I enjoy playing sports but I’ve never been any good. When we picked teams in grade school, I was usually among the last people selected.
A man’s got to know his limitations.
When I got coached up, I could be average. When I played tennis with someone significantly better than me, I was briefly above average.
Nobody ever said to me, “Mate, sport is where you shine. Forget the books.”
Life teaches you what you’re good at.
I never got a girlfriend because of my grace on the playing field.
I played a bit of soccer when I was a kid (my last match was when I was 18), but I hated heading the ball because it hurt so much. I’m sure that with better technique, it would have hurt less, but it seems like an unhealthy choice for the brain.
If I had kids, I would not want them eating vegetarian, drinking, drugging, fighting, playing football, or heading a soccer ball. Girls are more physically fragile than boys, so I really would not want them to compete in sports. I think Title IX is idiotic. Why would you want to encourage girls to do something that is so dangerous, and take resources from programs that boys need more?
My parents did not want me running marathons when I was 12, but they wisely chose not to forbid it (I was filled with self-will and I would have gone crazy), and so I finished five marathons before my knees gave out in 1979. Osgood Schlatter’s disease stopped me running much from age 13 to 18. Then I was able to take it up again without harm.
I tell Gemini: “Heading a soccer ball has to cause brain damage.”
Gemini says:
You are onto something that sports science has been looking at very closely. Heading a soccer ball does hurt, especially if your technique is slightly off, and researchers are finding that your intuition about long-term damage is backed by growing evidence.
The concern is not just about overt concussions, which occur from violent, unmistakable impacts. The primary issue with routine heading is a different type of trauma.
When a player heads a ball, his brain undergoes what neurologists call a subconcussive impact. This is a head injury that does not cause immediate, noticeable symptoms like dizziness, memory loss, or blacking out, but it still delivers enough force to cause microscopic changes in brain tissue.
A standard soccer ball travels anywhere from 30 to 60 miles per hour during a match. When that mass hits the skull, the brain sloshes forward and backward inside the cerebrospinal fluid, striking the inner walls of the bone.
While a single header is unlikely to cause lasting harm, the cumulative effect of hundreds or thousands of these minor impacts over a playing career is where the risk lies. Studies tracking amateur and professional soccer players over several years show measurable changes:
White Matter Alterations: Brain scans often show disruptions in the white matter, which consists of the nerve fibers connecting different parts of the brain. These disruptions resemble the structural changes seen in patients with mild traumatic brain injuries.
Cognitive Decline: High-frequency headers perform measurably worse on memory, focus, and processing-speed tests compared to players who rarely head the ball.
Long-Term Neurodegeneration: Chronic Traumatic Encephalopathy (CTE), a degenerative brain disease long associated with American football and boxing, has also been diagnosed in deceased professional soccer players known for their heading frequency.
Because children have weaker neck muscles and developing brains, their risk from these impacts is significantly higher. Stronger neck muscles help stabilize the head and absorb some of the linear force, reducing the acceleration of the brain inside the skull. Without that strength, a child’s brain absorbs more of the direct energy.
This reality has forced youth soccer organizations worldwide to change their rules. In the United States, heading is completely banned for players age 10 and under, and strictly limited during practice for players up to age 13. Similar restrictions exist across Europe to protect young athletes before their neuroanatomy fully matures.
I ask Gemini: “What are the statistics for injuries for females playing competitive soccer and basketball vs boys?”
Gemini says:
In both soccer and basketball, female athletes sustain more injuries per exposure than their male counterparts.
The most pronounced statistical disparity between male and female athletes occurs in non-contact ACL injuries.
The Multiplier: Across both sports, female athletes suffer ACL tears at a rate 2 to 8 times higher than males.
Soccer Breakdown: Soccer is the highest-risk sport for female ACL injuries. One long-term study of high school athletics found that 53.2% of all ACL tears recorded among female athletes occurred in soccer, compared to 17.2% for boys.
Basketball Breakdown: The same study tracked basketball as the source for 26.5% of female ACL tears, compared to only 5% for males.
Contributing Factors: Orthopedic research attributes this gap to structural and physiological differences. These include a wider pelvic angle (the Q-angle) changing knee alignment, greater ligament laxity, variations in hamstring-to-quadriceps strength ratios, and a tendency for female athletes to land more upright and flat-footed during pivots and jumps.
Concussion statistics reveal another significant gap in sports played under identical rules.
Soccer: Girls sustain concussions at more than double the rate of boys. Data shows girls soccer at 7.1 concussions per 10,000 exposures compared to 3.3 for boys soccer.
Basketball: Girls basketball players are nearly twice as likely to sustain a concussion as boys (4.2 vs. 2.4 per 10,000 exposures).
Mechanisms: In basketball, roughly half of female concussions result from direct contact with another athlete. In soccer, head injuries frequently occur during heading or air challenges, with girls reporting more severe and lingering symptoms on average than boys. Researchers point to lesser average neck muscle density and development as a primary physical factor.
The nature of the injuries and the required recovery also vary by gender:
Overuse Injuries: Female athletes are significantly more prone to overuse injuries (such as stress fractures and patellofemoral pain) than males. In soccer, the overuse injury rate ratio is 1.37 times higher for girls; in basketball, it climbs to 1.82 times higher for girls. Surgical Intervention: Because of the higher frequency of severe joint trauma like ACL tears, a greater percentage of injuries in girls’ sports require surgery. Approximately 8.2% of girls’ basketball injuries and 6.4% of girls’ soccer injuries result in surgery, compared to 6.8% in boys’ basketball and 4.7% in boys’ soccer.
