Eight Hits Too Many: When Footy Steals a Kid’s Future
There are stories in footy that make you want to thump the table, and then there are stories that make you go quiet. The story of Angus Pitman, a teenage South Australian country footballer who copped eight — eight — concussions and was ultimately forced to find a new sport entirely, is firmly in that second category.
No drum-banging from me today. Just some hard questions that every level of this game needs to sit with.
A Kid Who Just Wanted to Play
Let’s be clear about who we’re talking about here. Angus Pitman wasn’t some elite draft prospect with a support network of club doctors and welfare officers around him. He was a country kid playing country footy — the lifeblood of this game in regional South Australia, the kind of footy that built the sport we all love.
He loved it. Of course he did. Generations of kids across this country grow up with the leather smell, the frozen Saturday mornings, the roar of a country oval crowd that somehow sounds bigger than it should. That’s what footy gives you at that level and it’s irreplaceable.
But eight concussions. At his age. That’s not hard luck — that’s a pattern that demanded intervention, and it raises serious questions about how equipped country football really is to protect its youngest players.
The Concussion Problem Isn’t Just an AFL Issue
Everyone loves to talk about concussion in the context of the big league. The AFL has rolled out its protocols, tightened its return-to-play rules, and the scrutiny on how clubs manage head knocks has never been greater. That’s genuinely good progress and teh game deserves credit for moving on it.
But here’s the uncomfortable truth: the further you get from the top level, the thinner the safety net becomes. Country footy clubs are run by volunteers. They are run on passion, on sausage sizzles and raffle tickets and blokes giving up their weekends because they love the game and the community it holds together.
What they often don’t have is a sports trainer with specific concussion assessment training on every bench. They don’t always have access to a doctor at every game. They may not have the resources to properly track a player’s history of head knocks across a season, or to confidently tell a 17-year-old that he shouldn’t be running back out onto the ground.
That’s not a criticism of the people running those clubs. That’s a systemic problem, and it sits at the feet of the broader football administration structure in this country.
What Does Eight Concussions Actually Mean?
I’m no doctor — I’m a bloke from Melbourne who barracks for Collingwood and gets angry at umpiring decisions, so take that as read — but the medical community has been pretty clear on this stuff for a while now.
Multiple concussions, especially in a young developing brain, carry real long-term risks. We’re talking potential cognitive effects, mental health impacts, and in the most serious cases, connections to degenerative conditions that don’t show up until decades later. The research keeps building and the picture it paints isn’t pretty.
Every concussion makes the next one more likely. Every next one potentially does more damage. By the time a young player like Angus has reached eight, he’s well past the point where any reasonable assessment of risk would say “yeah, keep going, she’ll be right.”
The fact that it took eight — and the reality that he ultimately had to make the call himself to walk away from the sport he loved — should make all of us uncomfortable. That’s a lot to put on a teenager.
The Culture Problem We Don’t Like Talking About
Footy culture has always celebrated toughness. Always. And look, I’m not here to tear that apart entirely — there’s something genuinely meaningful about resilience and playing through adversity and all the character-building stuff the game teaches you.
But there’s a version of that culture that has, for decades, made it hard for players — especially young male players — to say “I’m not right.” Especially in country footy, where the club might be short on numbers, where your mates are counting on you, where the unspoken pressure to harden up and get back out there can be enormous.
It’s not malicious. It comes from love of the game and love of the team. But it can be dangerous, and we’ve got to be honest about that.
How many times did Angus Pitman feel that pressure? How many times did he probably want to keep going because walking off felt like letting the side down? We don’t know, but you’d be naive to think that culture played no role in how this situation unfolded.
What Needs to Happen at Grassroots Level
So what’s the fix? I reckon it starts with resourcing — and I don’t mean asking already-stretched country clubs to somehow fund things they can’t afford.
State bodies and the AFL itself need to take genuine responsibility for rolling out standardised concussion education and protocols all the way down the football pyramid. Every trainer at every country club should definately be doing proper concussion training — and that training needs to be accessible, practical, and regularly updated.
There also needs to be clearer mandatory reporting and player tracking. If a footballer — at any level — has suffered multiple concussions, that history needs to follow them and be properly considered before they’re cleared to play. Not just a verbal “yeah he seemed alright after a few minutes” from a well-meaning but under-resourced trainer.
And honestly? The cultural shift has to keep happening. Players, coaches, parents — everyone needs to understand that pulling a kid off after a head knock isn’t weakness, it’s the smartest thing you can do for that kid’s entire future.
Angus Found Something New — But He Shouldn’t Have Had To
The one genuinely heartening part of this story is that Angus Pitman hasn’t let it break him. He’s found a new sport to throw himself into, and good on him for that. That kind of resilience — finding a new path when the one you loved was taken from you — is the sort of character footy is supposed to build.
But let’s not use that silver lining to paper over what happened. A kid who loved Australian Rules football was forced out of Australian Rules football because the safety structures around him weren’t sufficient to protect him. That’s on all of us — the administrators, the governing bodies, the culture of the game.
He should of had the chance to grow up playing the game he loved, on his terms, safely. He deserved that. Every kid running onto a country oval every weekend deserves that.
The Pies and the Bigger Picture
Now look, I’ll always be a Collingwood man first — Carn the Pies — and I spend a fair chunk of my writing real estate on what’s happening at the top level of the game. But stories like Angus Pitman’s remind you why the grassroots matter so much.
The AFL is only as strong as the communities that feed it. The country kids, the suburban leagues, the parents running the boundary line in the cold — they’re the foundation. If we let that foundation crack by failing to protect the people who play at that level, we’re not just hurting individuals. We’re hollowing out something fundamental about what this game is.
Eight concussions is eight too many. It’s time the whole football community — from the top floor of 140 Harbour Esplanade all the way down to every country oval in regional South Australia — takes that seriously.
For Angus, and for every young player still out there running through their own pain because they love the game and don’t want to let anyone down.
