Small Business Lifestyle

Youth football safety debate is rekindled by deaths of 2 players [Video]
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Youth football safety debate is rekindled by deaths of 2 players [Video]

Ryan Craddock had seen his share of tragedy during his two decades as a coal miner and firefighter.Then came the toughest heartbreak of all: his own.Related video above: Football player dies of head injury received in practice at West Virginia middle schoolCraddock and his family are mourning the loss of his 13-year-old son, Cohen, who died from brain trauma last month after making a tackle during football practice at his middle school.Cohen’s death, and the death of a 16-year-old Alabama high school player from a brain injury on the same day, have sparked renewed debate about whether the safety risks of youths playing football outweigh the benefits that the sport brings to a community.”I don’t think we need to do away with football,” Craddock said. “A lot of people enjoy football, including myself. I just think we need to maybe put more safety measures out there to protect our kids.”Craddock is among those who believe that some concrete actions need to be taken to prevent more deaths.Proposals in individual states to ban tackle football for younger children during a critical period of their brain development have gotten little traction. At the same time, youth participation in tackle football has been declining for years, and efforts to steer young boys into flag football are growing.In 2023, three young football players died of head injuries, and 10 players died of other causes, such as heat stroke, according to the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Research at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr. Robert Cantu, medical director of the organization, which has been tracking football-related deaths for more than 40 years, calls that a “typical” year.”So I would not be particularly alarmed about two deaths in a week,” he said. “But I would be very alarmed if we had two deaths per week for four or five weeks in a row. Because we’ve never had that before.”Cantu also subscribes to another philosophy: “No hits to the head are good,” he says.In the past, Cantu has recommended that for kids under 14, there should be no tackling in football, no heading in soccer and no full-body-checking in hockey.In football practices, at least, most helmet-to-helmet contact can be eliminated by using noncollision methods such as tackling dummies, said Cantu, who is also co-founder of the Boston-based Concussion Legacy Foundation, which supports patients and families struggling with brain-trauma symptoms. He suggests children play flag football until they enter high school.Flag football is already wildly popular among girls and is sanctioned as an Olympic sport for men and women at the 2028 Los Angeles Games. About 500,000 girls ages 6 to 17 played flag football in 2023, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations.Whether that popularity transfers to boys remains to be seen. The Concussion Legacy Foundation has a “Flag Football under 14″ initiative and has compiled a list of Pro Football Hall of Famers who waited until high school to play tackle football, including Tom Brady, Jerry Rice, Jim Brown and Walter Payton.”I suggest age 12 would be a good place to start the conversation,” said Dr. Chris Nowinski, the foundation’s CEO and a former WWE wrestler who retired due to a concussion. “But any minimum age requirement that takes into consideration brain health for children would be welcome.”Nowinski said even the NFL has limited full-contact practices during the regular season and recently changed kickoff rules aimed at preventing concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy, a degenerative brain disease that medical studies have linked to the head trauma of NFL players.”Yet middle and high school football has made neither change,” he said.Efforts to ban tackling in youth football have met strong resistance. A New York lawmaker fought unsuccessfully for 10 years to enact such a rule. In January, California Gov. Gavin Newsom said he would not sign a similar bill if it were to reach his desk.There has been some progress, however. For instance, all 50 states have some form of sports-related concussion laws, mostly requiring athletes to leave a game or practice if a concussion is suspected and be cleared by a medical professional before they can return.An increase in reported concussions from 2005-06 through 2017-18 was likely due to that additional education and awareness, said Christy Collins, president of the Indianapolis-based Datalys Center for Sports Injury Research and Prevention. The center uses a sampling of high schools nationwide to calculate injury rates involving football practices and games combined.”Athletes (and their parents) may have been more likely to recognize symptoms of concussion and report those symptoms to medical professionals,” Collins said.Loren Montgomery, who has won nine Oklahoma state championships in 14 seasons as the head coach at Bixby High School, believes football is “safer than ever.” He cites efforts to minimize injury risk, such as penalizing helmet-to-helmet contact and certain types of blocks, along with technology, including cognitive tests for concussion assessment and protective soft-shell helmet covers known as Guardian caps.”Obviously, there is inherent risk in all contact sports, but the values of teamwork, hard work and overcoming adversity far outweigh the risk involved,” Montgomery said. He allowed his son to play football starting in the fourth grade, “and I believe it has made him a more well-rounded young man.”Guardian caps are used from the NFL on down to the youth level. One cap made by Guardian Sports sells on Amazon for $75. But the caps have only a six-month limited warranty from the date of purchase, meaning they could be pricey for a school district to have to replace every season.Guardian Sports also warns on its website that no helmet, helmet pad or practice apparatus prevents or eliminates the risk of concussions or other serious head injuries while playing sports.Still, Craddock has vowed to look into the caps’ use at Madison Middle School in Cohen’s memory.On Wednesday, several days before his son was to be laid to rest, Craddock found the strength to speak with Cohen’s teammates.”I told them that this was a bad accident, to move forward,” he said. “I didn’t want them to have the weight of my son on their shoulders. But I wanted them to play for him. I wanted them to play ‘Cohen strong.'” Riddle reported from Montgomery, Alabama.

