The mother of a 15-year-old child left severely injured at a high school football game has spoken out.
The player, who has been named as Colton, was left with a fractured spine after larger players on the opposing side pancaked him in a JV game in Michigan on Thursday evening.
Colton's mom Courtney Mims was watching the game between Lakeshore and Kalamazoo Central High Schools when she saw a larger player on the Lakeshore side cross a line.
After tackling Colton, the larger player then launches himself back onto him while Colton is still lying on the ground.
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Colton's horrified mom didn't realize at first that the player on the ground was her own son.
“As soon as it clicked that it was, I couldn’t be stopped," she told WSBT. " I had to go down there. I’ve never felt anything like it. I’ve never been as upset or shaken up as I was over something for my son.
“These boys are high school boys. They’re 15 years old. The game means a lot to them. It’s their whole life right now.
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"They’re there from before I get up to go to work in the morning till after dinner, putting in the work and for somebody to try to take that from somebody doing so much is awful for me to see.”
Colton was quickly taken off the field and transported to hospital where he is being treated for two fractures to his spine.
It is not clear at the moment whether he will ever be able to play again.
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A spokesperson for Lakeshore High School told WSBT: "We can't share any information at this time, other than we are working with the other school about this situation."
Football is also highly dangerous not just because of injuries caused by incidents such as this, but also by seemingly smaller hits which happen dozens of times in each game.
The human brain is suspended in liquid inside the skull and when two players slam into each other their bodies stop moving very suddenly, but the brain continues moving forward and hits the inside of the skull.
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Over the course of a player's career this often leads to a condition called chronic traumatic encephalopathy, or CTE.
The condition is not unique to American Football, but the high contact nature of the sport places players at a particularly high risk.
In fact, the evidence is overwhelming, with a 2023 study at Boston University CTE Center diagnosing 345 former NFL players out of a pool of 376 with CTE, compared to a 2018 study of the general population which found it in 1 in 164 people.
Kit Roberts