Youth football participation has been in steep decline due to CTE concerns among parents. And now a famous organization in the youth football is being sued over head trauma concerns.
As Law360.com reports, a U.S. District Court judge in California allowed part of a lawsuit to proceed that alleges that Pop Warner Little Scholars Inc.—a nonprofit that promotes youth football across the U.S.—didn’t provide its players with league-wide safety guidelines, leading to an increase in head trauma among its players.
In an order, Judge Philip S. Gutierrez wrote that while Pop Warner claims that head trauma is a known risk in tackle football, he agrees that parents should be able to allege “that PWLS misrepresented that safety was its top priority, with coaches trained in head injuries, equipment that afforded the best protection, and rules and procedures designed to protect children from injury—all with the knowledge that none of this was true, to boost the number of Pop Warner participants,” he wrote.
The original lawsuit was brought on Pop Warner by parents of two sons who died after careers in youth football and were both found to suffer from CTE (CTE is currently only diagnosable posthumously). Other parents later joined the suit.
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