No one would put their computer, cell phone, new car, or TV under an attic window and repeatedly drop a soccer ball onto any one of them from 30 feet in the air. But, some parents will encourage their children to hit a fast-moving soccer ball with their skull. Obviously, many value their possessions more than their children.
When we ask “Why?”, the possible answers aren’t pretty. Some have suggested that a bitterness about themselves makes some parents oblivious to the effect of having hard soccer balls crashing onto the thin, bony shell that protects a child’s brain.
“I played soccer and there’s nothing wrong with me.”, many parents and soccer coaches say. “All the other children are playing, and I don’t want mine to be ‘different’.”, say others. None of these people wants to think about what happens when a child, running at fifteen miles an hour smashes his or her soft, pudding-like, sloshing brain into a soccer ball moving twice as fast in the opposite direction.
On impact, the head stops, and the brain keeps moving. It slams into the skull the same way a driver without an airbag smashes into a windshield in a head-on collision. As the brain is “sloshed” around inside the skull, wiring is disrupted. Cells are ruptured. Delicate capillaries are destroyed.
Soccer’s frequent near-concussions have a cumulative, permanent, debilitating effect on the brain. Things attached to the brain are hurt. The tiny, delicate bones in the ear are especially vulnerable. So are the eyes, wherein retinas are easily detached.
How a parent can allow, let alone, encourage a child to destroy his or her own mind is beyond rational analysis.
How anyone can have a job, like coaching soccer, that diminishes the future of the children they pretend to “help” is even more unfathomable. It’s hard to see why we should think of them more favorably than child molesters.
