New America Media, Video, Text: Viji Sundaram / Video: Mike Siv, Posted: Sep 26, 2011

SAN FRANCISCO – Two to five high school football players die each fall as a direct result of on-field brain injuries.

Yet despite mounting evidence that playing football is bad for your health, high school football players say the risk of serious injury has not dampened their love of the game.

“Lot of kids who play football don’t think they’ll get injured,” observed Mark Huynh, who coaches the football team at San Francisco’s Galileo High School, which this year is 60 percent Asian American. “We have lots of kids in the school who want to play, but their parents say no because of the risks involved.”

Teenagers are more susceptible to multiple hits to the head, according to research by the University of North Carolina National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury, resulting in brain bleeds and massive swelling in an organ in which the tissue has not yet fully developed.

The effect of a concussion on kids can be much more deadly than on adults. Postmortem analysis shows that repeated blows to the head may be linked with Parkinson’s disease, ALS (Lou Gehrig’s disease) and the early onset of Alzhiemer’s.

Last month, the American Academy of Neurology endorsed two free online safety courses created by the University of Michigan to help high school coaches detect signs of concussions and what to do if a player gets a head injury during a game.

But for high school football players at Galileo High School – where O.J. Simpson once famously played when he went to school here – the risk of serious injury may not be enough to keep them off the field.