I wanted to say something about a tragedy that occurred at a Kentucky high school football practice that resulted in the death of a young player from heat stroke. The coach was tried, and eventually acquitted, but something good did come out of the mess. New rules were instituted which required training for coaches to recognize potential problems before they get too out of hand.
Football is too great a sport to allow it to be tarnished with such wholly unnecessary tragedies. Hopefully, school officials at both the high school and college level will follow this up with a realization that a player's health has to take precedence over the prospect of winning and losing games. They are as much to fault as the coaches whom they put inordinate pressure on to produce a winning season.
Football is one of those games that, had the ancient Greeks known of it, they would have gone wild over it, though I doubt they would have bothered with all the protective gear worn today. Hermes would doubtless have been the patron deity of the sport, and it would have been considered his purview as to whether any died during the course of a game, or during practice. Many people might have died from the battering they received at the hands of other players, but one thing I can pretty much promise is, no one would have died from heat stroke.
Such things as that, in our modern era, are simply inexcusable, in the vast majority of cases.
