Very interesting Ohio69, just saw the story on ESPN and noticed that you posted it. Where to begin, I think Coach Fedora is hearing this from a lot of high school and youth coaches. They aren't going to say that to the media and get the same type of reaction, but he will. In taking my boys to various sports camps this summer I am hearing very similar things. Some youth coaches and high school football coaches are very nervous about the future.

One coach just told me that at a recent coaches fishing trip, they all agreed that high school football had peaked, but when? Some coaches said it peaked 10 years ago, others said it was the 80s-90s, a few old timers thought in Ohio anyways it was the late 1960s-late 1970s, before the industrial decline of the late 1970s commenced. The big argument centered around whether by 2030 high school football would be on it's way to becoming a boutique sport like soccer and lacrosse was in Ohio in the 1970s.

Is Coach Fedora right that our nation would change if football ceased to be as we know it now? Would it effect our military as he fears? Boxing was once a popular sport. Some argue that we have become soft since many young men participated in amateur boxing and now do not. Many older Europeans feel their culture is totally different now than it was 50 or 60 years ago. I know a lot of kids in the neighborhood that just seem to think that football is way to hard, intense for them, even though they definitely follow it. I can't imagine even saying such a thing at their age, even if I believed it. It just wouldn't happen, at least where I grew up.

The odd thing about this whole debate is that youth football is safer than it ever has been, but the stats from past players with obvious brain injuries scares not only kids but their their parents. I might have made mention of a couple of former college football players I know whose kids go to my kids school. They won't let their kids play football, and it has nothing to do with CTE scare. One guy says he has chronic shoulder pain and the other guy has had a series of knee surgeries. Their kids wanted to play middle school football, but they both said no way. When I brought up the fact that they might have had the same injuries in basketball, they both said not nearly the same chance.

People seem to be at different places in their mindset than they were 20, 30 or 40 years ago. Whatever you think of Coach Fedora's rant, it is just reflective of many my age who just didn't see this coming.

I wouldn't necessarily conclude from lower US ratings for the World Cup are indicative of any broader trends: unlike the recent past, the US wasn't in the tournament AND the tournament games mostly took place during the workday. A double whammy.

There was a discussion about youth sport's participation on Rick Wolf's The Sports Edge.

He was saying that last year there was a 14% drop in participation in youth soccer.
I believe he was talking about Travel Teams,but he said there does seem to a trend of less participation in all levels of youth soccer.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/14/sports/world-cup/socce...

Soccer's biggest problem in the United States is the "pay-to-play" mindset undertaken by the US Soccer organization. Leadership in US Soccer reminds me very much of the folks who think Ohio Athletics should raising ticket pricing. It's entirely the wrong approach. Focus on getting more people interested first. Maximizing growth today leads to exponentially bigger profits tomorrow.

I do think CTE is an under-reported issue in soccer. There aren't nearly as many severe head-on collisions as in football, but it's still a much more violent sport at the higher levels than people realize. Concussions are common. It's also the only sport where players INTENTIONALLY try to make the ball hit their head.

Perhaps the drop in youth participating in sports may be in part because many kids no longer see the long term benefit for themselves in playing sports, after say the age of 12. It becomes harder to get playing time and kids in big suburban schools have to compete against countless kids who have been on traveling teams since kindergarten. Until recently, I thought traveling teams were only for kids 10 or older. You learn something new everyday!

Until I was about age 12, I lived under the allusion (probably delusion) that my skills were going to get me to play college sports and beyond. Reality hit me in high school! I went to school with friends (and taught guys) who played college football at smaller colleges. I can't tell you how many guys I know tell me high school football was the happiest time in their lives and playing small college football was the most miserable time of the lives. The camaraderie and almost heavenly like coming of age experience that existed in high school wasn't there in college. Endless practices and film study, grading teammates performances and limited playing time made for more of a purgatorial, if not hellish college experiences for the guys I knew. Most stopped playing college football after one year and focused on what was really important about college--getting a degree.

I remember entering high school hearing my parents and the nuns in school telling me and my friends that most of us were going to be first in our families to go to college, I dutifully followed their advice. However, I never kept track of my GPA and didn't measure myself against others or scout elite schools I might have attended. However, kids in high school today often do, possibly because of the competition to get into the right school. High school sports playing time and or a college sports scholarship might be a pipe dream for most of the kids today, whereas when I was in school my friends and me had allusions (which quickly became delusions) of playing college sports. Perhaps that is why fewer kids are participating in youth sports past the age of 12.

We may see dramatically better helmets sooner rather than later, thanks to research in viscoelasticity. The problem is that to do any good, a helmet needs to absorb energy, but in the process of absorbing energy, most materials are destroyed. Think, for example, about a styrofoam bicycle helmet - it's good for one use. When you hit your head, it absorbs energy, and in the process it's crushed. Thus, it needs to be replaced before you bike again. A football helmet that deformed in the event of collision would provide some protection, but you can't very well replace every helmet every time a player is involved in contact.

Imagine a helmet made of a material that is liquid (viscous), but on collision it becomes crystalline, and is crushed, then after the collision, it becomes liquid again, and repairs itself....