Every autumn, millions of Americans come together to watch football, a sport defined by strategy and speed, but also by collisions and physical contact.
Behind professional football lies a serious long-term health concern that can result from long-term exposure to repeated head impacts: a brain disease called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.
The risk of CTE is particularly concerning in both college and professional football because players can experience repeated head impacts throughout their careers. These impacts do not always result in a concussion, meaning that a player may continue participating without realizing the potential long-term effects of repeated trauma to the brain. While professional players often receive greater medical attention and access to neurological resources, even college athletes face significant exposure to repetitive head impacts at a critical stage of their athletic careers.
“It all starts with looking for those big hits.”
Mr. William Wardle
Researchers continue to study how repeated head impacts may contribute to CTE and other long-term changes in the brain. Boston University’s CTE Center reported finding CTE in 345 of 376 former NFL players whose donated brains it had studied.
This unsettling finding raises the question: what measures does Haverford’s football program take to protect its players from the long-term effects of repetitive head impacts?
For player safety, proactively identifying a head injury is crucial. Head Athletic Trainer and Assistant Athletic Director Mr. Bill Wardle said, “It all starts with looking for those big hits.”
After a big collision, coaches and staff monitor the player, looking for unusual behavior or physical symptoms of a head injury. “If he’s not walking straight, if he’s not acting like his normal self, if it sounds like he’s talking differently, he seems disoriented,” Mr. Wardle said, “then we just have to keep a really close eye.”
Observations like these can help staff identify when a player may need further medical evaluation before returning to play. Other measures that the program has implemented are more preventive.
“Each week we only do really one full day of full hitting, and the rest of the days in practice are really just limited contact.”
Mr. William Wardle
One preventive measure is the use of Guardian Caps, which provide an additional layer of padding on a player’s helmet. “They can decrease some of the forces from a direct helmet-to-helmet blow,” Mr. Wardle said. In addition to the Guardian Caps, coaching staff have limited the team’s full-contact practices. “Each week, we only do really one full day of full hitting, and the rest of the days in practice are really just limited contact with minimal full tackling.”
Although head impacts remain a concern in high school football, it has not been proven that CTE is a huge risk factor for high school football. “The notion of CTE has not come up at the high school level yet, just because it’s largely people that have played football for a lifetime, like high school, college, and pro,” Mr. Wardle explains. “To my knowledge, there haven’t been any cases of kids who only played high school football and then went on to have CTE.”
