Please Let Your Son Play Football.

We jog onto the field from our locker room. The crowd roars. All butterflies and nerves leave my body once I hear their emphatic cheering. We’re playing our biggest game of the year, a home game. And the stakes are high. On the 50-yard line, my team faces the opposing captains. We shake hands.

“Good luck,” we tell each other.

Then it’s game time. My mind goes silent as soon as the kicker’s toe meets leather. My nerves come back. The ball’s been kicked, beginning the game. The only thing that matters to me now? Block and lay an opposing player on the ground. That way, our team's kick returner can take it to the house. After the first kick-off, we... scored! The ten of us all do our job perfectly, allowing one teammate to steal the game’s first six points.

Sure. The kick returner got all the glory for the touchdown. But, if the rest of our team did not do the behind-the-scenes work of blocking to make lanes for the kick returner, he wouldn’t have had the chance to score. That’s what makes football so unique. To win a game, everyone on the team has to succeed at their job. Someone else's role will be affected if a teammate misses an assignment or a call. Maybe a quarterback loses his season because an offensive lineman decided to take it easy one play. Or maybe a punt returner gets tackled five yards away from their own end zone because his blockers were playing lackadaisically. You always have to play for your teammates, not yourself. This is the beauty of the sport. This is where boys become men. This is football.

The rush of playing football is undeniably satisfying. But maybe you’re here because your son, entering high school, has asked you if he can play on the football team...but you’re hesitant to say yes, given what you’ve heard about the sport. I can’t make that decision for you. But I can share my experience with you as someone who played football throughout high school.

Through football, I learned three traits I’ll carry with me until I go down: teamwork, discipline, and faith.

Teamwork

Football is a selfless sport. Join a team, and you’ll quickly learn the value of teamwork, of sacrificing personal gain to help someone else make a crucial play for the team. I can’t overstate the importance of lifting sessions, summer conditioning practices, and late nights studying films of the opposing teams’ strategies. But teamwork plays the most significant role when it comes to success.

On a football team, you’ll work for hours upon hours with the same group of guys, and thus, they’ll become brothers to you. Football practices are brutal. So when you’re walking down the halls in school and see one of your teammates, remembering how you endured those conditioning sessions in the heat of summer together, you’ll automatically feel a different connection to them. A bond.

When you become part of a team, it's bigger than you; you’ll gain 40 or 50 brothers who would do anything in the world for you and always have your back. This is one of the greatest feelings that football has to offer. It won’t matter what “friend group” someone was in before joining the team or their interests outside of football. You’ll care about everyone and sacrifice for them because that’s the nature of the game. It’s unlike any sport in that way. The only real comparable measure is being in the military. There isn’t as much at stake in football as there is at war, obviously, but if you drop the ball on a task at war, it could be at the expense of your brother’s life. If you decide to take a play off in football, it could be at the expense of another brother’s season. See the similarity?

Discipline

Football goes far beyond the field. The sport encouraged me to earn solid grades, pay attention in class, present myself well at school, and attend class regularly. My teammates and I were required to hold ourselves to those standards. My coaches taught us that if one of us didn’t, we’d all be penalized. If just one player were to get in trouble at school, the whole team would have to run sprints at practice. The result? We became disciplined, held each other accountable, and looked out for one another.

I’ve been incredibly blessed in life, having had the opportunity to grow up in a stable home with an above-average household income. Others, though, experience adversity in their upbringing. When I used to go to a football summer camp held by the University of Alabama, I made friends who had experienced challenging upbringings. One of my friends told me that drugs were a constant source of peer pressure in his hometown. His teammates would keep him and others away from drugs and crime—and the discipline in playing the game steered him away from that lifestyle, too. It’s much easier to stand up against peer pressure if you have a brotherhood behind you, supporting you in staying strong.

Yet another one of my friends from that camp told me he’d grown up in a house where he regularly experienced abuse. He was thankful whenever he saw another practice scheduled in the summer or the fall; that gave him an extra two hours to be away from his home environment and be in a safe space with his brothers on the field.

Through camp, not only did I learn a lot about what football meant for me, I also learned that football may be why some of those kids are still alive. It was eye-opening and taught me not to take what I have for granted.

Faith

To me, faith is the power of believing in things you cannot see, whether religious faith or faith in relationships and bonds down here. I attended a Christian high school, so faith was a large part of the football organization. My head coach, a solid Christian, strived to enlighten us on the word of God by sharing his personal experiences with us.

But really, all of my football coaches, the head coach included, served as second parents to us. They cared about each player as a son. Above everything, they wanted to see their players become strong human beings. Frequently they checked in on my school life and asked me about my family. They genuinely cared about me off the field and wanted to see me succeed off the field more than on it. Our coaches would even set up days for our team to give back to the community. For example, we once spent a day helping build a house through Habitat for Humanity. Even after graduating high school, my coaches consistently check up on me. They ask how I feel about college and what I’m majoring in. And we players also care for them by bringing them their favorite foods. We are a family, from top to bottom, coaches and players.

I remember once I had just dove to catch a two-point conversion in a JV game my freshman year. When I dove, both my legs cramped up, and I had trouble getting up off the ground. I vividly remember seeing my 65-year-old coach bust it down the sideline to check on me. He picked me up over his shoulder, running down the sideline to get me back to our trainer. I was throwing up all over his backside, but it didn’t bother him. He just wanted to make sure that I could be seen by a trainer and that I was all right.

Getting Injured

Many times throughout my playing days, it seemed logical to quit football or have my parents pull me out because it was a very contact-heavy sport, which naturally concerned us. In high school, I suffered from three concussions—only one from football—and numerous shoulder injuries. So after each concussion I suffered, I had very delicate conversations with my family. We always decided to let me continue playing. We believed that the benefits I got from football outweighed the costs the injuries provided.

A while back, I saw a thread on social media between two parents that reminds me of my family's perspective. A mom posted a picture of her little daughter—maybe around five years old—holding a knife and cutting vegetables. Another mom replied to the post asking why in the world she would let her daughter use a knife at such a young age; she could hurt herself! The parent who posted the picture replied that she would rather raise a self-sufficient daughter with nine fingers who knew how to cook than a daughter with ten who was less independent. We knew it wouldn’t be easy, but we knew that football would be worth it.

I know that letting me continue to play was one of my parents' best decisions for my growth as a young man. That being said, the technology and safety measures that high school football is implementing are making the game safer to play each year. Helmet protection is improving. During practices, most teams wear a shield over their helmets to limit the number of hard hits players take. Helmets worn in-game are equipped with technology that tells trainers when to take a player out of the game because of an impactful hit to the head. And the rules, safety measures and regulations continue to change. I always gave the proper amount of time for my concussions to heal and avoided any long-term damage. The game has come a long way since I started playing over a decade ago, and injury and concussion numbers are declining.

Football is a major part of who I am today. Without football, I believe I’d be missing out on many of the values I carry with me as part of my character. Football, the sport itself, is not what's special. The brotherhood, the discipline, and the role models you meet along the way are what make the sport one of a kind. Yes, the Friday night lights and the hard hits are always enjoyable, but the true meaning of football cannot be seen from the outside in. The work and grit that goes into a football program are not seen from the stands. I will be forever grateful for what football gave me. I know it’s a deeply personal decision, but I encourage you to let your son try the sport out if he’s curious. See what he thinks about it. Ultimately, football may not be for your son—it’s not for everyone—but it might just change his life. I welcome your feedback; please leave a comment below.