In the past few years, the football world has been rocked by numerous concussion-related lawsuits. And now those safety suits have trickled down to the youth football legaues.
A Wisconsin woman brought a lawsuit against Pop Warner, the nation’s largest youth football organization, claiming that her 25-year-old son’s suicide was caused by brain damage from his youth football days. The complaint details that Debra Pyka’s son, Joseph Chernach, committed suicide after years of suffering from dementia and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).
Seasoned football law readers will note that this isn’t the first time a lawsuit like this has been brought. More than a few suits have been brought against high school football programs across the country, and last year saw both the NCAA and the NFL settling multi-million dollar lawsuits over concussions and other football trauma.
It’s going to be a hard case for Pyka to win. She’d have to demonstrate not only that football was the cause of injury (Chernach played many sports until he graduated from high school) but also that Pop Warner knew or should’ve known how dangerous football would be.
Luckily (might be worth tiptoing here a bit…”Though it presents a difficult challenge,”) there’s plenty of statistics and cases to back up the latter claim, including the NFL’s settlement, which although dodging the question of whether the NFL knew about concussion-linked brain problems, still marked a change in how the league would see concussion claims. As Salvadore J. Zambri writes for DC Metro Area Personal Injury Law Blog:
While the NFL experts were denying a link between football and long-term brain damage, the NFL’s retirement board concluded that players did suffer brain damage. According to a joint investigation by ESPN’s “Outside the Lines” and PBS’ “Frontline” show, the NFL retirement board began paying disability benefits to players in the late 1990s and 2000s, concluding that football caused their brain injuries.
According to the mediator, former U.S. District Judge Layne Phillips, this was “a historic agreement, one that will make sure that former NFL players who need and deserve compensation will receive it, and that will promote safety for players at all levels of football…”
That lawsuit set a sort of official stance acknowledging that football and brain injuries, unfortunately, go hand-in-hand. Additionally, a recent study claims that NFL players who played tackle football when they’re younger are more likely to have thinking and memory problems as adults. (The study was also dismissed by Pop Warner as “flawed” and “too narrow.”) So it’s a problem that’s fairly rampant in youth football, says Carin A. O’Donnell in a post for Pennsylvania Law Monitor:
As it turns out, brain injuries in youth sports have reached epidemic proportions. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, more than 300,000 sports and recreations related traumatic brain injuries occur in the United States each year. What people also don’t know is that a concussion is considered a mild traumatic brain injury.
Studies show that 42 percent of coaches believe that concussions occur only when an athlete loses consciousness. This is not correct, as a brain injury can occur even without losing consciousness.
Having even coaches be unaware of the proper concussion procedure is disconcerting, since studies have shown that recovering from a concussion takes even longer as an adolescent—if not longer. Tim Titolo writes for the Brain & Spine Injury Law Blog:
This study examined the outcome of 0- to 17-year-old children 36 months after traumatic brain injury (TBI), and ascertained if there was any improvement in function between 24 and 36 months….The authors conclude that a child who suffers a moderate or severe traumatic brain injury (TBI) may still have substantial functional disabilities and reduced quality of life 2 years after the injury. After those first 2 years, further improvement may be minimal.
…These findings are also important to offset the common notion that head injuries in kids are not serious. After all, we all had bumps and bruises growing up. But we now know this is simply not true. What problems a child goes on to develop as she gets older is now an acknowledged and valid concern.
And if you take into account that children under the age of 14 make up 70 percent of football players in the U.S., it’s concerning to think that many players who have had their bell rung are simply being told to walk it off. So even if this lawsuit isn’t a winner, it’s a clear sign that awareness around brain injury is improving, even outside of professional sports, and trickling down to even the beginner level. With any luck, that goodwill can extend even beyond football, since after football girls soccer is the highest source of concussions in young people.
Win or lose, it’s safe to say that the fight to protect players–particularly young players–is far from called. At best, opponents are just running down the clock.