Steve Christilaw: Youngsters’ brains too valuable for headers in soccer

Sometimes the most important aspects of our character are how we deal with life after we begin to know better.

In the past few years we’ve begun to understand the way the human brain deals with some of the things we do to it in the name of sport. Tragically, in some cases.

It started with the brains of football players – the ones who make their living banging their heads against each other. In a finding that screams “duh” at the top of its lungs, it turns out that banging your head against a brick wall, or anything else hard, is not good for the brain.

You see, the brain is a brilliantly designed organ that does miraculous things. To do those incredible things, it floats inside the skull surrounded by fluid. It can handle things like slapping your head with the palm of your hand because you forgot to have your vegetable drink just fine. But when you strap a helmet to it and bang it into a brick wall a few times, it sustains damage.

When you make a career out of doing just that, it comes at a high cost. A tragic cost.

That kind of damage has a name: chronic traumatic encephalopathy. As it accumulates, it can be debilitating. It warps personalities, changing otherwise loving human beings into rage-filled monsters. It has been tied to a growing number of suicides and murders.

It doesn’t always end that way, but living with it can be painful.

The challenge of CTE is literally morbid. The only certain diagnosis of the condition comes during autopsy, and, of course, by then it’s too late to do anything about it other than use the tragedy as a lesson for the rest of us.

At first it was thought that CTE was a result of having suffered repeated concussions. But researchers have discovered that you can suffer from CTE without ever having been diagnosed with a full-blown concussion.

And as we’ve learned more, CTE isn’t limited to football. Hockey players have been diagnosed. Boxers, too.

And now it’s being found in kids who play soccer – the result of heading the ball.

The header is a beautiful part of the game of soccer. At the highest level, it’s almost an artform.

But it’s also a painful way to make a play. If you know what you’re doing when you make that play, it may be worth the headache that comes from redirecting a hard-kicked, fully inflated ball with the part of your body that houses the most delicate part of a human being’s wiring.

And that’s if you just make contact with the ball.

The problem is, there generally are opponents leaping into the air trying to do the same thing you are, and frequently heads collide. And it ain’t pretty when they do. There can be serious injury involved – severe concussions included.

We’ve seen that with high school soccer players locally.

There is a movement by some big-name former soccer players, including Brandi Chastain, to make it illegal in youth soccer for kids under 14 years to head the ball. Give the kids a chance to grow up and develop their neck muscles, they say.

That’s a great idea. It’s an ounce of prevention; the pound of cure, it turns out, is a high price indeed – we don’t know yet if CTE can be reversed or if the brain, once injured in that way, can heal itself.

Over the years we’ve learned things with youth sports. We’ve learned that having Little Leaguers throw curveballs damages the development of the elbows and shoulders. It’s better to wait until the kids mature physically to learn the fancy stuff; it’s better to teach young pitchers how to control the ball and change speeds.

We’ve learned that it’s much more productive to have peewee hockey players concentrate on puck handling, shooting and passing than hitting each other the way they do in the NHL.

And we’ve learned that if we teach young football players to block and tackle properly and not use their helmets as weapons, the game is safer for all concerned.

Now it’s time to do the same with soccer.

Learn to handle the ball. Learn to pass it properly. Learn how to play the game.

There will be plenty of time to learn how to head the ball later. If you want to.