Skyline High in Oakland is ending its varsity football season early after the school says it no longer has enough players available.<\/p>\n
Skyline High is the second East Bay school in the past week to cancel its season, partly due to player safety.<\/p>\n
The first school was Mount Diablo High. The school was supposed to play against Benicia High, but Mount Diablo High canceled its varsity season last week amid player safety concerns.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had to scramble to fill our spot today to have a homecoming game and we\u2019ve heard of other schools having to do the same,\u201d Benicia High principal Brianna Kleinschmidt said.<\/p>\n
Skyline High did the same. The storied Oakland program, once led by the late John Beam, is canceling its season, citing injuries, transfers and other circumstances impacting player availability.<\/p>\n
In a statement, the principal wrote, \u201cThis is a decision we do not take lightly and it came after exhausting all other options.\u201d<\/p>\n
The news came as a shock to many in the McClymonds crowd, since the school has been rivals with Skyline over the years.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a shock really, because when I was growing up Skyline was the dominant force,\u201d parent Laron Blackwell said.<\/p>\n
Leia Grew, a parent, agrees that player safety comes first. Her son even chose to wear a \u201cguardian cap\u201d over his helmet as an added layer of protection.<\/p>\n
\u201cHe\u2019s the only one on the team that has one. I’m really happy he has it on, we do a lot of stretching. I think player safety is of big importance,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Some head trauma experts can\u2019t say whether head-injury concerns are driving high school players away from football, but what has changed is awareness.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe awareness of head injuries have gone up. More parents are seeking care when their kid gets injured,\u201d UCSF neurological surgery assistant professor Dr. John Yue said.<\/p>\n
Looking ahead, Skyline says it will spend the rest of the school year recruiting more student athletes, with the goal of rebuilding its football program for next season.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Skyline High in Oakland is ending its varsity football season early after the school says it no longer…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":485195,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[143,145,144],"class_list":["post-485194","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-oakland","tag-oakland","tag-oakland-headlines","tag-oakland-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485194","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=485194"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/485194\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/485195"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=485194"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=485194"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=485194"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}