siegel middle school football player life flight

Siegel middle school football player life flight full#

These racial divides show up in the football that America watches: Today black athletes make up nearly half of all Division I college-football players, up from 39 percent in 2000. Meanwhile, in Lee County, Georgia, a majority-black area near where the Jacksons live, a coach recently started a new travel football team for kids to provide them with guidance and mentorship. This trend has become particularly visible as majority-white towns such as Ridgefield, New Jersey, and Healdsburg, California, have dropped their varsity-football programs due to a lack of interest. Other recent studies suggest that more black adults support youth tackle football than white adults. Football at the high-school level is growing in popularity in states with the highest shares of black people, while it’s declining in majority-white states. A recent survey of 50,000 eighth-, tenth-, and 12th-grade students found that about 44 percent of black boys play tackle football, compared with 29 percent of white boys, as analyzed by the University of Michigan sociologist Philip Veliz. But proportionally, the scales appear to be shifting.

In keeping with America’s general racial demographics, white boys continue to make up the majority of youth-tackle-football players, according to data from the Sports and Fitness Industry Association. But black kids in lower-income communities without a lot of other sports available are still flocking to football. Kids in mostly white upper-income communities in the Northeast, Midwest, and West are leaving football for other sports such as lacrosse or baseball. Yet not all parents are holding back their kids from tackle football at equal rates, which is creating a troubling racial divide. In the 2017–18 school year, 6.6 percent fewer high-school athletes participated in 11-player tackle football than in the 2008–09 school year, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. Research suggests that tackle football can cause long-term brain injury, and as a result, many parents are telling their kids they can’t play. Marqwayvian McCoy at home in his jersey (Dustin Chambers)Īs Qway throws himself into football, the sport is facing a highly publicized reckoning more serious than any it has confronted since the Pop Warner youth-football program was established in 1929. Qway knows his mother doesn’t have the money to send him to college, so he studies websites that track top high-school-football athletes and watches all the football he can online, hoping to get better at the game.

Siegel middle school football player life flight full#

As a middle schooler, he’s already been asked to practice with the high-school team, the Colquitt County Packers, a national powerhouse that in 2016 sent two dozen boys to college with full scholarships. Jackson dreams that Qway will soon make it out of their home in Colquitt County, a place marked by fields of crops and cotton bales the size of Mack trucks. They’ve nicknamed him Live Wire because he can hit so hard. Now his teammates help him when he gets stuck in his studies and look up to him for his prowess on the field. Jackson says Qway has been diagnosed with schizoaffective bipolar disorder, which sometimes manifests in bursts of anger and an inability to focus at school.

Jackson’s eldest son, Marqwayvian McCoy-or Qway, as she calls him-has particularly thrived. They take the boys on field trips to the beach and to Busch Gardens. Over time, the boys’ coaches have become mentors, making sure their athletes get good grades and stay off the streets. Jackson says she passed up a daytime shift at Home Depot so that she can drive them to games and cheer them on. Now 11, 12, and 14, they play in games across the region. They began in a local league five years ago when they were still little, their helmets like bobbleheads on their shoulders. As a single mother who works the night shift at a Home Depot warehouse 50 minutes away from her house, Jackson relies on the sport to shield the boys from gang activity in her rural Georgia county. S hantavia Jackson signed her three sons up for football to keep them out of trouble.