Sorry but I have to rant a little bit

"Any parent who would allow their kid to compete without being cleared from a concussion is an idiot. "

My son was knocked out in a collision with another player. He felt lousy for a couple of days.  Missed one game.  Got tested-- he was cleared.  But he shared with his brother (who then told me) that he still had mild headaches.  Which means, in my opinion,  he was still to some degree concussed.  But I didn't intervene.  It was his last few weeks of senior year.

Rational people can vary in their tolerance for risk.  From a risk standpoint, I would have been disappointed if any of my sons had played football ( I would let have them, but I didn't promote it).  Other dads, equally as rational as myself, actively promote football.  And so it goes.

And if you ask the parents of any of the 7 who have died so far this year, could have been the last few weeks of his life! Honesty is CRUCIAL. There's only so much a medical provider can do when the patient is not compliant and not honest.

Title IX is also a high school issue. Hence, my correct statement.

I haven't seen it contested at the high school level yet in the court of law. But I would imagine this case would come into play if and when it's challenged at the high school level. And the fact that only 29 state associations recognize it as a sport would definitely come in as well. If your school is a part of a state association which does not consider cheerleading a sport, then I think the school would quickly lose that case...

Bulldog, just because you haven't seen it doesn't mean it hasn't happened. My daughter was a high school student-athlete just before this lawsuit occurred. The final straw was when a new locker room was built for the boys complete with lounge and film room while the girls got the old mildew infested, small boy's locker room. While the high school sends a significant number of athletes to college at some level, it typically sends more girls than boys. The girls also have won more conference championships. At the time my daughter was there the softball team was winning four straight conference titles and two trips to states while the baseball team had a losing record all four years. Yet the baseball team got their field resurfaced while the softball team got nothing.

http://articles.philly.com/200...-equity-high-schools

So RJM, what does this article tell us about cheerleading being a sport? NOTHING.

It says the cheerleaders performed at more boys events than girls events. That's it.

I didn't say it hasn't happened; I said I haven't seen it. Before I posted that, I did a google search and did not come up with anything. Granted, I didn't spend a significant amount of time. Rather than me spending time looking for that type of article, I'm too busy spreading the word about cheerleading injuries at the high school level and research that topic thoroughly.

Your post also goes to show NOTHING about cheerleading. Why is it any time a topic comes up about even the thought of Title IX you have to let us know how your daughter was mistreated in high school? Hopefully you DID something about it rather than just telling us about it continuously.

I haven't been talking about cheerleading. I made a statement about Title IX and high school. You told me it didn't apply. You said there haven't been any lawsuits. I showed you one. I'll attribute it to somewhere along the line we miscommunicated and misunderstood each other.

I told you what didn't apply? Title IX? Maybe you need to try re-reading the thread again where you do specifically mention that "Classifying cheerleading helps address Title IX issues." And I point out that it doesn't appear to do so because I have found no evidence of the definition of cheerleading involved with a Title IX lawsuit at the high school level. The link to a lawsuit that you provided talks nothing about considering cheerleading as a sport having ANYTHING to do with Title IX. All it talks about is a Title IX lawsuit.

If you truly believed that I don't realize Title IX is also associated with high school activities, then you simply have not paid attention over the years when it has come up MULTIPLE times on this very site.

Now, maybe we should re-join the original conversation which was about cheerleading.

Well, didn't want to open that can of worms but if you have daughters(and sons that cheer), not a bad thing.

Thought I would give an update to this situation because I'm still pissed off over this.

So this girl in question got cleared from that concussion sometime in basketball season and was able to resume cheering for us.  Spring time rolls around and she makes the team again.  Goes to all our summer stuff and starts in the fall.

Sometime in the fall she gets another concussion at........wait for it........you'll never guess where........yeah it was all star / travel cheer.  Once again we pulled her and said she would have to complete the protocols of the concussion awareness law just like last year.  During a football game I was on the track with one of our asst. principals and she came up and was talking to us.  She said she was still cheering for her all star / travel team.  In a nice way I lost my mind on her and the assistant principal tried to tell her the same thing.  One thing I didn't pull any punches on was how pathetic this coach was and what a POS they were.

Fast forward a couple of weeks I get a text from our cheer coach and this girl - who is a Junior this current school year - is not able to cheer probably ever again.  She has serious issues from the two concussions so close together and right now her neurologist is not sure if this is something she will recover from or not.  She is now on a 504 plan, she cannot be in bright light for very long and she is very limited in how much she can learn in class due to the headaches it creates.  She told me that one of her doctors said that if she got hit in the same spot again it probably would have killed her.  Luckily (if there is anything good from this) her doctors are the ones who wrote the Gfeller - Waller Law.  So they are the best in the business for this.  

She said she now understands why we did the things we did.  Unfortunately it's too late but I think the other girls now understand why we do what we do.  This spring when we do try outs and I have my concussion meeting I'm going to use this to help educate our cheerleaders.  I'm also going to tell them what coach did this and if they were smart to avoid this person at all costs.  

I blame the parents.

Sad story, I hope all goes well for her.

I'm finding more and more it's the parents and not the coaches in these situations. That's not to say the coach isn't to blame ever. But the parents are real pushers.. I had one get real mad at me earlier this year about how I was just diagnosing concussions for fun or something like that. If she saw the amount of paperwork I have to do for every single concussion, she'd realize quickly that I don't do it "just for fun." 

I believe concussions are about to open the door to ending football as we know it or perhaps ending football altogether.  

I view this in terms of boxing.  Boxing's decline started when the sport no longer attracted middle and upper class participants.  The danger associated with Football is probably already starting to limit participation in this economic strata. The real threat is when HS football comes under fire from the costs of the medical/insurance/liability front.  Think about what happens in a lot of small and middle sized schools in suburban areas when participation suddenly drops from 50 players to 30 or less. 

