‘There’s no place to go after eight-man’: Small towns seek to preserve football | Hacker News Reader

‘There’s no place to go after eight-man’: Small towns seek to preserve football

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17 pointspmcpinto44 comments

Coming from Australia, one of the strangest things about American Football is that nobody plays it for recreation (or semi-competitively) after High School / College.

In Australia there are thousands and thousands of cricket, Aussie Rules footy, Rubgy (union and league) and more games played every single weekend.

It's strange that a national sport is not played more.

The UK is exactly the same. In most towns/citys all the recreation grounds are full up with amateur league football (soccer) and rugby, plus loads of cricket matches, during the appropriate seasons. That's not to mention all the workplace-based football/netball teams that have matches in the week.

There are flag football leagues all over the US, semi-pro leagues exist, too. There's lots of people who play on the weekend in and out of leagues.

Or you're asking why 35-year olds aren't buying helmets and pads so they can break collarbones and tear ligaments? Contact football is brutal.

> Or you're asking why 35-year olds aren't buying helmets and pads so they can break collarbones and tear ligaments? Contact football is brutal.

Yes, yes.

In Australia we play Aussie rules, Rubgy League and Rugby Union - all are full contact with no pads or helmets. Plenty of people play into their 40s.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qh5hNY83UA4

The price of equipment itself is a limiting factor. Also, though rugby is rough, there's an argument that the reason why US football is as dangerous as it is is due to the equipment. See here where a helmet to helmet hit breaks a jaw.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j9RfJwSkMU8

Helmet to helmet hits are incredibly rare in casual play (and illegal!). Most of the arguments against Football only apply to Pro and College where people are getting paid millions of dollars. When that much money is on the line, of course people are going to be ridiculously competitive, even to the point of injuring others intentionally. I've yet to see that kind of behavior in high school or semi-pro ball.

Helmet to helmet hits are illegal but the dynamics of that play are repeated almost every passing down. Receivers running ten to fifteen yards down the field, basically defenseless at the catch. Every single punt and kickoff only exacerbates this with people sprinting down the field in body armor, with plastic shells on their head that turn into weapons.

You've never played football, have you? Or rugby?

What kind of question is that?

I played tackle football from third to 8th grade, fullback and middle linebacker. I've been watching it for 25 years.

Don't assume things about people when you disagree?

I didn't assume. I asked. In all of your time playing football, have you ever had a concussion? How about anybody you played with? Did you ever lead a tackle with your head? If you had, you'd know how much it hurts and how ineffective it is.

In my middle and high school years, it seemed like 1-2 people per year would get concussions.

I'd wager 1-2 received concussions that were outwardly noticeable. More likely received mild concussions that went unreported.

Ey, lots of people I know in the UK in their 30's play rugby recreationally.

Oddly in Australia, the most played team ball sport is soccer (football).

http://www.roymorgan.com/findings/6123-australian-sports-par...

But the Australian soccer (football) league isn't that big.

I lived in the US though and found that there weren't nearly as many local teams for basketball and soccer as there are in Australia.

In the US it seemed High School football was a bigger deal than school sport in Australia. In Australia it is more organised with local clubs.

Also in the US the colleges run other sport where as in Australia there is just local clubs running that kind of sport and pro-clubs for the highest levels.

The lack of clubs with thousands of juniors may diminish having clubs for seniors too.

> It's strange that a national sport is not played more.

It's a cultural thing. After college, you're expected to grow up, get a job, start a career, make a name for yourself and, once you're 'successful', marry and have kids. There aren't a lot of adult leagues in the US. There are a few in large cities, but nothing like what exists in most of Europe, the UK and Australia.

I've thought about creating one in my small, rural corner of the country. You'd think finding funding would be the hardest part. It's not. The hardest part is finding enough adults who want to play on a regular basis. I'd probably have better luck if I was in a larger city.

Living in a large, dense suburb, this is so foreign to me.

Most of my friends play adult rec league sport of some sort. I cycle and run (the first with a club, the second just for fun). My neighbor plays organized soccer. Another friend plays adult league baseball. A few play kickball or bocce. Many of them weren't athletic in school - the adult league thing is 90% social for them.

> It's a cultural thing. After college, you're expected to grow up, get a job, start a career, make a name for yourself and, once you're 'successful', marry and have kids.

Watching sports is part of that culture.

Equipment costs aside, gridiron is a very position-centric game. It's difficult for 22 random people to start a recreational pick up game.

Players are rarely trained in more than one or two positions and winning certain matchups are heavily dependent on the height and size of that player being within an optimal range for that position.

Casual backyard football will often be played as 4 on 4 or 7 on 7 but that takes away the line play which IMO is the most unique and cerebral aspect of American football.

The national sport is still played recreationally: every employer I've ever worked for has a softball (similar to baseball, but with some rules changes for amateurs and a larger ball) team. These teams play in leagues organized by the city Parks Department and play other businesses in the area (car dealership employees vs bakery employees), then everybody goes out for drinks afterwards.

Part of this is that football is a relative newcomer as our national pastime, and is largely a product of the broadcast era (radio first, then really taking off with TV). The first precursor to the NFL wasn't formed until 1920. By contrast the World Series had already been played for 17 years at that point, and the precursors of the modern big leages had been around for more than 50 years.

