (And there have been plenty on here previously.)

But I will just say this. Everyone has their reasons for playing “club” or “travel” or whatever your area calls it.

Football is huge where I live, and a lot of money and effort is invested in it here. Baseball, not so much. At all. Fields in crap shape (DS got a knee injury requiring surgery sliding into third on an unkept, lumpy infield), practices almost unheard of, people running league corrupt, you name it. So if you have a kid who wants to really get into that sport, you have to look elsewhere.

There were several kids from where we live when DS started on his AAU team. None of them knew how to really play the game. It was embarrassing. The coach, who was from a neighboring town, couldn’t believe it, since all had played since TBall (and one was hitting home runs on varsity fields at 11). But that all changed for the better and they grew in the sport thanks to the better experience. I’ve been to places all over NE, NY, PA, NJ and FL for baseball and the bottom line is that, some places value baseball as a sport, and some don’t, and it shows. If you live in a place that does, how fortunate for your community, as it is a really great pastime for so many.

Baseball is bigger in this rural community than football. Immediately after football a lot of kids move right into practices for baseball even tho they don't play until spring/summer. There are a ton of competetive/travel baseball teams here and places you can go for private training. There is NOTHING for football. It's legit the only thing that I dislike about where we live. There is no where I can take them in a 2 hr radius for any sort of training and their school is so small they will never get any kind of attention from colleges. We also have a TON of wrestling clubs nearby including some of the biggest names in wrestling who have private clubs for kids starting as young as 5. My kids have trained with olympic wrestlers a few times.

My son did play football and also was a wrestler and played tennis. All five of my brothers played football all through grade school and high school and one played football in college. They were also all in another sport like baseball, track, cross country, basketball, soccer and hockey when we lived up north. Obviously, I have no problems with it but I am from a different time (you know those of us who walked barefoot, in the snow, up hill both ways to school).

Frankly, I would much rather watch my son play football then wrestling. Talk about putting your body through rough stuff. I would have to turn away when some of the smaller weight kids were wrestling because I just knew a bone was going to break the way they were twisting them. To wrestle in a lighter weight class they would even go to the extreme of not swallowing their spit on the day of a match.

I am the opposite. I worry a lot more about injuries in football than in wrestling tho the most serious football injuries we've had in 5 years of football so far have been broken fingers/thumbs, thankfully. I think I worry more because in football my oldest kid is always signifigantly smaller than most of the kids on the other teams. He's literally played against teams with kids who weigh 200 lbs more than he does (I know this bc the youth league has limits on specific positions so the kids all weigh in at the beginning of the season.). Even now he's only 88 lbs. In wrestling, he's against kids within 2 years age difference and generally 5 lb weight difference. My 9 yr old on the other hand is just as tall as the 12 yr old (4'10) but 110 lbs so he's usually one of the bigger ones. I do thing wrestling is much more intense and requires a lot more effort and is more physical than football. These kids in our club, many of them have maybe a 2 week break between football ending and the start of wrestling practice. They all think they are in good shape after the football season but football shape and wrestling shape are not the same. Wrestling isn't a thing either of my boys are passionate about but it is the art of pushing people around which makes it a perfect compainion to football.

 

[JLTraveling]

I played one season of tackle football when I was about 8 years old. Primarily because they didn't "let" girls play, and I've always been a diehard feminist. So I managed to talk my way onto the team. I also played soccer from ages 6-10 and baseball until I was 12 (I could not talk them into let me, a girl, move up to the Pony League. Still bitter about that). But I was first and foremost a theater and dance kid, so by 13 I was all-in on that. My parents still can't fathom where I got my sports interest from, neither of them ever played a single sport (other than the semester of golf my dad took in college). But they let me do it.