The Baltimore Sun
01-30-07
FOR LINEMEN, FOOTBALL IS BIG, MAYBE TOO BIG, STUDY SHOWS
MILTON KENT
Two stories that slipped under the radar recently, one hopeful, one not so much,
provide yet another window into the soul of where high school athletics are and
where they might be headed.
A new Iowa State University study of 251 Iowa high school football teams found
that 9 percent of the linemen on those squads in the 2005 season had body
mass indexes (or BMI) that could qualify as adult-class obesity, which suggests
that we're willing to put our kids' health at risk earlier and earlier in the name of
supposedly making them better.
This report comes on the heels (no pun intended) of a University of North
Carolina study showing that 56 percent of all NFL players could be considered
obese.
The Iowa State study, published in the Jan. 24/31 issue of the Journal of the
American Medical Association, showed that 7 percent of the linemen had a BMI
that would be classified as adult class II obesity, while an additional 2 percent
were in the class III category.
Not surprisingly, the biggest linemen came from the biggest schools. Players
tended to become bigger with age, with seniors having the highest BMI and
freshmen having the lowest.
A person's BMI is determined by dividing his weight in kilograms by his height in
meters squared. A BMI of 30 or higher is thought to be obese, while a measure
of 40 or higher is considered morbidly obese.
There is, to be certain, disagreement in some medical circles about the value of
the BMI, but there isn't or shouldn't be any disagreement about whether high
school football players should be NFL-sized before they actually get to the NFL.
Look around most big-time high school football programs these days, and you're
likely to see linemen who tip the scales in excess of 275 pounds. While many of
those players are hitting the weight rooms in greater numbers, a lot of them
aren't, and that can't augur well for the future.
Kelly Laurson, an Iowa State graduate student who co-authored the study
with Joey Eisenmann, an Iowa State professor, told the Iowa State University
News Service: "We obviously suspect these linemen are being pressured by
coaches to gain weight or may want to gain weight because when you watch the
NFL, you see these big linemen. So they may desire to be big. They may have
been big before starting high school football, but may desire to be bigger as they
go through the sport."
Laurson, who played high school football in Iowa, asked the relevant question
that flows from this study, namely, "What happens to them when they stop
playing football?"
What, indeed?
Meanwhile, one of the best pieces of news to emerge from high school sports
lately came with the announcement that basketball impresario Sonny Vaccaro is
ending his annual ABCD summer camp, designed to parade the nation's best
boys high school players before college coaches and agents, not to mention
sneaker company representatives, eager to get their first taste of the young talent
before it aligned somewhere else.
The result was a toxic brew that more often than not alternately perverted and
trivialized high school basketball, turning the game on its ear in the name of
hooking up talent with willing buyers.
The free-wheeling nature of summer-league basketball, and its emphasis on
flash and dash, essentially pushed the high school coach and his quaint
preaching of the virtues of passing and defensive skills to the side.
And no one was a greater champion of the summer game than Vaccaro. The 67year-old, who got gigs with Nike, Adidas and Reebok, always held himself out as
nothing more than a facilitator. That would be something akin to the way a pimp
facilitates transactions between "customers" and "clients."
If there's any good news out of the NBA's decision to require high school players
to wait a year before turning professional, it is that they might actually have to
spend some time learning to do something other than shoot long-range jumpers
and dunk.
The bad news is that Vaccaro is talking about forming a basketball academy,
where the best young players could go to learn the game. Kids would be wise to
read the textbooks in that school carefully.
milton.kent@baltsun.com