Catholics and football

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Amalie

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My dad certainly suffered from CTE. How can the church ethically sponsor football teams in CYO if it ruins brain cells? He was a terrible leader, ruined finances, and suffered debilitating depression. Our family liked growing up was very hard because of his mental illness.

Can we start a movement to stop anything football related that is linked to our church? I understand it’s entertainment but it’s no better than boxing. It ruins people.
 
I’m sorry that your father suffered from CTE.
However, it is by no means the case that every young person who plays CYO football gets CTE. Many of them end up just fine. I know a lot of middle-aged guys who played football in school and were not harmed.
There is also more awareness of the condition nowadays so coaches, players, and their families may be better able to avoid risks.

Every sport carries some risk. I’ve known far more people who were severely injured in bicycle accidents than as a result of playing CYO football. One lady died falling off her bicycle in an empty parking lot, she wasn’t even on the road. Does that mean the CYO should never sponsor a bike ride, or that people shouldn’t ride bikes?

As for “Starting a movement”, I would imagine in the areas where people would support your movemet, the kids already don’t play football. Soccer and lacrosse for example are big around here, and one reason is likely because it’s perceived as safer. In other areas the kids like to play football.
 
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Great points! Thank you. It is hard to keep an unbiased view so I appreciate an alternative opinion. Agreed we shouldn’t get rid of a sport because of a perceived small risk, but I hope people are informing themselves about those risks. We need all our of our youth to face this world with sharp healthy minds if that is what they were blessed with.

I do hope people are being wise. I worry that football scholarships make it too tempting to continue to play because college is so expensive. And it concerns me that colleges can both offer education based on participation in a brain damaging sport. Football also makes huge profit for colleges. Seems like a conflict of interest.

My dad was the only person to attend college in his family because of a football scholarship. And it ruined the man we all love. His life has been full of confusion and pain.

I think truly “informed consent” to playing football is hard unless you’ve met someone who has struggled with CTE. It’s easy to minimize a far off “rare” event.

CTE symptoms don’t show themselves for decades. Most people will never link the two together. Whereas a bike accident is immediate and easily understood as the “culprit” for the injury.

I just feel a huge burden to educate people that 90% of college and professional football players brains in one study showed CTE on autopsy. Studies are ongoing to correlate the pathological findings with the severity of symptoms the individual suffered.

We don’t know how much depression and Future brain damage/ pain can be caused by a few years of youth football, but we need to study it. Depression is so common now, it took us decades to connect it to my dads football. Why does that matter you ask? Because when we had neurocognitive testing done we realized that he had deficits not just depression. We had been expecting someone with cognitive deficits to lead our family. He struggled and blamed himself for it. It wasn’t his fault.

Don’t allow your loved ones and your healthy young men ( or rarely daughters) to play without understanding the risks. Is it worth years of depression anxiety and joblessness? Confusion and impulse control problems?

Protect the beautiful brain God designed. Especially your frontal lobe that participates in executive decision making.

I believe and hope that football will soon go the way of smoking.
 
Amalie said:
I believe and hope that football will soon go the way of smoking.
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It’s the most popular sport in America, so while I think you have every right to start a boycott/express your view, I advise you to be realistic. It won’t go anywhere in our lifetimes. Most players also know the risk and they still choose to play the game as well. They have that right.

It’s fascinating to me-football, like many other things in our lives, is getting attacked on all sides. From the politics that the NFL embraces to the CTE issue, it seems like the NFL just can’t win.
 
At least CTE is an issue that actually relates to the game, rather than to some peripheral thing happening before it, after it, or during the halftime show.
 
I honestly thought CYO sports disappeared years ago - I haven’t even heard the term here in New England for decades. Is it still popular elsewhere? Given the medical issues I would think going to flag from tackle would make sense.
 
Yes, CYO is what typically would run the sports leagues for Catholic children and teens. Often the teams would be associated with a Catholic school or a Catholic parish, and the teams from the schools and parishes play each other. Catholic parents, priests, teachers etc are often involved in running or supporting such organizations as being healthy activities for young people and it can also lead to college scholarships. They also field teams and participants for many sports other than just football.

Looking at the Archdiocese I’m typing from, CYO here has teams for soccer, volleyball, basketball, track, baseball, softball, and cross-country. No football; in USA the areas with more well-off white collar folks tend to favor soccer as being less dangerous, more European, something girls can also play etc. Football is most beloved in the less wealthy and more blue-collar areas. The Diocese where I grew up was poorer ; they still have football, and Catholic high school football at the two biggest boys’ schools there is huge, like it gets statewide and national sports coverage.
 
