If the rules of the game were being written today, making head-to-ball contact would be outlawed — but they were written 150 years ago. Backed by research and growing concussion awareness, U.S. Soccer is trying to reframe how we think about such an ingrained and dangerous part of the sport.

It’s morning on a soccer field, somewhere in America. Two teams of 10-year-olds play a typical youth match, a constantly moving mass of arms and legs. There’s passing and shooting, goals and saves. It looks like soccer, except for one thing: There’s no heading. When the ball flies up into the air, the children control it with their chests, thighs, or feet, or they let it hit the ground. They don’t head the ball because it’s against the rules.

It might look a little strange to the casual observer, used to watching Zlatan Ibrahimovic launch himself into the air and clash with a center back to reach a ball 10 feet off the ground, but ask yourself a question: Knowing everything we now know about head injuries, if we were going to invent the sport of soccer today, would we allow heading?

The growing anti-header movement within the game suggests not. In late 2015, as part of its Recognize to Recover program, the United States Soccer Federation announced the U.S. Soccer Concussion Initiative 2016, which bans heading for children 10 and under (and limits heading for children aged 11 to 13 to 30 minutes per week). In England, the Professional Footballers’ Association wants the country’s youth leagues to adopt measures similar to those currently applied in the U.S. If it happens in England, experts think Western Europe will soon follow.

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Dr. Ann McKee tells ESPN says NHL players show milder CTE but in small sample sizes.

A year after NHL commissioner Gary Bettman was accused of being "dismissive" in response to research of a potential link between concussions and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), at least one concussion specialist is calling for more posthumous brain donations from hockey players.

Dr. Ann McKee, the director of Boston University's CTE Center, spoke with ESPN's John Cooper about ongoing efforts to track the damages of concussions in hockey. And it is apparent, at least to McKee, that the NHL is still lagging when it comes to CTE findings.

"We're not nearly as far in hockey [research] as we are in football because we just don't have the same numbers," McKee said, per Cooper. "It's not a systematic study, but just anecdotally looking at the players that have come into our brain bank compared to the football players, in general I think the hockey players have less CTE or a milder CTE. But again, this is based on very few numbers and this could change. But I haven't had the experience of seeing many, many advanced CTE cases in hockey like I have in football."

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