Heat Is Putting More Football Players at Risk

Much of the debate over whether or not football is safe for its players has to do with the risk of brain damage from concussions incurred during games and practices. Unfortunately for athletes engaged in the sport at all levels, this isn’t the only potentially existential threat that players suiting up for a game or practice could face. A number of recent cases, including the deaths of multiple high school players, suggest that rising temperatures are putting more football players’ health at risk.

Nathan Kalman-Lamb and Derek Silva, the authors of the forthcoming book The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game, reckoned with the risks of heat to players in a recent article for The Guardian. They cite the case of three high school players who “suffered acute medical emergencies resulting in their deaths during summer football activities” — and a fourth student-athlete who also may have died as a result of heatstroke.

“Playing sports in high heat puts stress on your body from two different sources: metabolic heat production and ambient heat,” Dr. Bharat Venkat, the founder of UCLA’s Heat Lab, told The Guardian. “On top of that, you have protective gear that makes it harder to lose heat.” It’s a perfect storm of conditions that are likely to exact a toll on the human body — and that’s before factoring in rising temperatures around the world.

Kalman-Lamb and Silva go on to cite research that they conducted for their book, which included hearing a number of football players discussing their experiences with extreme heat and, in one case, a coach who continued with training even after a player had, in their words, “nearly died on the field.”

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The questions raised by their research and reporting speak to broader existential questions about the role sports plays in our society — and the ethics of watching it. Kalman-Lamb and Silva are among the hosts of a podcast called The End of Sport, which reckons with these questions in more detail. The planet isn’t getting any cooler, which suggests that the tragic outcomes described in the article at The Guardian will only become more pronounced.