I think we may be on the edge of the one killer lawsuit over, coaching technique or poor equipment or any number of other issues (including concussions) that will make the risk of running a HS football program prohibitive for school districts.  Without HS football as a feeder College and NFL football suddenly have a problem.

This isn't going to happen this year or maybe in this decade...but it is coming unless the game can be made significantly safer for head injuries.  The NFL is already bailing water on this issue and trying to get around in front of it.  Problem for them is the entire feeder system may be under fire in the next 10 years.

From the Wall Street Journal in January 2014:

While football still draws crowds to the TV set, participation in the sport in U.S. high schools was down 2.3% in the 2012-13 season from the 2008-09 season, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations.

I think the tipping point is already here and Football is about to find itself on a very slippery slope.

As for Cheerleaders being athletes - they are for in those competitions.  The leaping, gymnastic, throwing moves are crazy.  No kids of mine cheer - those young ladies take what I consider to be atrocious risks for injury.  Completely unprotected flying to through the air 10 and 15 feet up while twisting and stunting. I would never allow a daughter of mine to be the Frisbee in these routines under any circumstances.  Just insane IMO.

LB Good points.Here in IL. an former H.S. player last playing H.S. fball 16 years ago.Filed a law suit last week claiming hes so messed up by H.S. Fb he has to sue.(from concussions)No doughbt in my mind with our current rocket scienctists down in springfield.They will fix this problem once and for all.

"Football as we know it" for people our age has already disappeared.  The athletes have become so big, so fast, so skilled, and so intense that they play a different game than I participated in as a D3 football player 35 years ago.

The game I played required a level of risk management I could explain to non-athlete friends.  The game now is a more violent, more dangerous undertaking. It's harder for parents and players to justify the risk.

Totally agree with you on cheer, too.  My youngest daughter was involved in cheer during her middle school years.  She injured her back lunging to protect one of those hurtling aerobats from a bad landing in a crazy stunt gone awry. Two weeks later, she was singled out at a team meeting for lack of team attitude for being unwilling to return to action for a big competition before she was fully recovered. That led to a very short meeting between mom, dad and daughter, which resulted in unanimous approval of the resolution that "These people are crazy and we need to find another sport." 

I don't know how it is with other "travel" cheer programs, but the team had no bench.  Everybody was assigned to a squad, and each squad's routine involved all the squad members.  If somebody got hurt, they had to re-design the routine, which the coaches hated to do, especially close to a competition.  The absence of substitutes created a lot of coach and peer pressure for injured girls to compete when they should have been recovering.  

I never saw this "safety a distant second or third" attitude in any sport my sons played. 

Proud - Doesn't sound so different from the deal the NFL made this year on concussions.  Except instead of a thousand guys suing a multi-billion dollar business for millions there will be millions suing multi Trillion dollar governments for billions. 

Picture this as a settlement - ACA AKA Obamacare is now a giveaway to all men that can prove (or not) that they had a head injury playing HS football.  Free medical care for life paid for by the municipality they played football in.  How long before football ends at your local HS then? 

Not saying this is good or bad but how it will be if football goes away at the high school level.  You can say goodbye to every other sport that high school has.  If football goes away there will be no money to fund / run all the other sports.  No amount of fundraising will save the other sports.  If you find a school that will fundraise a baseball team there will be nobody to play against without having to travel to the ends of the earth.

Football needs to go back to fundamentals.  Get the head out of tackling and majority of concussions go away.  Yes there will be misses and the head will get in there but it will be rare.

Problem with cheer is the lack of a bench.  Everyone has a starting spot and if someone goes down you have to change everything.  It's crazy.

For every sport, you can find a flaw. Football is concussions, soccer is concussions, cheerleading is catastrophic injuries (65% of all female high school catastrophic injuries), gymnastics is stress fractures, baseball is elbow and shoulder injuries, wrestling is the dangerous weight loss and the skin conditions. Should I go on?

Athletics are very much a personal and family decision. Is it worth the risk to you? I don't have an answer for you..

Have you seen Pete Carroll's video he put out on how to tackle?

Does it include smacking gum like an 11 year old?

Lionshead, can you put some kind of gif or meme in my post to make that funnier?

Are they the staff that teaches head behind, wrap arms around and twist?  I saw a major college or NFL coach talking about this last month and can't recall who it was.

Yep... I am going to watch the full thing this week. Looks like he is teaching some sort of rugby style tackling.

Over the weekend, I watched the 1969 Arkansas-Texas football game. I haven't watched it in about a decade. The difference in how the game is played from a physical standpoint is ridiculous. Arkansas' starting offensive line averaged 210 lbs. This years offensive line averages 325 lbs.

I hate that you brought up that game. I was only 10 but being an Arkansas native living in Texas, I sure was pulling for them Hogs>

Even today, I loathe Houston Street if only because he is the spawn of the devil.

I'm the dad who believes in one sport at a time, one team at a time (active). Sure some mild overlap can happen from the end of one sport/team to the beginning of another but you get my point. And I always give priority to the school's sport/schedule. Why? All kinds of reasons, but to name a few: my child's safety/health will always trump "winning", the process has worked throughout history as well as for both my children (one is 24 yrs old), playing sports/activities with school mates (regardless of skill level or age) can be some of life's great moments/memories, I don't play "keeping up with the Jones" in life or sports, focusing on one sport/team at a time tends to focus a players loyalty and desire for that particular team to play well (at the moment, it is the only one you have to play for), learning to take pride, or have respect for, or show support for your local community and its institutions (like a school) is an important life lesson, and I could go on ...

That was one of those games I remember to this day where I watched it. I was a wishbone QB in junior high at the time. I worshiped that Texas team with Street, Worster, Bertlesen and Koy.