Are high school football athletes being put in danger of injury and death unreasonably? High school players suffer three times as many catastrophic injuries than their college counterparts and death is a real possibility. This indicates that high schools are doing something wrong when it comes to caring for their football players. If your high school student was injured or even killed while on the football field, these are some things to consider.

Coaches are often uneducated or insensitive to the risks of heat.

The practice field may extremely dangerous for your player and the coach may not realize it (or may be willing to push the boundaries of safety in order to push players to improve). The high heat of summer, when practice starts, can make it dangerous for young athletes who are rushed into conditioning.

There are guidelines recommended to protect young athletes on the football field from the heat:

• Practices shouldn't be held more than once a day at first and limited to 3 hours at a time.

• There should be at least 3 hours between a walk-through of a game and a practice session.

• Students shouldn't be asked to wear padding during the first few days of practice until they adjust to the heat.

In addition, many school districts now require teams to have cooling devices available so that a player's body temperature can be lowered if he or she becomes overheated. When the heat and humidity are excessively high, coaches should consider abbreviated practices or canceling midday practices altogether.

It's a negligent act when coaches and schools ignore common safety recommendations and let players suffer dehydration, permanent injuries, and death. You have the right to recover for those injuries through a personal injury or wrongful death lawsuit.

Injuries and health conditions are often ignored and players are often mismatched.

In some cases, players have died after medical conditions were aggravated during a football practice or game. Asthma and heart conditions are known contributors to death on the field. Other deaths are caused by injuries on the field. Deaths have been caused by sudden blows to the chest, abdominal injuries, bruising on the brain, and broken necks.

Football is a dangerous game, but coaches increase the danger when they dismiss a player's injuries to keep him or her in the game and pit smaller players against those who are much larger from other teams. In a case out of New York, a high school player who was put back in the game after suffering a concussion later walked off the field and died. His parents are now suing the school system, among others, for his wrongful death.

Don't allow anyone to convince you that a preventable football injury or death was one of the risks of the game. Contact a wrongful death attorney in your area today to discuss the possibility of either a personal injury or wrongful death claim.