The search for Susan Smith’s children [Video]
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Small Business Lifestyle

The search for Susan Smith’s children [Video]

Convicted killer Susan Smith will soon be eligible for parole on Nov. 4, according to the Leath Correctional Institution in Greenwood, South Carolina.WYFF 4 decided to take a look back on the case of Smith and the alleged disappearance of her children.(Video above: Archived video from early on in the search for Susan Smith’s kids)Around 9 p.m. on Oct. 25, 1994, Shirley McCloud was reading the newspaper in her home, which was about a quarter of a mile away from John D. Lake, when she heard a woman wailing on her front porch. McCloud turned on the porch light and found Smith crying hysterically. Smith cried, “Please help me! He’s got my kids and he’s got my car,” McCloud led Smith into her home, and Smith told her, “A Black man has got my kids and my car.” 911 was called immediately after.Union County Sheriff Howard Wells had driven to the McCloud’s home and was directing the search for the Smith children.According to Smith’s false claims, she said that on Oct. 25, 1994, while stopped at the Monarch Mills red light in Union County, South Carolina, a black man armed with a gun opened the passenger door, got in, poked the gun in her side and demanded that she “shut up and drive.”About three or four miles down the road, she claimed the man told her to stop the car and get out. Smith asked to get her sons, Michael, 3, and Alexander, 14 months old, out of the vehicle, but the man said no as he didn’t have time for it.Smith stated to police that she was pushed out of the car before the man took off with her children in the car. She then ran to the closest house to get help. She told authorities she had never seen the man before the “carjacking.” On the morning of Oct. 26, Wells contacted the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division to coordinate efforts to send divers to John D. Long Lake to search the waters.Throughout the day, a SLED helicopter flew over the lake and the nearby Sumter National Forest with heat sensors in an effort to find the car or the children. Divers searched but did not find anything on the bottom of John D. Long Lake in the area they searched. Union County deputies and SLED agents searched the area surrounding the lake but, despite all efforts, they came up empty.Wells arranged for a sketch artist to meet with Smith to obtain a better, more detailed description and a composite sketch drawing of the kidnapper.Smith described the man as around 40 years old, black and wearing a dark shirt, plaid jacket, jeans and a dark knit cap. On the afternoon of Oct. 26, Margaret Frierson, the executive director of the South Carolina Chapter of the Adam Walsh Center, talked to Smith’s sister-in-law, Wendy Vaughn, to offer help in the search for Michael and Alex. Frierson and her assistant, Charlotte Foster, worked with SLED to obtain pictures of Michael and Alex in an effort to print fliers describing the missing boys.Frierson explained to the family that she and Foster could be the family’s liaison with the media by scheduling interviews and providing information about the crime. Susan Smith and her now ex-husband, David Smith stood on the steps of the Union County Sheriff’s Office and talked to the press before being questioned by SLED for six hours. Susan Smith was asked numerous times to go over the details of the carjacking.On Oct. 27, both Susan and David Smith agreed to take polygraph tests administered by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The two signed and read their Miranda rights before taking the test. David Smith’s polygraph results showed he knew nothing about the disappearance of his children, but Susan Smith’s results came back inconclusive.According to officials, when Susan Smith was asked, “Do you know where your children are?” the test showed the highest level of deception. Reportedly, Susan Smith told David Smith she did not think she did well on the test and was concerned authorities would begin to doubt her story.The