Quote:
Originally Posted by CleverCowboy
I've been there. Not playing capture the flag, but football (American). The opposing team's running back lowered his helmet right before colliding with me at full speed. Caught me right on the crown of my head. Luckily we had helmets, but this was 40 years ago and the construction of them was not the same as today. I saw stars, similar to what you might see in a cartoon, then lost consciousness for a few moments and my teammates were standing around me asking if I was OK, then helped me up.
The safety aspect of the game has changed for the better. If that happened today, I would be taken out of the game immediately and undergo concussion testing. The running back would be penalized for "targeting" and thrown out the game. But that is now, and this was 40 years ago. So nothing happened. No penalties, and I just sucked it up and played the rest of the game. I am certain I sustained a concussion, and it sounds like you did too.
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Sounds rough, luckily safety has improved but from what I've heard concussions are still a problem, and former players who've grown old can be in big danger of developing things such as Dementia at an earlier age than others.
In Australia we also developed our own version of football, Aussie Rules Football, and it is a very physical game. I'll just call it AFL for now as that's the name of the main league, basically the same as how you may sometimes refer to your sport as 'NFL' though that's not technically its name.
Anyway, the sport has its own very unique rules I won't go over now, but in terms of the physical aspect of the game, well I'll just leave this video here if you're curious:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uPIQ7vLJYIA
Luckily this is a reel of the worst hits rather than exactly what happens every single game, it's in an incredibly physically demanding sport. The overall stamina of the players is unreal, you need to be really good with basically every aspect of athleticism; running, jumping, throwing, kicking, tackling, all parts of the game.
The sport if huge here, has been around for about 150 years, packs out the MCG (100,000 capacity) for the final every season, has the 5th highest average attendance of any sport league on the planet, you get the idea.
Grand Final last year
On the note of what I was saying about Port Arthur in the previous reply, here's a picture from that school camp with myself on the furthest on the right.
