Although the local rivalry between Gunn and Paly doesn’t quite bring this level of drama — barring incidents like September 2022’s football game, which was canceled due to student misbehavior — Gunn athletes find that it has its own intensity and competitive spirit.

When it comes to basketball, boys varsity team co-captain senior Ethan Fu feels that the larger crowds that rivalry games attract create an immense pressure to win.

“The crowd is always huge (when we play) Paly, and it’s disorienting at first,” he said. “But the pressure from the crowd isn’t just pressure to represent my school, but also pressure to show (up) for my friends and family who are there watching me.”

Varsity point guard junior Sam Little also highlighted the benefits of playing to an audience.

“The fan turnout definitely makes our team play better,” he said. “It keeps us alert and more in touch.”

Although Little acknowledges the idea of home-court advantage, he believes his wins and losses mean more when they happen at Paly.

“Especially when we play Paly at their home court, there’s this feeling of, ‘I want to crush this team in front of their own support, on their own home turf,’” Little said. “Above all, the game just feels more competitive.”

Both Fu and Little also emphasized how being the underdogs — Gunn is usually projected to lose matchups against Paly — imbues a game with extra emotional charge. While Paly has to defend their previous wins, Gunn is able to fight from the bottom up.

“When we win, it’s especially gratifying,” Fu said. “(It) feels like we’ve beaten the odds.”

Girls varsity lacrosse team member junior Sophia Howell finds an opposite dynamic to be true for her team, which has won every game against Paly since the 2021 season.

“Most of the pressure the team faces when it comes to playing Paly is around maintaining our winning streak,” she said. “But at the same time, having wins behind us alleviates pressure while playing.”

According to Howell, there isn’t much of a difference in crowd size when their team plays against Paly, so spectators don’t play a role in raising the stakes. However, similar to the competitiveness the Gunn boys basketball team brings as the underdogs, Paly girls varsity lacrosse brings its own spirit, fighting to break Gunn’s winning streak.

“We play a pretty clean game and tend to keep our cool (as a team), but when Paly is down (on the score-board), the game gets more physical and they sometimes commit petty fouls,” she said.

Fu sees a similar pattern in basketball.

“Both our team and Paly’s are pretty well disciplined, so I don’t think a fight or anything would ever break out, but it gets chippy out there sometimes,” he said. “It gets more physical, harder fouls, harder defense, but it’s all part of the game. That’s what makes it fun.”

For girls varsity track-and-field member senior Avery Adelman, the Gunn-Paly rivalry manifests itself differently due to the nature of her sport. Adelman competes in the 400-meter dash and 300-meter hurdles — both non-contact, individual events — which present a new kind of competition.

“For track, it’s less about racing your opponents and more about racing for time,” Adelman said.

Even so, she found that competing against Paly with the rest of the varsity girls team brought them together in a special way.

“In the last season, varsity girls beat Paly and we were all so excited on the way home,” Adelman said. “It definitely would’ve been a different feeling if we beat (another high school) or something, but we beat our cross-town rivals, so it felt like a big deal.”

However, the cross-town rivalry runs deeper. Last season, Paly runner Hillary Studdert — who is the sister of this article’s author — was one of Adelman’s biggest competitors.

“In the 400(-meter dash), Hillary had times that were similar to mine, so I was always really nervous before we (met) with Paly,” she said. “I was also just really excited to race because I knew she would push me to run a fast time whether she beat me or not. It was all good energy and she was a great competitor.”

Adelman feels that the local aspect of the rivalry makes the competition more personal.

“The girls who I run against from Paly, I’ve mainly ran against before,” she said. “We get to talk here and there, so there’s always a kind of sense that I know who I’m running against, which makes me want to compete harder.”

Fu also finds a sense of familiarity among his Paly opponents.

“A lot of the kids that I grew up playing club basketball with now play for Paly, so I’m friends with basically the whole team,” he said. “It adds a mix of intensity and fun, which you can’t find really with any other team.”

Check out the first installment of The Oracle‘s “Inside Practice” series, in which Gunn athletes give behind-the-scenes tours of their daily training.

According to the National Federation of High School Associations, nearly 1 million male high school students played football during the 2021-22 school year. Yet increasing medical research and knowledge caused concern over the sport’s physicality.

This, perhaps, should come with little surprise: Players are constantly colliding with one another at high speeds and with significant force, either “blocking” or “tackling” to obstruct their opponents’ movement. Although players are required to wear protective gear, such as helmets and shoulder, leg and knee pads, injuries are frequent and can be dangerous.

Former junior varsity football player senior Ethan Fu cited these risks as his reason for quitting the sport.

“Given the frequency and sometimes severity of injuries, I didn’t want to get hurt and jeopardize my participation in basketball, my main sport,” he said. “When my JV team would train against varsity, I saw how much more aggressive they played, and I thought the risk was just too great.”

According to the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, players are most likely to injure ligaments and muscles. Ankle, hamstring, wrist and knee sprains are fairly routine, though severe tears and breaks may also occur.

According to varsity football player senior Josh Kim, the team saw two torn anterior cruciate ligaments and a broken collarbone this past season — both injuries requiring surgery and long-term rest.

In recent years, however, medical professionals, parents and ex-players have looked beyond the purely physical repercussions of injuries. According to the NFHS, high school football players suffer an average of 11.2 concussions per 10,000 athletic exposures, defined as each individual time they play or practice football.

In the past, concussions were seen as standalone events and were treated as immediate concerns with short-term impacts. However, new research shows that concussions, especially when accumulated over time, can increase the risk of early-onset dementia, brain disease and Alzheimer’s disease. Since the human brain undergoes significant development during the teenage years, playing high school football is a direct threat to proper brain development.

Still, these brain injuries do not increase the likelihood of depression, as shown by a 2021 study published in the Frontiers in Neurology journal.

Kim also highlighted the relatively low occurrence of significant injuries compared to minor ones. “When a massive injury takes place, for example, when Damar Hamlin (of the NFL’s Buffalo Bills) went into cardiac arrest, those (injuries) are far less frequent than smaller sprains and tweaks,” he said. “And that’s why those injuries garner such media attention.”

While football has become safer in recent years — due to more emphasis on safe tackling techniques and more widespread use of protective gear — the inherently aggressive mechanisms of the game continue to cause injuries. In fact, even the use of protective gear may have unintended consequences: According to the Peltzman effect, individuals are more likely to make dangerous choices with new safety measures, since their risk perception decreases.

Though Fu stopped playing football, he is hesitant to describe the sport as “too physical” for high schoolers to play.

“I think, given the brain-development timeline, that tackle football should definitely not be played before high school,” he said. “For high schoolers, though, we are probably mentally developed enough to risk the physical and mental injuries.”

Though protective measures have come a long way, participating in football can result in both significant bodily injuries and development-hindering brain injuries. Such an assertion, however, doesn’t change much. To strap on shoulder pads under the Friday-night floodlights is, ultimately, the choice of an individual athlete and their family. The aforementioned NFHS numbers say it all — high school football saw nearly 1 million players in 2021-22, even in light of these growing concerns.

“Even after my collarbone injury, I don’t regret playing football or see the sport any different now,” Kim said. “It gave me a lot as a person, and, for me, that sort of outweighs everything else.”