Tipping the competitive scales
High school football players are bigger than ever. Is that a good thing?
BROCKTON - His name is Brickhouse and it fits. Khaldun Brickhouse is huge.
The starting left tackle on Brockton High School's football team this fall is listed at 6 foot 7, 300 pounds. He wears size 3XL pants and size 13 cleats on the field. He towers over his teammates on the offensive line. And Brickhouse, just 18, might grow to be even bigger. The baby-faced high school senior has dreams of playing football next fall at a Division 1 college.
"Any school that'll take me," he said. "I want to go D1, though."
Brickhouse, though large, is no anomaly. The average starting offensive lineman at Brockton High this year weighs in at 262 pounds, more than 50 pounds heavier than the average lineman that played for Brockton's Super Bowl champion teams in 1972 and 1984. The O-line of the 1996 Championship team was about the same size as today's.
Three-hundred-pounders, once unheard of in high school, are increasingly common, not just at Brockton, but at schools across the state. And their stunning size at such a young age not only reflects a change in high school sports, but in American life.
High school football players today, raised in an era of ESPN highlight reels and $100 million National Football League contracts, are sometimes willing to do just about anything to bulk up, eating vast amounts of food, devoting themselves to year-round weight training programs, and, in rare cases, using performance-enhancing drugs.
There is no question, coaches say, that high school players today are better trained than those who pulled on shoulder pads in the 1970s or '80s, just like their counterparts playing in college or the NFL. But the heft of today's high school linemen cannot be solely attributed to fitness. Mirroring a nationwide trend, many students who come out for football are just plain big - and not necessarily in a good way.
"They're overweight for the same reason that 80 percent of the rest of the country is overweight," Charlie Stevenson, head coach at Xaverian Brothers High School in Westwood, said, speaking of some of the 300-pounders that he has seen in recent years. "Their diets have been horrible their whole lives. They eat French fries and
Football players have always been big, but recent research suggests that the size of today's athletes is especially troubling. Studies published last year in the Journal of the American Medical Association and the Journal of Pediatrics found that children who play football are overweight and obese at rates far exceeding their classmates who do not play. A study of nearly 3,700 high school linemen in Iowa found that 45 percent were overweight and 9 percent would be classified with severe adult obesity. And a second study of 650 football players in Michigan, ages 9 to 14, found that the weight problems begin before high school. Forty-five percent of the youths studied there were overweight or obese.
It seems football has become a haven for overweight children, said Kelly Laurson, the lead author of the Iowa study and an assistant professor of kinesiology at Illinois State University. "If you're big," Laurson pointed out, "there's a place for you on the line."
But being big comes at a cost. Studies show that overweight adolescents are likely to be overweight adults. Obesity can lead to long-term health problems that can include high blood pressure and coronary artery disease. Many of the players in the Iowa study were so large, said Laurson, they could be candidates for gastric bypass surgery. And on the football field, all this weight is taking a toll as well.
In a study just completed by Ellen Yard, a research associate at the Center for Injury Research and Policy at Nationwide Children's Hospital in Columbus, Ohio, overweight and obese high school football players were found to suffer injuries at a rate greater than their slimmer teammates. They were 40 percent more likely to suffer ankle injuries, Yard discovered, but underweight players suffered as well. Smaller teenagers were twice as likely to break a bone, Yard found, and three times more likely to sustain an injury that required surgery than the big players.
"It kind of affects the whole spectrum," Yard said. "The growing overweight and obesity problem in high school football is affecting the injury rates and injury patterns among all football athletes."
Brickhouse dropped 30 pounds before football season started, and says he feels good at his current playing weight.
But Peter Colombo, head coach at Brockton High, said he has had to sit down other players and tell them they need to lose weight if they want to play.
In one such conversation at the end of last season, junior Dan Ohrenberger sat there, stunned. Ohrenberger weighed 320 pounds at the time. He was slow, got winded easily, and his ankles always felt sore. It was like he was "running an 18-wheeler on
Now a high school senior, Ohrenberger weighs in at 260, starts at defensive tackle, and, best of all, feels better. The lesson, Colombo said, is that sometimes weight alone does not make a good football player, especially when a 6-foot teenager is carrying 300 pounds.
"They're not able to move well enough to play," Colombo said last week. "If you're carrying extra weight, there's only so many reps a kid can do. He just can't keep it up. Try playing football with an extra 30 pounds on you. Think about that."
A generation ago, Armond Colombo, Peter's father and the head coach at Brockton for more than three decades, did not have to deal with such complications. The team's biggest offensive lineman in 1972 - the year Brockton, a football powerhouse, won its first Super Bowl - weighed 235 pounds, and that was considered mammoth.
More often than not back then, linemen at Brockton and other high schools weighed 200 pounds or less. They were so small sometimes, Armond Colombo confesses now, that he would inflate a lineman's weight - a time-honored tradition that Colombo says he employed in 1984 when a pint-sized center, Darrell Martin, was anchoring Brockton's offensive line.
"I refused to coach a 170-pound, 5-foot-6 center," he said. "Therefore, he went to 200. And that's the truth."
It hardly mattered. Even with a line averaging just 205 pounds, Brockton won the Super Bowl again in 1984. Today, however, players Martin's size find it harder to play on the line. Time spent in the weight room, combined with a population of bigger students to begin with, is literally reshaping a new generation of football players and forcing some to become fixated on size.
"I felt a lot of pressure," said Andrew Knowlton, who enrolled at St. John's Prep in Danvers in 2005 and went out for the football team. "All the older guys tell you, 'You've got to lift. Got to eat. Eat right, but eat a lot.' So there's a lot of pressure from everyone."
Knowlton responded. Convinced that weighing 200 pounds was not enough, he hit the weight room, working out as much as six days a week, and hit the dinner table, too, eating five or six times a day. By his junior year, he weighed 270 pounds and became the team's starting right tackle. And by this fall, he was even bigger: 293 pounds.
Knowlton, 18, knows that he'll have to drop the extra poundage after his football career ends. "After football - no pun intended - it can be a weight," he said recently. But for now, he is focused on playing college ball, just like so many others.
In Brockton, Brickhouse has his plan to play in Division 1 while underclassmen hope to one day have Brickhouse's position or another starting spot on the line. Raheem Hart, a 265-pound sophomore, wants to add 20 pounds in the next two years. Maybe that, Hart said, will help him make the varsity team, where fellow sophomore William Carruthers already starts at defensive tackle.
Carruthers weighs 290 and acknowledges that he is a bit too heavy. He would like to drop 20 pounds. But what he would like even more is a shot at playing college football.
"He tells me to pray about it all the time," said Carruthers's mother, Deborah Holloman. "He really, really wants to go to college and play football, and I want him to do that, too."
Keith O'Brien can be reached at kobrien@globe.com. 