Football, Coaches and Hell Week=A Dangerous Situation

It is coming upon the days that football teams and coaches call "hell week"; the time when eager young would be football players are forced to begin drilling in hot humid dog days of summer.

This jogs my mind back to an unfortunate period of time when my sons desired to play football under a coach who was both a bully and an egomaniac.

He was known to be a stickler who let "no one" escape the ravages of the summer heat and two a day practices for any reason.

This policy of Coach B's lead to us locking horns over my youngest son arriving home from morning practice at the end of the first week drenched in a cold sweat and running a temperature just below 103 degrees.

After a thorough examination including a chest x-ray, it was determined that my son had pneumonia and could not continue with "hell week" as was required to be allowed to play under  Coach B's rules. 

 He was a hard ass and when I saw him in person to explain my son's absence, he cut me no slack, "no hell week participation means no playing on the team; that's my rule."

Needless to say as a sports' fanatic who always supports my sons, I was furious!

As soon as my son was over the bout of pneumonia he caught chicken pox and I was being hospitalized with bacterial pneumonia and way past the point of arguing a now moot point.

I mention this because I read the other day about a nineteen year old at a Florida college dying from complications of sickle cell trait after falling ill under the stress of training for football and was berated by his coach for "showing weakness" as he collapsed on the field.

Behaving like a hard-headed bully is, for me, not at all attractive in any coach of children any age; and yes, to me a nineteen year old is still enough of a child to need an adult supervising his athletic endeavors and using sound judgement.

When my oldest son made a stunning play and tackled a tailback with nobody else even close, allowing his team to have a 21 to 0 game against Chicago South Shore's 6A team, and then was not allowed to play again for the rest of the season because he had not been "hand-picked" by Coach B, wore western clothes and boots to the toney country club high school, would not let the coach belittle him for his clothes, and had a mother who did not know her place.  I should not have been surprised.

He had been fired as an Illinois college coach much earlier in his career for striking a player, yet had been hired on as an assistant coach to an elderly head coach  soon to retire.

His bad behavior as a collegiate coach was evidently "not quite bad enough" to discourage a high school from  trying for another coach capable of inspiring consecutive seasons with no losses.

For my youngest son's junior and senior years we moved out of the area to a high school that appreciated my sons' talents and gave them many opportunities to prove their worth on the smaller team by helping them improve their new school's record.

But again I digress when my point is that no matter what the sport or what level it is being played at, coaches need to be aware of their players' health issues.

A pre-existing medical condition is just as serious as a hidden condition which a younger player has not been fortunate enough to have had detected yet in the yearly sports physicals which are usually cursory at best.

The exertion of physical exercise will bring out many anomalies that coaches should look out for and be ready to recognize.

Even as a substitute teacher I was able to detect serious illnesses in students I had seen only infrequently (epilepsy, diabetes and asthma). 

Coaches need to be cognizant of such illnesses and their symptoms and protect their players by seeing that they get prompt medical care.

A nineteen year old football player should not get to the point where he collapses on the field and dies because his coach can not recognize a player in distress.

What a terrible American tragedy!