Baseball simply had a head start on the popular consciousness, and is much more pleasant for adults to play and still go into work the next day (fewer broken bones, black eyes, bruises, concussions).

I would definitely concur on the injury side of things. If you don't take it seriously then it's hard to justify the toll on your body.

I am getting into mountain biking, and not long ago I would have dived in headfirst and likely take a bunch of spills. These days I have better things to do than lay around injured so I am taking it much slower.

Wear shinguards when mountain biking. Lots of people overlook them, but that's gear that will save you from bone-chipping pain.

The history of American football is its always been something for "other" people to play, coming from ivy league rugby teams after the civil war which is roughly 0% of the population. Much like car racing it was always a spectacle other people performed, almost like theater. Baseball, for contrast, was very bottom up growth.

If it were not for the short term fetishization of "everyone must go to college" and therefore intensely celebrate everything related to college, plus the broadcasting industry, football would still be some weird traditional thing a couple boys at Harvard played against a couple boys at Yale occasionally.

Will be interesting to see, after the edu bubble pops and the sportsball broadcasting bubble of boomers pops, if the current football regime survives. It may go back to an ivy obscurity.

Hardly. My father grew in western Pennsylvania in the 1930s, when not a lot of people went to college--this was before the war and the GI Bill. The annual high school football game between his town and the next one over was heavily patrolled by the police the keep brawls from starting. And from the same period you will find a sandlot football in the novel The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan--fiction, but presumably plausible.

We're not really disagreeing. That anecdote is a couple decades after the radio era began and 75 years after the ivy league stuff. Football was already "big entertainment" eighty years ago.

I've played in lots of recreational touch football games, with ages ranging from teens to forties. Is it really that odd?

It definitely is, but in different forms. Flag football, for example, is a thing lots of people do in my neck of the woods.

Once thing that jumped out at me was the gender disparity in the younger classes. If I'm reading it correctly, for 2015+2016 there were 39 kids in kindergarten and 7 of them were boys.

There is someplace to go after eight-man... Our small school in Eastern Colorado played six-man football against other schools across the state. The field is smaller and there's a lot more running. Most guys played both ways (offence and defense). And the school and boosters funded it very well.

I didn't participate cause I could care less about sports in general.

American football; for the rest of the globe, football is something different, normally what Americans refer to as "soccer", sometimes another nation-specific sport such as Australian Rules Football. Can we at least get "American" added to the title to avoid confusion?

Is eight-man soccer a thing?

It can be played with smaller teams, sure. Just like basketball; even with just two of you you can still have a compelling reason to play.

Football, not so much.

Sure it can. I grew up playing 3-man touch football. One QB, one receiver and one defender. We always called it "stars" and had an entire rule system for it, although I don't actually know whether it was an intensely local thing or whether it's something a lot of other people did too.

Five-a-side is very common, tons of five-a-side pitches in the UK with people playing in leagues or more casually.

Five-a-side is very common, tons of five-side pitches in the UK.

edit: in the context of your comment, yeah there's no mistaking the headline is about american football.

That's a fair point. However, unless I know that eight-man American football IS a thing, I'm still left slightly confused!

These kids shouldn't be killing their brains to play a game. Just finished reading League of Denial, incredibly eye-opening re: everything the NFL has done to cover up long term brain damage from football. The NFL is basically Big Tobacco now, and imo any parent who lets their kid play football at this point with everything we know is akin to child abuse.

Oh, come on. Anybody that is "shocked, shocked, I say", about football players who've taken thousands upon thousands of hits getting squishy after their playing careers has been asleep at the wheel for a long, long time.

But grade school football and NFL level football are orders of magnitude apart. Life is a trade-off, and children aren't made out of glass.

We are talking about high school students (14-18 years old), playing tackle football, with all the helmet bashing (and concussions, if you read the article) that entails. Many of these kids weigh 250+ lbs and hit each-other hard on every play.

But if you want to talk about grade school students, the risks are possibly worse: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/19/sports/football/tackle-fo...

> and concussions

Scare mongering. Concussions don't happen at the high school level. I played high school football, my brothers played high school football, cousins, etc. There is no helmet bashing. It's illegal and it hurts, so nobody does it.

Concussions don't happen at the high school level.

Yes, they do. But, they also happen in soccer at a surprisingly high rate.

So... You didn't read the article.

"A week ago, he left the second half of North Dickinson’s loss to Superior Central because of a concussion. He looked ready to return for senior night, then took a turn midweek when he couldn’t remember some of what showed up on the game film of Phillips High, this week’s opponent."

Concussions are common in football, and are not just due to helmet bashing.

Yes, they do. I got one. Hit to the head. Flash of white, then blacked out momentarily.

Yeah. It's like the difference between boxing for fun as a low-level amateur, and turning pro.

//edit// And in that I mean that the health benefits from the exercise outweigh the slim chance of any damage.

But it's now an open fact that kids (who, lets remind ourselves, are not mature enough[1] to make the decision themselves) who play American Football in High School are damaging their brains.

It's akin to having a high school based lesson where the teacher walks around the classroom repeatedly hitting every boy on the head with a baseball bat. If that was a thing, as a parent you would never stand for it. However you happily let your your child suffer the same cranial damage out on the football field simply because it's 'cool' to have a kid on the team.

As a parent, my mind boggles at this.

[1] https://simple.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_majority

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