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Yeah, the only working-class people into soccer here would be Latin Americans who are usually recent immigrants within the last couple generations. Other than that it’s considered one of those “So European!” things that some Americans love to gush about.
 
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I think pro sports have gotten too politicized and are going to slowly fade out.
 
Ok, having played football through high school, I can honestly say it was the most formative experience, outside of our home, I had growing up. I cannot quite put my finger on it, but I am convinced there is something unique about football with regards to how it helps form young men. I have a couple of weird theories about why that is the case, but I won’t go into that now.
Having said that, I do not find it at all surprising that we are now finding out it has serious long term consequences. Thats a shame. But I do not think the benefits outweigh the dangers involved.
I have to wonder if it will ever go away, it is a large part of our culture, especially high schools and colleges.
Its an issue I have a lot of mixed feelings about. I can only say I feel very fortunate to have played and very fortunate all I have to deal with my whole life due to the sport is a bum knee (which I can always just offer up as a sacrifice when it is giving me fits), which surprisingly has gotten better the last few years, it may have been the worse in my 20s and 30s.
 
The NFL just can’t win? Well, it pulls $15 billion dollars of revenue a year.
 
We have CYO basketball. I assume other sports, but my kids did basketball.
 
It’s in the PNW. Ignorantly, I hadn’t heard of it elsewhere, lol! https://parish.holyfamilyportland.org/catholic-youth-organization

Last I checked, football isn’t an option in CYO-PDX.
Amalie said:
. How can the church ethically sponsor football teams in CYO if it ruins brain cells?
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I’m really sorry your dad suffers from this awful condition.

The core issue with CTE is that the NFL for many years covered it up, threatened scientists who blew the whistle on it, and even encouraged behavior in their football players that could cause it.

The NFL is a major industry, and I cannot name one corporate industry that is free from corruption. While we don’t need football like we need other industries, (she said while hiding from all of the football fans coming at her with torches and pitchforks 😏 ), we’ll never get rid of any of these industries.

The key for us, as Catholics concerned with Catholic Social Teaching, is to be a voice against the corruption itself. I don’t know specifically what such activism would look like in this context, but I’m open to ideas.
 
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Right, and that makes me feel better. The right wingers who have boycotted the NFL over it’s political stance aren’t making an impact.

And the left wingers who boycott football because it’s “anti intellectual, capitalistic and promotes violence, is too blue collar” also aren’t making an impact.

It is, of course, your right to voice your opinion about whatever topic you want to, but sometimes it’s best to leave some topics alone and just let people enjoy stuff.
 
My husband loves NCAA football but all this political football has turned him off of NFL possibly forever.
 
I’m sorry to hear that. Of course he has every right to do that (and you didn’t need me telling you that, lol) but I don’t get it. I can put politics aside and just enjoy the game. I see a lot of people on the left who do this too-they don’t listen to this or that musician because they are conservative, or don’t want Frasier because Kelsey Grammar is a republican. I don’t get it. I don’t put politics uber alles.
 
I don’t know of any parishes that have sports teams, football or otherwise, for youth.

My nephew plays flag football, but not through his parish or his Catholic school. It’s through a community youth sports league. And they live in the 4th largest city in the US. And I lived there for years… never heard of church youth sports. Nor in my new state.
 
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1ke said:
I don’t know of any parishes that have sports teams, football or otherwise, for youth.
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Don’t know where you are, but I can tell you CYO sports programs are extremely common in dioceses like Philadelphia, Cleveland, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, and the New York City area dioceses. They’re often associated with parish schools, but many sports programs will accept kids from the parish who don’t attend the school, or in some cases will accept kids from neighboring parishes that don’t have a school or a CYO sports program. Or several parishes will pool efforts and have a joint CYO sports program. They are typically diocese-wide and funded by Catholic Charities.

CYO page for Cleveland Diocese:


CYO page for Philadelphia (program is so huge it’s got like 14 different regions)
http://www.cyophilly.com/

CYO page for NYC (each borough has programs):
http://www.cyony.org/
 
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Huh, maybe it’s a thing in the northeast.

The only place I’ve seen youth sports is in school like high school teams that participate in inter scholastic league sports with public schools. Junior high and high school.

And I’ve never seen parish kids able to participate in that.
 
Amalie said:
Can we start a movement to stop anything football related that is linked to our church?
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I want not part of it, and will oppose it. I am all for safety, but not for stopping football. If the Church has not condemned a thing, then I do not see any such agenda against that thing being successful, or needed.
 
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