A 13-year-old football player from West Virginia died on Saturday after suffering a head injury during football practice, becoming the seventh youth football player to die in the U.S. this month alone.
Cohen Craddock was a Grade 8 student and defensive lineman for the Madison Middle School football team. During a practice on Friday, Cohen hit his head while making a tackle.
After colliding with other players, Cohen got back up, took a few steps, then lost consciousness. He was rushed to the hospital suffering from brain bleeding and swelling. His oxygen level was low while he was in the ambulance, his father said.
The next day, Cohen died, just three days after the first day of school.
“You wish it was a bad dream you could wake up from,” Ryan Craddock, Cohen’s father, said.
In an interview with NBC News, Craddock remembered his son as “Mr. Personality” with a “heart of gold.”
“He was very, very smart. He excelled at math, loved technology stuff, very smart with electronics and computers,” Ryan said, adding that his son had hopes of becoming a computer engineer. “As a father, I couldn’t have been more proud.”
The Boone County Sheriff’s Office wrote in a Facebook post: “Losing someone so young is heartbreaking, and our entire community feels the weight of this loss.”
“Today we’re all Madison Middle School Redhawks,” the post read.
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The school district’s superintendent, Matthew Riggs, said counselling and other mental health support will be available to Madison Middle School students, staff and faculty as the community grieves Cohen’s loss.
The 13-year-old’s father plans to work with the school to get young players to wear soft-shell helmet covers, called Guardian Caps, as part of their regular equipment.
“I want to take the loss of my boy to try to protect the other guys,” he said. “I don’t want anybody else to go through what we are going through currently.”
A GoFundMe page has been started in Cohen’s memory to raise money for Guardian Caps. It has so far raised over US$3,000.
Cohen’s death comes amid a concerning wave of fatalities among young football players. At least seven students have died due to football-related injuries in the month of August alone.
On the same day as Cohen’s death, a 16-year-old high school quarterback from Alabama also died. It’s believed that Caden Tellier suffered a ruptured blood vessel in his brain after being tackled to the ground during a Friday night game.
A week before that, two high school football players died on Aug. 14: Ovet Gomez-Regalado, a 15-year-old from Kansas City who collapsed during practice, and Junior Leslie Noble, a 16-year-old lineman from Baltimore who also collapsed during practice due to heat stroke.
Two other students died on Aug. 13. Semaj Wilkins, 14, was rushed to a hospital after collapsing during football practice. A cause of death has not been revealed in that case, but temperatures were upwards of 35 C in Alabama when he fainted. Robert James Gillon III, 15, died in his home in Florida the day after football practice, complaining of chest pains.
On Aug. 5, a 15-year-old from Virginia died after collapsing during a drill session due to heat stroke. Coaches doused Javion Taylor’s body in water and ice to cool him down, but the 15-year-old died shortly afterwards in the hospital.
California lawmakers recently proposed banning tackle football for children under 12 in order to reduce brain injuries as advocates call for stricter regulations on contact sports. The Concussion Legacy Foundation strongly recommends that parents delay enrolling their children in tackle football until at least the age of 14.
“Research continues to show us that the long-term effects of repetitive brain trauma from tackle football can be catastrophic,” the organization notes.
A 2021 study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that youth tackle football athletes sustained 23 times more high-magnitude head impacts than flag football players during games and practices. Tackle players suffered, on average, 378 head impacts during the football season, while flag football players only suffered eight head impacts.
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