HOW SAFE IS SAFE? : Football Presents Unique Problems

The story goes that the first day Vince Lombardi met his Green Bay Packer players he told them football is not a contact sport. Dancing, he said, is a contact sport. Football is a game of hitting.

In the 30 years since, the hitting, at all levels, has become more violent--bigger, faster, stronger athletes have seen to that. In high school, the hitting is so intense that Keith Beebe, a physical therapist at a sports clinic in Orange, likens it to a prolonged car crash.

“It’s a game of high - speed collisions,” said Beebe, who works at the Sports Conditioning and Research Center. “It’s not a matter of if you’ll get hurt, but when.”

Injuries, of course, aren’t exclusive to football. But, whereas baseball players experience a lot of arm and shoulder injuries and basketball injuries are predominately in the legs, the nature of football means every part of a player’s body is vulnerable.

Bill Clark, Southern Section administrator in charge of football, said: “It’s really the only sport we have that’s truly full contact.”

Given that, it might come as a surprise that no state agency requires an ambulance at regular - season games, or, that of Orange County’s 58 public high schools, fewer than 10 have full-time trainers.

High school administrators and football coaches recognize the inherent danger of the sport.

“Let’s face it, football is always going to have more injuries than the other sports,” said John Myers, Ocean View principal. “It’s a concern everyone faces.”

But many times, what they’d like to have to deal with and what they are left to work with are decided by budget constraints. Still, administrators seem confident that they are able to deal with the unique problems football presents.

They point to mandatory coaching certificates--requiring training in first aid and cardiopulmonary resuscitation--improved coaching techniques and better conditioned athletes.

But, how safe is safe?

“No matter how well you’re prepared, there are some things you can never foresee,” said Dick Hill, Santa Ana football coach.

In 1983, Katella Coach Larry Anderson, then at Lynwood High, had a player sustain a serious neck injury, which resulted in the player becoming a quadriplegic. Anderson said the injury so affected him that he seriously considered leaving the profession.

“I had done nothing wrong, but the possibility it might happen again frightened me,” he said. “You teach kids the proper techniques, but that doesn’t eliminate something like that happening. Football is a collision sport and it’s going to happen. I know that, but it’s hard to live with.”

Pamela Singleton works for Schaefer Ambulance Service. She has worked at high school football games in San Diego and Orange counties. She needs no special training to work football games, as she says, “If you can work a vehicle accident, you can work a football game.”

The hard fact of full contact is that a football player is more vulnerable to serious injury than any other high school athlete.

The chance of serious injury makes emergency medical reaction critical. Most Orange County high schools play their games without ambulances nearby. Only the Garden Grove School District requires them at member schools’ home games. Some stadiums--Santa Ana Stadium, for example--also require ambulances. The Southern Section requires an ambulance only in postseason play.

So, during the regular season, most county schools rely on emergency paramedic response. According to the Orange County Fire Department, response time is usually 3 to 5 minutes on a Friday evening, the night a majority of the varsity games are played.

Most administrators feel safe with the paramedics a phone call away. La Habra High has the luxury of having a fire station within a block of its stadium.

“They can be here in one minute,” said Tom Triggs, La Habra principal. “That’s very assuring to me.”

School officials say ambulances, which usually are staffed by emergency medical technicians, are not crucial because, if a major injury did occur, paramedics would have to be dispatched anyway. Paramedics have more training than EMTs and can administer certain medications.

All schools have team physicians present at games to diagnose serious injuries. Police also are present at all varsity games and, if something serious develops, are able to immediately dispatch paramedics to the scene.

However, lower-level football games (junior varsity, freshman) usually don’t have police.

It’s rare that police or team physicians are present during practice, where, according to the National Athletic Trainers Assn., 62% of all football injuries occur.

“You’re probably better off getting hurt at a game than at practice,” Ocean View’s Myers said.

A high school’s obvious concern for a student’s safety is heightened by fear of litigation. In an age where high schools have been sued by players’ parents for not being allowed to play in the playoffs, the specter of legal action over injuries, or fatalities, weighs heavily on the minds of school officials.

Since 1931, when the statistics were first compiled, there has been at least one high school football fatality in the United States every year. Twenty years ago, 26 died. Last year, there were 7 deaths and 12 “catastrophic” injuries, which include serious head, neck and spinal column injuries.

