01-11-2013, 02:15 AM
My brother wrecked a leg playing football in 8th grade a half century ago. I was a good bit younger, so never really desired to play it, and had already started in sports with fewer chances of being maimed.
My niece was a starter on her high school soccer team, but a string of concussions from headers ended that sport in her junior year. It also impacted her performance on SATs 6 months later. She's an exceptional student and a very smart person, but, perhaps partly because she was not fully mature, she continued to do headers when she knew she shouldn't.
WBB wouldn't seem likely to be a sport for concussions, but Jamie Carey suffered them. I've forgotten the details of Toni Kokenis's concussion two years ago (which probably influenced her being rested after getting an elbow in the head recently).
And, of course, baseball has its problems with thrown balls and even sometimes the batted ball.
(I just Googled and found at least one study that found no signs of neurological effect of 50 3-meter springboard dives on a set of NCAA D1 divers. That's good to know.)
Imagine if the people of the US decided to ban some sport for minors. Most likely that would be done state by state, and so may be applied unequally. Athletes & their families would likely move to particular states where the sport was still played, which might be perceived as a money-making opportunity by a state (like gambling and prostitution are allowed differently in different states), meaning some states would likely hold out for a long time. Colleges, on the other hand, being high-minded, would offer scholarships in bulk to foreign students just because they had 6+ years of experience in the sport before coming on campus. Next thing you know, the professional sports leagues will be complaining that they can't get enough green cards for the foreign athletes they want to bring in, since the colleges aren't producing them from US citizens in sufficient quantity & skill level.
(Contrary to what you might think, I've never poked a stick at a hornet's nest just to see how many hornets I could stir up!)
Some colleges already import their teams to some extent: 1/3 of Hawaii & ASU Women water polo teams are from continents other than the Americas; I thought that number was 50% two years ago (for ASU?), but that is unconfirmed. (ASU foreign students are just under 10% of all students; Hawaii, is somewhere around 8%)
My niece was a starter on her high school soccer team, but a string of concussions from headers ended that sport in her junior year. It also impacted her performance on SATs 6 months later. She's an exceptional student and a very smart person, but, perhaps partly because she was not fully mature, she continued to do headers when she knew she shouldn't.
WBB wouldn't seem likely to be a sport for concussions, but Jamie Carey suffered them. I've forgotten the details of Toni Kokenis's concussion two years ago (which probably influenced her being rested after getting an elbow in the head recently).
And, of course, baseball has its problems with thrown balls and even sometimes the batted ball.
(I just Googled and found at least one study that found no signs of neurological effect of 50 3-meter springboard dives on a set of NCAA D1 divers. That's good to know.)
Imagine if the people of the US decided to ban some sport for minors. Most likely that would be done state by state, and so may be applied unequally. Athletes & their families would likely move to particular states where the sport was still played, which might be perceived as a money-making opportunity by a state (like gambling and prostitution are allowed differently in different states), meaning some states would likely hold out for a long time. Colleges, on the other hand, being high-minded, would offer scholarships in bulk to foreign students just because they had 6+ years of experience in the sport before coming on campus. Next thing you know, the professional sports leagues will be complaining that they can't get enough green cards for the foreign athletes they want to bring in, since the colleges aren't producing them from US citizens in sufficient quantity & skill level.
(Contrary to what you might think, I've never poked a stick at a hornet's nest just to see how many hornets I could stir up!)
Some colleges already import their teams to some extent: 1/3 of Hawaii & ASU Women water polo teams are from continents other than the Americas; I thought that number was 50% two years ago (for ASU?), but that is unconfirmed. (ASU foreign students are just under 10% of all students; Hawaii, is somewhere around 8%)