‘Play hurt, practice hurt’: How life-threatening injuries became normalized in college football | College football

Clint* says he was suffering from an undiagnosed concussion when he collapsed on the field during preseason training camp for a team in the Power Five, the elite level of college football. It was an incident that foreshadowed the tragic death of Jordan McNair at a University of Maryland practice. Clint was attended to by medical staff and ultimately hospitalized overnight. Meanwhile, the head coach called out, “Move the drill!” and sent the team to continue on another side of the field.

“One of my friends told me they had to carry on with practice and they didn’t know if I was dead or not,” Clint told us, adding: “[Head coach] never checked on my wellbeing before, during, or after.”

Perhaps the most notable part of this story is the way it was waved away by other sources we spoke to, including members of the coaching staff: “At this level in sports, that type of practice is common. We have multiple injuries a practice. They can’t just halt everything and everyone once a player goes down.”

This is precisely the problem: life-threatening injuries are standard procedure in college football, normalized to the extent that training is seen as impossible if sessions are stopped to care for injured players.

Just days after the training camp collapse, Clint says he had his only conversation with his head coach checking in on his health. He says the head coach told him, “We need two weeks of work from you, and I need to know if you’re up to it. If you’re not up to it, we’ll have to move on with [your backup].”

Clint understood that to mean that he could not afford to take time off to recover – “the message was sent” – and so he returned to practice 10 days after the collapse.

But, he says, he had not actually recovered from the injury – and did not tell coaches he was still feeling the effects of his collapse and earlier undiagnosed concussion for fear of losing his place on the team.

“I returned to the practice field earlier than I should have, was not fully asymptomatic, and did as many other players before and since have done, and put the clear signs that my brain was sending me on the backburner and didn’t miss another day.” Instead, he says, “The entire 10 days or so build up to the first game, I was suffering from intermittent migraines, inability to sleep, and decreased appetite.” Nevertheless, he started and played that entire game.

After the game, in consultation with some trusted coaches and medical staff on the team, Clint decided that the best and safest course of action would be to retire from the sport he loved. When informed of the decision, Clint says that his head coach offered him the chance to speak to the team, which he accepted. However, he adds the head coach also told him, “Don’t go into too much detail, we don’t want to scare any of the other players. There’s a lot of concussion stuff out there right now, and we have a long season ahead of us.” Clint says that he agreed to the head coach’s stipulation, a decision he calls “the one regret I do have.”

Clint’s experience is hardly exceptional. The dynamics he describes evoke conditions across college football. In anonymous interviews** conducted with former players for our forthcoming book The End of College Football: On the Human Cost of an All-American Game, many athletes spoke about similar issues.

One player told us that he too was dissuaded from bringing up the issue of head trauma with teammates because it might influence their desire to participate: “We had, I think it was six or seven offensive linemen received concussions … I go, ‘Hey, I want everybody to come over to my house, we’re going to sit down and we’re going to watch this movie Concussion. We’re going to watch what happens when you rush back, we’re going to watch where this might lead if you’re not careful.’ … But my head coach at the time caught wind of it. And he goes, ‘You’re not going to do that. You’re not going to get everybody in there and you’re not going to watch that movie.’”

Another player described a harrowing experience during training camp: “They weigh you before and after practice each day, to make sure that you’re not losing a lot of weight. I don’t think anyone’s looking at this because I lost 30lbs in five days … On the sixth day after two morning practices, and the lifting, I just felt like my body was going cold … I went to the back shower and I had lost consciousness … I later on learned that I basically had all the signs that I was potentially going to go into cardiac arrest … I didn’t have a pulse, so they went to put bags of saline in me … I’d been vomiting so much that my esophagus was scarred and was starting to close a little bit … I did miss that afternoon practice, and I felt super guilty about it. You know, Stockholm Syndrome, whatever you want to call it. The next morning, I went and had an endoscopy. They just found a bunch of scar tissue. So the next day, I was practicing again … and would still kind of vomit here and there, but it eventually subsided. It was nuts. There wasn’t really anybody looking out for my mental or my physical wellbeing. I pushed myself so hard that I literally almost died.”

Unsurprisingly, Clint agrees that his experience was not unique. He told us that his head coach’s “messaging was consistent. You play hurt, you practice hurt, and that availability is the most important ability. He constantly complained about the injured players being inside for their rehab during practice. He wanted them outside at practice, but not standing around. He stated multiple times that it shouldn’t be comfortable to be injured. He felt like if being injured felt like a break from work, then more guys would feign injuries.”

That comment was corroborated by a former teammate, who added: “The one thing I’d want to mention is [head coach’s] workouts. I remember one day in particular on the game field at 5am we did a workout that caused several people to ‘fall out’ with full body cramps and exhaustion. The training room after the workout had over eight people on IVs, convulsing essentially with the full body cramping.”

Clint also observed that the taking back of scholarships was a consistent problem he noticed in his time around his head coach. He explained that, “The plan laid out to many of us when we were recruited: come in, redshirt, and your fifth year if you have taken care of your academic business, you could attempt to be accepted in graduate school. That was my five-year plan, as well. For many of the players in my class, they were pushed to graduate and leave when they had spent four years working with academic supervisors to plan their schedule in such a way that their redshirt senior year [fifth year] they would get into graduate school. Multiple players in my class were told to leave, therefore blowing up their previous four years of planning.”

His former teammate noted a similar phenomenon – and one that was noted repeatedly by players we interviewed for the book at programs across the US – with respect to drug testing: “We also had ‘body snatching.’ [Our head coach] started to make it obvious who he wanted to kick off the team, pull their scholarships to free up room. People that had been on the team but not contributed. Every Wednesday they would drug test six or seven people. And it was obvious they were using it to try and pull scholarships rather than to deter smoking weed.”

The other former player also resonated with these recollections: “Once you’re on the team it’s well known that all the lines [head coach] says about it being important that you get your degree is just for the parents during the recruiting process … He does tell recruits he wants them all to graduate with masters degrees but this is never actually pushed and I can’t even think of one guy who actually ended up doing that.”

Clint, for his part, continues to struggle with the physiological consequences of his time in college football. “I, and my psychologist, both believe that the three to four weeks between my hospitalization and the first game [of the season] could have long-term effects that span the rest of my life. I was essentially practicing and playing for close to a month in a perpetual post-concussive state.”

So, why share his story now?

“There is a shadow to college football that needs to have a light shined on it for the betterment of all involved, not just the athletic departments that benefit from the labor and health of the underserved population that they ‘employ’.”

Still, Clint himself is in a good place now. He says, “I ended up getting a world class education and meeting the love of my life and the mother of my children at [college]. [My head coach] is only a footnote in my story.”

* Clint is a pseudonym. We have not named the college in question to protect the identities of those we spoke to, who fear retaliation.

** Former players we spoke to for The End of College Football have been granted anonymity to protect them from reprisal and in accordance with academic research protocols and research ethics board requirements.