There’s an old myth in sports that if a player or team is on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s magazine, something bad is bound to happen to them.
When I say bad, that could be losing to a huge underdog the next week, a star player being lost to a season-ending injury or some sort of scandal that drags a team down.
It’s with no joy when I say that curse might have filtered down to the realm of high school football. Out of the four players – Brody Kube, Parker Perry, Cody Shaver, Cohenn Stark – that I chose for the covers of the annual football preview editions, Kube and Perry have suffered similar serious injuries. That alone beats incredible odds.
But it’s not just the cover boys. In Week 2 at Northwest, Fox was putting up a fight against the Lions, and it was no coincidence when the game turned in Northwest’s favor after Warrior
Myles Black was carted off on a stretcher with a serious leg injury. Black was a key lineman.
“With Myles, he had bad luck, timing,” Fox head coach Brent Tinker said. “He stood up, and the pile came back and got his leg. So sad, but it could happen at any time.”
Grandview senior Brock Poole’s injury has kept him out of the lineup, but Grandview head coach Cory Hanger said although he’s unsure about when Poole will return, he was going to try and practice this week. That’s great news for the Eagles. His teammate, Aaron Smith, broke his foot before the season and won’t play his senior year. For a team that struggles to field an adequate amount of players, that’s a huge loss.
But things really got surreal when Kube’s replacement at quarterback, junior Cohner Baer, went down with a broken collarbone against Lindbergh, the same injury that felled Kube two weeks earlier. The only saving grace for Baer, who is head coach Nick Baer’s son, is he has one more year to play.
Baer’s injury happened in the fourth quarter of the win over the Flyers. Imagine being Baer, trying not to think about his son’s injury and processing that while trying to hold on to a road win against a team you’ve never played before.
After going right to the ER at Mercy South Friday night, Nick Baer said his family didn’t leave the hospital until 5 a.m. the next morning. A few hours later, Nick watched his other sons play football.
We all know about the inherent risks of playing football. More and more players who retire from the NFL are having their brains examined after they die to see if they have chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE). It’s not just the hits they absorb professionally. Those are piled onto every blow to the head they’ve taken since youth football.
I grew up watching the NFL of the 1970s. It was a completely different era of football. Clothesline tackles were an art form and celebrated. What the Raiders were doing in the secondary was outright criminal behavior that eventually led to a player being paralyzed, in a preseason game, no less. But people loved the violence. The NFL celebrated it. If you don’t believe me, watch the NFL pregame highlight videos from the ‘70s. Every highlight today would be not only a 15-yard penalty, but probably cost the player money in fines and suspensions.
Improvement in helmets and equipment, the league’s changes to the rules to protect players, especially the QBs, and of course TV money have changed the NFL landscape and attitude toward violent play. Now the NFL is one of those US companies that’s Too Big to Fail, and makes billions of dollars every year. They bend their own rules – see LA Rams – to meet the whims of their own oligarchy. That’s a word being thrown around a lot these days. It seems to be a perfect fit for NFL owners.
Back on our level, the start of this season has been played under the added strain of intense heat. I’ve asked a few coaches if they think the heat has added to the rash of serious injuries. None of them thought it was the culprit. But more and more, I keep hearing about how the artificial surfaces they play on are the biggest contributor to today’s injuries.
St. Pius X bucked the trend by installing Bermuda grass for their new stadium. However, the football team won’t be sharing the field with any other sport, so maintaining it won’t be as costly or time consuming. That’s not feasible for the public schools in the county who use their artificial fields for a multitude of sports and rent them out for other purposes, like band competitions.
I think everyone hopes, and feels, the spate of injuries, like the unusually hot weather, is an anomaly. Attrition can ruin a team’s playoff hopes. There are some teams in the county capable of playing deep into November, maybe December. Here’s hoping the trainers have less work to do until then.
Some teams have avoided the injury bug that can bite at a moment’s notice.
“To be honest, I haven’t noticed a difference,” Jefferson head coach Matt Atley said about an uptick in injuries. “For us, this has been one of the healthiest starts to a season in a couple years.”