Junior Seau, a 43-year-old professional football player, was one of the best linebackers in NFL history, and retired after 19 long years in the league. On May 2, 2012, Seau committed suicide after suffering from a concussion-related condition with depression as a symptom.
“It’s sad and it’s terrible,” said Nate Behar, Carleton’s star wide-receiver. “It’s tough to gauge because you want to think that these guys have a semblance of an idea of what they’re getting themselves into . . . But with recent evidence that’s come out, it’s evident that people have known for a long time.”
What has been known for a long time, according to Behar, is that there is a concussion epidemic plaguing high contact sports. It is putting the lives of athletes at risk, and has been for years.
This past month, an NFL executive acknowledged that there is indeed a link between football and Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), the degenerative brain disease that leads to depression, and in Seau’s case, his own death. In the hockey world, more than 100 retired players are currently suing the NHL for failing to protect them against brain injuries.
“It seems that it’s mostly related to the number of concussions a person would receive,” said Matthew Holahan, a Carleton professor of neuroscience. “The more contact these athletes have at higher level sports, the more it starts to set off this cascade of events that leads to neurodegenerative process in the brain.”
Holahan is examining athletes and the effect of concussions in sports.
“It’s really hard to pin down when this process starts and why it happens in some and not others,” Holahan said. “I think you can really only do that with animal studies . . . But even then it’s not quite the same as the human brain.”
This climate of uncertainty in the world of concussions has allowed some leagues to not fully address this issue. Despite this, some players have taken matters into their own hands. In Canadian Interuniversity Sport, Western University quarterback Will Finch decided not to return for a fifth year for reasons associated with concussions. Behar, who is friends with Finch, said that the decision is “pretty devastating.”
“He’s an incredible player and athlete, but him and his family finally decided that for his long-term health and quality of life he should lay the cleats down,” Behar said. Additionally, Finch said in a London Free Press article that there’s much more to life than “being in a hospital bed at 2 a.m., [or] sitting in a dark room with no visual stimulation.”
Elite level athletes are not the only ones at risk. Children in youth sports who participate in contact sports are also susceptible to the ills of concussions.
“We really have to be careful with kids,” Holahan said. “If they do receive multiple concussions, it can have a more detrimental impact in the long term, so that they can’t really contribute as much to society.”
“Injuring a developing brain at a young age can have a major effect. So in that respect, the impact [of concussions] is a bit greater when it happens with kids,” Holahan said.
Holahan has two children and said he would never consider putting them in competitive hockey where there’s a higher incidence of concussions.
On the other side of the fence, Carleton football head coach Steve Sumarah has a stepson who plays football. He said that he feels safe letting him play contact sports.
“The education is better, the protocols are better, and the coaching is better,” Sumarah said. “Because of that [the game] is way smarter and way safer,” he said. “We have doctors at games who are constantly monitoring contact, and checking with players when they come off the field,” he said.
In regards to the suicide problem in the NFL, Sumarah said that a lot of it happened in an era where concussions weren’t scrutinized like they are today.
“I’m a believer that the new equipment and rules have made this game very safe,” he said.