“You’d like to think there was some way of getting that number down to zero,” said Dr. Fred Mueller, a professor at the University of North Carolina who compiles the statistics. “But as long as football is football, these things are going to happen.”

This year, there have already been two deaths--in North Carolina and Indiana--and a boy in Bakersfield is currently in a coma. The most recent football fatality in Orange County occurred in 1980, when Junha Cho, a 15-year-old player at Cerro Villa Junior High in Villa Park, died of head injuries sustained in a game.

The last time it happened at an Orange County high school was 1969, when Mark Naylon, a 15-year-old halfback on the Edison High junior varsity team, died after a game against Loara.

“Your protection standards have to be high,” said Joe Quartucci, Valencia principal. “You’re so liable. You always have to think about the possibility of injury, you can’t afford not to.”

In order to avoid player injuries, high schools stress more conditioning, believing a better-conditioned athlete is less likely to be injured. The catch is that better-conditioned athletes tend to hit much harder for much longer.

“When I played, you were playing both ways and you were so tired by the end of the game you couldn’t hit worth a lick,” said Dick Schindler, an assistant director in charge of football for the National Federation of State High School Assns. “Now, you have offensive specialists, defensive specialists, and they’re all much better athletes than we were. The hitting at the end of the game is just as vicious as the hitting at the start of the game.”

Another safety plus and minus is equipment. The modern high school football player wears some pretty sophisticated gear. Air-and-liquid cushioned helmets and knee braces are among the advances. But better equipment tends to make a player believe he is safe to hit harder.

Schindler recalled the 1950s and ‘60s when the football helmet went through a metamorphosis.

“They made the outer shell harder. They added a face mask, then a better face mask. Then came the mouth piece and all of sudden it seemed like the head was the best-protected part of the player.”

What happened is that coaches started to teach tackling with the head first. As a result, football-related deaths rose at an alarming rate in the 1960s--most of them from neck and head injuries--until the 1968 peak when 26 boys died.

“The fatalities showed that what we had taught was wrong,” Schindler said.

Since then, Schindler’s organization has passed rules that have virtually outlawed the use of the head in first contact. Other rule changes have included outlawing certain methods of blocking, including blocking below the waist.

The modern coaching clinic almost always includes teaching proper technique in critical areas.

“Coaches have always been sensitive about human beings,” said Santa Ana’s Dick Hill, who has been coaching since the 1950s. “But they certainly didn’t know the things they know today.”

Hill has a full-time trainer at Santa Ana. He said he would have a hard time coaching at a school that didn’t have one.

“If they told me I couldn’t have one, I’d either get the school nurse out here or make sure one of my coaches took some training classes.”

But a majority of Orange County’s high school coaches must do without. Only a handful of county schools have full-time trainers. The others must make do with part-timers or student interns.

Those situations tend to lay more responsibility for safety directly on the head coach. Administrators say they are confident coaches can handle this because a coaching certification, which is mandatory, demands a coach go through instruction in CPR and first aid.

But Katella football Coach Larry Anderson disagrees. The Anaheim Union High School District, which includes Katella, eliminated for budgetary reasons the four full-time trainers who served the district’s eight high schools.

“One of the worst moves they (the school district) could have made,” Anderson said. “It’s a killer. Obviously a quick first-aid class a coach takes does not prepare him or put him in the class of a trainer.”

A nine-year study conducted by the National Athletic Trainers Assn. in North Carolina seems to support Anderson. The association followed the progress of high school programs with and without full-time trainers. It found that players at schools without full-time trainers reinjured themselves 71% of the time. At schools with full-time trainers, the study reported the reinjury rate was 11%.

Before Katella, Anderson had a very successful program at Lynwood High. In 1983, in the last minutes of the last game of a 10-0 season, Sean Powell, a defensive end and the school’s student body president, sustained a head injury that caused him to become a quadriplegic.

“I’ve never had a more horrifying experience than going out to talk to Sean and having him tell me he couldn’t move,” Anderson said. “I felt no responsibility at all, it was a freak think, but all of a sudden the game means nothing.

“I couldn’t stand to watch contact for most of the next year. I would hold my breath until the kids got up. Football is a collision sport and those things are going to happen. But you always say it never is going to happen to you.”