FBI agent who administered Susan Smith’s test said she made “fake sounds of crying with no tears in her eyes.”Due to the results of the polygraph tests, Susan Smith was tested many times, but David Smith was only tested once.As the search continued, the presence of media grew much larger, garnering the attention of the nation. The false claims by Susan Smith also raised racial tensions as Black men and women felt pressured as the search dragged on for the children and the mysterious suspect. After Susan Smith told her story repeatedly, several inconsistencies occurred. On Oct. 27, she was interviewed three times at the sheriff’s office.During an interview with investigators, Susan Smith claimed her son, Michael, asked at 7:30 p.m. to go to Walmart on the day of the kidnapping. When questioned about this, Susan Smith admitted to suggesting going to Walmart instead. She said that she drove to Foster Park, where Susan Smith and her sons stayed until 8:40 p.m., but did not get out of her vehicle. She then claimed she went back to the Walmart parking lot to use the bright lights to find Alex’s bottle, which he had dropped on the floor of the car. According to the reports, investigators spoke to people who were working and shopping at the Walmart Susan Smith “visited,” but no one remembered seeing her or her kids. At that point, Susan Smith changed her story, stating she actually was driving around for a couple of hours with her children in their car seats. She mentioned stopping for the red light at the Monarch Mills intersection, but saw no other vehicles at the intersection where she stopped.This caused suspicions to grow among investigators as the light at the Monarch intersection is permanently green unless a car on the other street triggers the signal to change, so the light would not have been red.While Susan Smith was being interviewed, David Smith told SLED investigators that she had been dating other men. Investigators asked David Smith for names and dates, and he told them of Tom Findlay, Susan Smith’s boyfriend. The investigator questioning Susan Smith told her that authorities discovered Findlay had broken off his relationship with her because of her kids. The investigator asked Susan Smith if this played any role in the disappearance of her children.She replied, “No man would make me hurt my children. They were my life,” which implied she thought her sons were no longer alive.Later in the interview, Susan Smith was directly asked by the investigator if she killed her children, and she became enraged, slamming her fist on the table, yelling, “I can’t believe that you think I did it,” before storming out of the office where the interview was conducted.David Smith reportedly grew frustrated that the investigators focused so much attention on Susan Smith rather than searching for his sons.Wells requested the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit to give a profile of a homicidal mother, and the profile almost perfectly described Susan Smith.On Oct. 28, Wells held a press conference to say there were no solid clues in the kidnapping of Michael and Alex, but no suspects were ruled out, including Susan and David Smith.On Oct. 29, the Union Daily Times newspaper published an article about inconsistencies in Susan Smith’s story.Six days after the kidnapping of Michael and Alex on Oct. 31, the Union County Sheriff’s Office got a call from officers in Seattle, Washington, about a 14-month-old child matching the description of Alex. Officials said the child was abandoned by a man driving a car with South Carolina license plates outside a motel near Seattle. By 10 a.m. Seattle police called, confirming the child was not Alex. Following the news, another press conference was held by Wells in front of the sheriff’s office.After the press conference on Oct. 31, authorities were faced with the challenge of proving Susan Smith was guilty, as officials concluded she was lying about her involvement in the children’s disappearance.Next week, we will look into Susan Smith’s arrest and trial for the murder of her two sons, Michael and Alexander.