Why Princeton was wrong to stop Sprint Football

Football. In my humble opinion, it’s the greatest sport on earth. Nothing compares to the feeling of stepping onto a football field, body pumping with adrenaline, ready to go out and hit somebody. I have been playing football for four years now, three years in high school, and this past year with Princeton Sprint Football. I, along with 30 of my best friends in the world, poured my heart and soul into this team. We put countless hours of blood, sweat and tears into a sport which we all love with a burning passion.

And then, it was taken away from us.

Imagine that. Putting in all that work, merely for the school to tell us it’s over. That there won’t be a next season. That all the work we put in during the off-season won’t see fruition, because the school won’t let us keep our program. It’s heartbreaking. The message from the administration to us – its students – is clear: If you keep losing at something, you should just quit, or else we will quit on you. Well, they did. Message received.

Sprint has meant the world to me, and it has had a huge impact on my life. Every alum I’ve ever spoken to has sworn the same. Our team is like a family. I know, every team says that. But we were especially tight-knit because nobody else was fighting for us. Nobody else believed in us. Not even the school whose name we wore proudly on our jerseys. We had no recruiting spots, no support. It was us against the world. To have something that was such a large part of my life suddenly evaporate is a crushing blow. Waking up this morning, knowing that I wouldn’t get to go down to the field for practice, not today, not ever again, was awful.

What’s worse is that we were about to turn it all around. This was Head Coach Sean Morey’s second season with the team. He played in the NFL for a decade after graduating from Brown and became a Pro Bowler. He won a Super Bowl with the Pittsburgh Steelers and was named the Special Teams Player of the Decade by Sports Illustrated. He was the man who was brought in to turn this program around. Everything was starting to click during his second season with us. We went into our final game against Chestnut Hill ready for the fight of our lives.

And it was.

For the first time in nearly two decades, we were leading by two touchdowns at the beginning of the fourth quarter. With a minute left, we marched down to the 14-yard line. Our offense was on a roll. We had scored five touchdowns that night already, and the first downs were coming easy on this drive. The game was tied, and we were a few short plays from sealing the game and breaking an agonizing, immortal 17-year losing streak.

But then, instead of the elation our program had been chasing since I was just a baby, we found more heartbreak.

A fluke fumble between the tackles came out of nowhere. I turned around and the ball was long gone, careening towards the opposite end zone in the hands of a defender who happened to be in the perfect place at the perfect time. It was over.

It was the most heartbreaking loss I’ve had in my years on the gridiron, but there was hope. Coach Morey was going into his third year, Chad Cowden, our all-league quarterback and leader, was going to be a senior, there was a new school entering the league. We could see the light at the end of the tunnel. And then Princeton took that chance away from us.

The school cited safety as a major concern and a contributing factor in the decision to cut the program. Football, by its very nature, is a collision sport. It tends to build a culture around it of prototypical macho masculinity, of playing through pain even when doing so is not in the best interest of you or your team. If you’re injured, this culture encourages you to suck it up and soldier on. Coach Morey, a leading advocate for concussion awareness in the NFL, has instilled a counterculture in which safety is the primary emphasis. Time and time again, he has told us that we have to put our own safety ahead of our pride and report any injuries.

As a result, we report all of our concussion symptoms. In instances of doubt or uncertainty, we are encouraged to err on the side of over-reporting, not under-reporting injuries. This practice is unheard of in football, and one that the University purports to aspire toward. The culture Coach Morey has established should be a shining example of what football could become. But instead of offering us the support we need for this kind of culture to thrive and spread, the school has chosen to eliminate it. We can’t help but feel like we’re being punished for doing exactly what the school has claimed it wanted us to do: report injuries more honestly than football teams in America have historically done.

Undoubtedly, other teams will see this and be incentivized to hide injuries and play through concussions. The administration had a real opportunity to make a statement about its views on the culture of injury reporting in football. And it made one.

The reason for the high injury rate which the school cites is largely skewed by the size of the program.

Firstly, they measure it unfairly. We have 11 guys on the field at all times, and much fewer on the bench compared to a normal football team. We have a higher percentage of players on the field at any given time so our percentage is much higher than another sport.

Compounded with this, the school doesn’t offer us any recruiting assistance of any kind, so we don’t have enough players for our starters to get sufficient rest. While many football players play 30 downs per game based on package substitution, some of our players play up to 150 downs per game. To protect our inexperienced players on the bench, most of our starters have to play offense, defense and special teams, an incredibly rare scenario on any other collegiate football team. When you have to play five times as much as your opponents and there just simply are not enough substitutes, you become more prone to injury. Instead of addressing the problem and helping us fix it, the university opted to shut the program down to avoid the embarrassment of injury numbers that were artificially inflated by the circumstances they’ve chosen to put us in for 17 years.

Sprint football inherently reduces risks of injury compared to football. By putting players against opponents who are roughly the same size, the sport minimizes injury. As a player in high school, I was a small person. I’m still a small person. But in sprint football, my 150-pound body will never have to go up against someone nearly twice my weight. High school football was more dangerous for me than sprint football is.

For the rest of the Collegiate Sprint Football League, this theory pans out in practice. Season-ending injuries are extremely rare, and teams with adequate depth to rest their players enjoy a safer brand of the game. Cornell and Penn receive plenty of recruiting support from their universities, and the result is clearly manifested in rest time, injuries, and wins. It’s only when the school depletes you of resources until your roster size shrinks to 30 walk-ons that this becomes an issue. I can promise you that if Princeton got rid of varsity football’s recruiting spots tomorrow, a walk-on only football team competing with no weight limit would produce injury reports exponentially worse than ours.

But the real issue here is that we’re all adults who can assess the risks of playing ourselves. We are students enrolled at an Ivy League University, who got in solely on academic merit (the school doesn’t let us recruit, remember?). Everyone on the team knows the risks of football. Every time we step out on a field, we know exactly what could go wrong. Broken bones, torn ligaments, concussions. But we all make a conscious decision that playing a varsity sport for the school we love with the people we love is worth running the risk. Now the administration is telling us that we don’t get to make that decision for ourselves, that they will make it, that they know better. It feels like we’re being babysat, like we aren’t adults capable of making our own decisions. Every other team at this university is treated like the group of adults that they are. Every student on any other varsity sport is allowed to weigh the risks and decide if he or she wants to compete and risk injury. Why can’t we? Which sport is next?

Our alumni are among the most dedicated of any team’s alumni base at the school. They are the force which has kept this program financially sustainable. Our team endowment of nearly $2.5 million is the largest per capita of any varsity sport at Princeton. This past year, in the annual Tiger Athletics Give Day competition, we won our bracket by having the most donations for our team, beating out huge teams, such as Swimming and Diving, and the combined Baseball and Softball teams. Unlike almost all of the varsity sports at Princeton, we fund nearly every part of our program ourselves. It’s hard for me to understand why the school would cut a sport with such incredible support from its alumni.

On March 17, 1993, the wrestling program was cut. Their alumni didn’t stand for it, and petitioned the school, which reinstated the program in 1997, giving them their recruiting spots as well. I have seen the incredible love which our alumni have for this sport and this program, and I hope that the university will listen to their concerns about the loss of a sport which has impacted so many people in such a positive way. I don’t know when Sprint Football will return to Princeton, but I hope it’s sometime soon.