Are Contact Sports Worth The Risk Essay

Are contact sports worth the risk or not is a hotly contested topic because some people think they are unique and full of benefits. However, I am here to tell you they are not. Research shows the negative side effects of contact sports. People should care about this because contact sports can cause lifelong illnesses mentally and physically. In order to prove the claim that contact sports are not worth the risk this essay will defend three evidence-based reasons. The first reason is that concussions can have life-altering negative effects. Next, contact sports contribute to the mental illness of aggression. Lastly, Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy or CTE. Finally, we will address the counterclaim that contact sports are totally worth the risk.

In an article written by Brain Resnick called What a Lifetime of Football can do to the brain, he states “The human brain — the most complicated and powerful organ on planet Earth — is squishy. And when a person hits their head hard, the brain can bounce around and twist in the skull. It’s this rapid movement of the brain inside the skull that creates the traumatic brain injury known as a concussion”(Resnick). This shows that concussions can have a large and life-threatening effect or a few weeks off effect. It’s not just in sports more pointed to males but also in female sports such as soccer, in Vander Voo Lee’s article The Concussion Gap: Head Injuries in Girls Soccer are An ‘Unpublished Epidemic’ he strongly believes as he states “National research has found girls are more likely to suffer a concussion than boys in any sport. In 2017, researchers at Northwestern University generated national headlines when they found concussion rates among young female soccer players were nearly as high as concussion rates for boys playing football — and roughly triple the rate of concussions in boy's soccer”(Voo). People may think that girls' soccer or even soccer in general is safe, but it’s not. As you can see, overall contact sports aren’t safe for anybody to play, and these sports can cost you your

In this article by Brain Resnick called What a Lifetime of Playing Football Can Do to the Human Brain he reports “Specifically, brains with CTE accumulate a protein called tau (which is believed to be dislodged from brain fibers during an injury). Tau clumps together in the tissues of the brain, interrupting critical information flow” (Resnick). This is critical because it shows how the brain flow causing you to make normal decisions gets cut off leading you to do something crazy. Again in this article, he states “Of the 202 brains, 177, or nearly 90 percent, were diagnosed with CTE. And there was a pattern: Those who had played football longer were more likely to have worse brain damage. Among the former NFL players in the sample, 99 percent had CTE” (Resnick). In fact, the brains of football players show how awful playing these contact sports can be. As you can see this disease is cumulative suffering and these symptoms can include headaches but the worse symptoms can include executive dysfunction, anxiety, depression, and ultimately suicidal