Near the end of the high-school football season a few years ago, John Pizzi realized he had a problem. Because of season-ending injuries, the football team at Riverdale Country School, the New York private high school where he is the athletic director, did not have enough kids to finish the season.

He canceled the team’s last game and then called Chris Nowinski, the CEO and co-founder of the Concussion Legacy Foundation, who has been talking for years about the need to better protect athletes of all ages from chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE), the degenerative brain disease caused by repeated hits to the head.

“I said to him, ‘You have to help me: football is either not going to continue here or we have to figure something out,’” Pizzi says.

Nowinski dove into research and looked a

See Full Page